LECTURE: Alina Nazmeeva / Mediated Worlds

ABSTRACT

“Technologies are relational devices. They weave us and we weave them.” (from Techno-Affections: For a Policy of Co-Responsibility, 2020)

How do digital media serve to augment or transfigure our spatial consciousness? How might representation act as a vehicle for critique or reinforcement of dominant narratives about the world(s)? In what ways might cartographic and image-generative practices be mobilized as instruments of activism and offer a conduit for resistance? This talk will navigate these inquiries through a combination of theoretical exposition and illustrative project references. It will interrogate material, social, political and cultural implications of diverse digital tools aimed to capture, monitor, simulate, represent or (re)produce space. It will delve into how these tools and the mediated worlds produced by them co-construct the ways we live in, conceive of, and perceive the world.

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BIO

Alina Nazmeeva is a designer, digital artist and an educator. She is the A. Alfred Taubman Fellow at University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. She is a graduate of Master of Science in Urbanism, MIT (2019); a fellow of the New Normal program at Strelka Institute of Media Architecture and Design (2017), and a Canadian Centre of Architecture fellow (2022). She was a lead researcher at MIT Future Urban Collectives Lab and a researcher at MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab. In her work Alina examines entanglements and overlays between physical and digital spaces and objects, and their cultural, economic and political implications. Using gaming engines, CGI software, machinima, found footage and installations, she exposes and examines the increasing oscillation between cities and videogames, images and spaces, life and animation. A research-based and narrative-driven approach is fundamental to her work as she often combines visual art projects with writing. With a background in architecture and urbanism, she refuses binaries of physical/digital, or virtual/real, and instead investigates the continuities, gray zones and points of friction between these notions.