Alina Nazmeeva is an artist and educator currently based in Detroit. Alina creates simulations and worlds that analyze the intra-actions of physical and digital spaces and objects, and their cultural, economic and political ramifications. Using XR, gaming engines, CGI software, machinima, and physical installations, their creative and research practice examines the oscillations and murmurs between virtual and concrete, cities and videogames, life and animation, organic and the engineered.
Virtual Social is a video-essay and a written dissertation that aim to unpack the protocols of space-craft and self-craft and their manifestations found in virtual worlds. New technologies always produce new toys, and the toys become commodities that gain profit. The most pervasive and profitable technological toys of the contemporary world are online digital games, those spaces and environments have become dominant social spaces for hundreds of millions.
Avatar skins; virtual pets and gardening tools; virtual real estate speculation, urban development and terraforming patterns of online worlds manifest specific design rhetoric. Individual expression and territorial control -- the enclosure of self and the space – is a grounding principle of design in virtual worlds. At the same time, they are social and shared spaces that enable co-presence, social practices, collaboration and competition, and other social interactions.