Arina Viazenkina
cinematic and videogame architecture March
The Bartlett UCL
Specialisms: Architecture / Film & Animation / Storytelling
Location: London, United Kingdom
Arina Viazenkina
First Name: Arina
Last Name: Viazenkina
Specialisms: Architecture / Film & Animation / Storytelling
Sectors:
My Location: London, United Kingdom
University / College: The Bartlett UCL
Course / Program Title: cinematic and videogame architecture March
About
Arina Viazenkina is a London-based designer with a background in architectural design and worldbuilding. A recent graduate of the Cinematic and Video Game Architecture MArch at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, she was awarded the Cinematic and Videogame Architecture Design Prize for her immersive, narrative-driven worlds. Her animated film Virtia, developed in Blender and Houdini, explores an allegorical social media economy through meticulously designed environments and characters. Virtia has screened internationally, including at the BAFTA-qualifying Brighton International Animation Festival, Iris Prize International Film Festival, the Canadian Screen Awards-qualifying Toronto International Nollywood Film Festival, and was shortlisted for the Oscar-qualifying Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival.
In an allegorical world where hair is currency and attention exploited, Virtia follows the journey of a single strand through a digital economy of surveillance, addiction, and control. The film materialises hidden architectures of social media, where intimacy is transaction and identity is performance. Hair became its central metaphor: intimate, socially symbolic, yet technically complex in 3D. Every environment and character echoes real-world tropes, from influencers to moderators, data farms to corporate futurism, constructing a surreal allegory of the present. Both dazzling and disorienting, Virtia reveals the price of desire in systems we already inhabit.
Competitions
