Artist: Natalie Bookchin

I was poking around at a lot of the artists on Wiki site and found that a lot of the artists deal with the issue of video games and literature. This piece entitled The Intruder by Natalie Bookchin is another example of an artist intrigued by this world of video games but also the messages they relay to us. Many of which are filled with violence and sexuality, these games that we are all too familiar with are really filled with very disturbing and graphic images. Taking this into consideration, Natalie Bookchin made a series of ten different "screens" that told a story. She chose a story that involved a young woman, prostitution, violence, and betrayal. Associating this story with the same connotations that many video games have, Bookchin developed a piece of art that told the story of this girl in a video game setting. 

What intrigued me about this particular piece was the mystery this piece of work entails. Some of the other pieces of work I was looking at played with this idea of video games telling a story but the aesthetic result was not very appealing. The images Bookchin creates render a sense of mystery but also a feeling of fear and apprehension. The black and white backdrop she has created looks like she drew it herself and I like this quality of seeing the artists hand. What is even more compelling about this scenery she has created is that the sketchy and faded lines work well against each other pushing out the white whites and black blacks. The girl Bookchin has inserted into these screens is definitely very digitized looking communicating to the viewer that this is a piece dealing with computer or television-like qualities. The orange of the girl and other places where Bookchin inserts color draws a nice contrast against the black and white background popping these images out and leaving the viewer trying to figure out this narration. Each screen progresses well from the previous one insinuating there is a story but not giving too much information that spells out every detail about this story. 

Bookchin's ability to take a subject such as video games and turn it into a piece of artwork that is not only visually pleasing but conceptually exciting, is very impressive. It is obvious that she made some very deliberate decisions concerning each part of this piece and the details she incorporates really makes this piece successful. I hope to integrate her ability to visually display literature in some of my work in this class and am excited about experimenting with different ways of doing so.