Olga Goriunova – författare

A philosophical and cultural distillation of the bleak joys in today’s ambivalent ecologies and patterns of lifeBleak Joys develops an understanding of complex entities and processes-from plant roots to forests to ecological damage and its calculation-as aesthetic. It is also a book about “bad” things, such as anguish and devastation, which relate to the ecological and technical but are also constitutive of politics, the ethical, and the formation of subjects.Avidly interdisciplinary, Bleak Joys draws on scientific work in plant sciences, computing, and cybernetics, as well as mathematics, literature, and art in ways that are not merely illustrative of but foundational to our understanding of ecological aesthetics and the condition in which the posthumanities are being forged. It places the sensory world of plants next to the generalized and nonlinear infrastructure of irresolvability-the economics of indifference up against the question of how to make a home on Planet Earth in a condition of damaged ecologies. Crosscutting chapters on devastation, anguish, irresolvability, luck, plant, and home create a vivid and multifaceted approach that is as remarkable for its humor as for its scholarly complexity.Engaging with Deleuze, Guattari, and Bakhtin, among others, Bleak Joys captures the modes of crises that constitute our present ecological and political condition, and reckons with the means by which they are not simply aesthetically known but aesthetically manifest.

How data and artificial intelligence create a new, abstract digital subjectIdeal Subjects examines how samples of our lives and daily behaviors have come to reside in the world of data and artificial intelligence—and what this means for who we are and what we may become. Detailing how AI-facilitated algorithmic prediction and data modeling make “ideal subjects” of us, Olga Goriunova explores the complex ways we relate to these digital abstractions. As more and more of our experience is funneled through computational records and models, datafied aspects of our lives are segmented and reconfigured to operate as new entities. Rather than viewing these abstract assemblages as extensions of our selves, Goriunova encourages us to consider these products of computational processes as an entirely new kind of subject, one that is both more and less than a human. Through close readings of contemporary digital practices and data analytics, Goriunova exposes the profound ethical, aesthetic, and political implications of producing and managing these new digital subjects. Highlighting the distinctive impact of computation on contemporary subject formation while placing the present within a history of shifting conceptions of the subject, she gives us much-needed tools for understanding how our intimate selves are rendered by the abstract entities of big data. Ideal Subjects presents an uncanny and deeply fascinating portrait of modern subjectivity in the technological age. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

In this book, Goriunova offers a critical analysis of the processes that produce digital culture. Digital cultures thrive on creativity, developing new forces of organization to overcome repetition and reach brilliance. In order to understand the processes that produce culture, the author introduces the concept of the art platform, a specific configuration of creative passions, codes, events, individuals and works that are propelled by cultural currents and maintained through digitally native means. Art platforms can occur in numerous contexts bringing about genuinely new cultural production, that, given enough force, come together to sustain an open mechanism while negotiating social, technical and political modes of power.Software art, digital forms of literature, 8-bit music, 3D art forms, pro-surfers, and networks of geeks are test beds for enquiry into what brings and holds art platforms together. Goriunova provides a new means of understanding the development of cultural forms on the Internet, placing the phenomenon of participatory and social networks in a conceptual and historical perspective, and offering powerful tools for researching cultural phenomena overlooked by other approaches.

In this book, Goriunova offers a critical analysis of the processes that produce digital culture. Digital cultures thrive on creativity, developing new forces of organization to overcome repetition and reach brilliance. In order to understand the processes that produce culture, the author introduces the concept of the art platform, a specific configuration of creative passions, codes, events, individuals and works that are propelled by cultural currents and maintained through digitally native means. Art platforms can occur in numerous contexts bringing about genuinely new cultural production, that, given enough force, come together to sustain an open mechanism while negotiating social, technical and political modes of power.Software art, digital forms of literature, 8-bit music, 3D art forms, pro-surfers, and networks of geeks are test beds for enquiry into what brings and holds art platforms together. Goriunova provides a new means of understanding the development of cultural forms on the Internet, placing the phenomenon of participatory and social networks in a conceptual and historical perspective, and offering powerful tools for researching cultural phenomena overlooked by other approaches.

Fun and Software offers the untold story of fun as constitutive of the culture and aesthetics of computing. Fun in computing is a mode of thinking, making and experiencing. It invokes and convolutes the question of rationalism and logical reason, addresses the sensibilities and experience of computation and attests to its creative drives. By exploring topics as diverse as the pleasure and pain of the programmer, geek wit, affects of play and coding as a bodily pursuit of the unique in recursive structures, Fun and Software helps construct a different point of entry to the understanding of software as culture. Fun is a form of production that touches on the foundations of formal logic and precise notation as well as rhetoric, exhibiting connections between computing and paradox, politics and aesthetics. From the formation of the discipline of programming as an outgrowth of pure mathematics to its manifestation in contemporary and contradictory forms such as gaming, data analysis and art, fun is a powerful force that continues to shape our life with software as it becomes the key mechanism of contemporary society.Including chapters from leading scholars, programmers and artists, Fun and Software makes a major contribution to the field of software studies and opens the topic of software to some of the most pressing concerns in contemporary theory.

A philosophical and cultural distillation of the bleak joys in today’s ambivalent ecologies and patterns of lifeBleak Joys develops an understanding of complex entities and processes-from plant roots to forests to ecological damage and its calculation-as aesthetic. It is also a book about “bad” things, such as anguish and devastation, which relate to the ecological and technical but are also constitutive of politics, the ethical, and the formation of subjects.Avidly interdisciplinary, Bleak Joys draws on scientific work in plant sciences, computing, and cybernetics, as well as mathematics, literature, and art in ways that are not merely illustrative of but foundational to our understanding of ecological aesthetics and the condition in which the posthumanities are being forged. It places the sensory world of plants next to the generalized and nonlinear infrastructure of irresolvability-the economics of indifference up against the question of how to make a home on Planet Earth in a condition of damaged ecologies. Crosscutting chapters on devastation, anguish, irresolvability, luck, plant, and home create a vivid and multifaceted approach that is as remarkable for its humor as for its scholarly complexity.Engaging with Deleuze, Guattari, and Bakhtin, among others, Bleak Joys captures the modes of crises that constitute our present ecological and political condition, and reckons with the means by which they are not simply aesthetically known but aesthetically manifest.

How data and artificial intelligence create a new, abstract digital subjectIdeal Subjects examines how samples of our lives and daily behaviors have come to reside in the world of data and artificial intelligence—and what this means for who we are and what we may become. Detailing how AI-facilitated algorithmic prediction and data modeling make “ideal subjects” of us, Olga Goriunova explores the complex ways we relate to these digital abstractions.As more and more of our experience is funneled through computational records and models, datafied aspects of our lives are segmented and reconfigured to operate as new entities. Rather than viewing these abstract assemblages as extensions of our selves, Goriunova encourages us to consider these products of computational processes as an entirely new kind of subject, one that is both more and less than a human.Through close readings of contemporary digital practices and data analytics, Goriunova exposes the profound ethical, aesthetic, and political implications of producing and managing these new digital subjects. Highlighting the distinctive impact of computation on contemporary subject formation while placing the present within a history of shifting conceptions of the subject, she gives us much-needed tools for understanding how our intimate selves are rendered by the abstract entities of big data. Ideal Subjects presents an uncanny and deeply fascinating portrait of modern subjectivity in the technological age.Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.