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.
The rhetoric of ephemerality has become an essential part of the internet imaginary, and online spaces are colloquially claimed to traverse boundaries that exist in physical social space. Here, the infinite market expansion has been virtually equated to individual freedom.
Grounded in the logic of territorial control and self-governance, online digital games have become the most pervasive social spaces of contemporary world. Virtual worlds are the Great New World. Being social spaces, online games became powerful rhetorical devices.
Combining urban design, planning and game design theories, this cooperative/competitive game questions the logic of production of digital space.
Collective Virtual is based on the shared ownership and constantly shifting governance. As the players share the space and inhabit collective body with others, the perceived finitude and discrete state of individual subject is undermined. Virtual geography emerges through conflict and negotiation, the space shrinks and expands due to the actions of the players. Shared spaces, if supersede the individually owned parcels produce the alternative narrative structures, open new decision trees, rules, and ways to design.
Through the series of playtests across different media, I have been modifying, testing and experimenting with the framework and the game play while working on its web-based version. At the current development state, it is a cooperative worldbuilding game for 6-10 players. Players have to collaborate and compete in order to design a “city”, in which they have to make meaningful connections between different neighborhoods, properties and areas. This “stitching”between the land, ‘grabbed’ by the players forces them to collectively negotiate the areas of ‘cross-hatches’ of collectively owned and governed space.