Case Study
Natalie Bookchin: Incorporations
By Aaron Landsman, December, 2002

When Internet artist Natalie Bookchin applied for a grant from Creative Capital in 1999, she had already collaborated for two years as a member of RTMark, was on faculty at Cal Arts' New Media program, and was organizing a cross-border dialogue and lecture series between artists in southern California and Tijuana, Mexico. What she needed was an organization to make an ongoing commitment to her own artwork as it developed. With $37,000 in cash awards, as well as Strategic Planning assistance and consultations, Creative Capital has helped Natalie gain a stronger foothold for her work in the international new media world.

Natalie originally applied for a grant to support The Intruder, a video game inspired by a Jorge Luis Borges short story, and received a $12,000 award. Soon afterward, she applied for Strategic Financial Support and received $5,000 to help pay for fundraising materials and travel costs incurred in finding a permanent home for the project.

As Natalie developed The Intruder, she also began collaborating with social scientist Jackie Stevens on a new gaming project and soon realized that the new work was more important to her than The Intruder. After consulting with Creative Capital, Natalie changed her funded project to the new game, titled Incorporations. "What's amazing," says Natalie, discussing the ability of Creative Capital to accommodate this change in direction, "is to have an organization that really invests in artists, rather than just projects."

Natalie describes Incorporations as a "participatory, inhabitable online project" in which players will live (virtually) within corporate states under a new form of government. It will exist both online and as a freestanding arcade unit, and Natalie says it is also more ambitious than The Intruder because it accommodates many players at once. Like many of Natalie's projects, Incorporations investigates the relationships among national identity, corporate control and technology. In 2001, Natalie began working with La Compagnie, a public art space and collective in Marseilles, France, to create a French version of the net-based project, and she has continued to work with the group over the past year.

Natalie will apply a Competitive Funding grant from Creative Capital for $20,000 to complete production on Incorporations, which is slated for release in early 2004. Natalie also took advantage of Creative Capital's Strategic Planning consultant, attended the 2000 artists' retreat, and met extensively with Colleen Keegan, Ruby Lerner and Alyson Pou to discuss possible fundraising opportunities and strategies. Natalie reports that, "They have been very helpful in suggesting possible leads and making introductions."

Equally important for Natalie was the increased exposure that Creative Capital provided. "The visibility of getting Creative Capital support really helped in terms of getting other funding," she says. In 2001, Natalie won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her most recent animation project, Metapet (2002), another online game created with her collaborative group Action Tank, has been supported by organizations as diverse as New York's Creative Time, Barcelona's Media Center for Art and Design, and the University of Southern California.

Another form of visibility that Natalie says has been helpful is the Creative Capital website. "Because I was listed on the site, a lot of artists and potential collaborators made contact with me," Natalie says. Those collaborators now include Lem Jay Ignacio, the Internet sound designer who recently worked on the award-winning Internet game Sissyfight.

Natalie is part of a network of artists that have been supported by Creative Capital for their groundbreaking mix of technological innovation, artistic excellence, and activism. "A lot of my colleagues have gotten Creative Capital support," Natalie says, "and we've kept in touch as a result." After three years of ongoing support, and an expansion in her artistic project as well as her career visibility, Natalie says that Creative Capital has been "unlike any other grant I have gotten in that there is continued interest, concern, and support for the work well past the writing of the check."