Our exhibition Between Worlds looks at the structural and socio-political issues around online worlds. These two talks, as part of TPG Fri Lates, dwell on ideas of the death of digital spaces and the creation of 'virtual elsewheres':
Nick Murray shares their fascination with Tamagotchi and where we find ourselves decades later, looking back on those little creatures we took care of now that they are long gone. In this light-hearted performative presentation, Nick looks at how we consider death in digital spaces, and the rituals we take to turn the lights off when digital spaces die.
Teodora Sinziana presents a look at her practice and research into ways of worlding with algorithmic technologies through a screen-based talk that explores the fluid topographies of computer-mediated worlds. Attempting to think techno-geographically about cyberspace and its underlying, less visible architectures, the presentation will navigate through a series of digital ephemera, experimental blueprints and snippets of world-instances, reflecting on the ways in which digital worlds produce structures of feeling. Bringing together speculative storytelling, practices of sensing and virtual space, the talk will delve into what it means to move through a ‘virtual elsewhere’, both poetically and politically - emphasising the idea that algorithmic worlds do not just represent a place that is already there with varying degrees of accuracy, but rather emerge as complex recombinant forms that enable collective engagement in speculative practices.
Watch the recording:
Biographies
Nick Murray
Nick Murray is a producer, composer and artist making interactive sonic and narrative work focusing on loss and digital cultures. This often takes the form of games, interactive poetry and performance. Nick is Lead producer for Now Play This at Somerset House, Director of Playing Poetry and associate producer with Penned in the Margins.
In 2023 Nick was selected as part of Film London’s Lodestars cohort, a list celebrating innovative film and game-makers across the capital.
Teodora Sinziana
Teodora Sinziana Fartan is an artist, researcher and writer based in London, UK. She is a Lecturer in Computational Media Practices at the University of Westminster and a PhD Researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image within London South Bank University, where she researches practices of worlding, computer-mediated imaginaries and networked experiences.
Teodora’s artistic practice explores the immersive, interactive and intelligent more-than-human entanglements taking shape within algorithmically rendered spaces, with a particular focus on the storytelling potential of these virtual geographies and the new modes of affective experience that they render into being.
Teodora has presented her research and artistic practice both locally and internationally at events and institutions such as transmediale, Somerset House, RIXC Festival, the Latvian National Museum of Art, Enclave Projects, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and Museums Without Walls at Kingston University.
@teodorasinziana
