New Video! Street Fighters, Sexologists & Suburban Cybermages: A Conversation with Tabitha Nikolai

Thanks to Portland-based artist Tabitha Nikolai for talking to us about her work and its relationship with gaming culture. You can watch the full event here, or click through to our YouTube Channel to see this and other recent recordings.

In the video we talk about Tabitha's performances, installations and virtual environments, and how they rework elements from series like Metroid, Street Fighter and Vampire: The Masquerade. We also discuss the relationship between gameplay, roleplay and magic, and how works like Ineffable Glossolalia look back to figures like the Weimar sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, whose Institute for Sexual Science was attacked by Nazis in 1933, to understand the forms of trans becoming and transphobic radicalisaition occurring in online spaces and gaming communities today.

Talking us through her digital recreations of grotty gamer dens and suburban shopping malls, Tabitha expands on her interest in how media circulate and communities form, and we discuss how buyouts, bans and stringent content moderation policies are making things increasingly difficult for experimental artists in the platform era. This tuns out to be an issue central to Tabitha's current projects - like the conversations about how artists and activists might take advantage of emerging Web 3.0 technologies that are hosted at frictionless.fail, or the Glades in Dark Forests archive, a chaotically disorganised media library encompassing everything from critical theory monographs to avant-garde anime, Ethiopian jazz to queer African-American sci-if.

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