AWAITING OBLIVION

Natalie Maximova

FILE SÃO PAULO 2026: Inter-creativity – Art and Technology – Full-length
Electronic Language International Festival

Awaiting Oblivion – England

Awaiting Oblivion explores the collapse of simulated reality in The Last of Us II, revealing spaces where boundaries between representation and existence dissolve. As the world fractures into glitches and voids, it exposes the instability of meaning, unmasking the illusion of coherence and confronting the observer with absence at the core of perception. A poetic voiceover amplifies the dissonance between digital precision and fluid, ephemeral ecological and philosophical inquiry.

BIO

Natalie Maximova is a London-based artist and researcher. Her work probes how simulated worlds produce and break meaning. Using machinima, game engines and post-photographic methods, she investigates glitches, edges and out-of-bounds zones, exposing the design logics and politics of mediation that shape how we see and inhabit digital spaces.

Mirror Armor
Being entrapped in narcissism is like a “self-jail”. Placing the mirror armor fixtures over my nude body causes the viewer to see the pixelated and fragmented image of myself. Usually covering, hiding, pretending to be a version of myself on the outside, therefore, “good looking” seems more of decoration or in itself a type of armor suitable for public viewing. Will these mirrors of self reflection cause me to wonder who I am on a deeper level? To discover who I truly am, what I am afraid of, why I waste my life without discovering my inner self. I constantly struggle with how I can break this boundary because I want to wake from this oblivion.

The Swing

In The Swing, a 3D game avatar becomes Rococo fleshy decadence. In this multi-screen animation, the avatar swings on a seat suspended from the sky, in super Mannerist slow time. Her wooded surroundings ebb and flow at different rate, imitating stop-motion. Years pass in a matter of moments. The avatar is the driver of all of these cycles, but a driver scarcely in control – she is instead, a Mother Nature heading straight for what she suspects might be oblivion. The Swing is a multi channel installation, in nine, five and three screen versions.

sound: Kurt Hentschlager

Oblivions Exercises
“Dimitriadis examined the “remember to forget” principle in the front of the mirror turned back to the viewer. According to Freud, memory-traces have nothing to do with the fact of becoming conscious, “indeed they are often most powerful and most enduring when the process which left them behind was one which never entered consciousness””Barbara Piwowarska