Olga Goriunova

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Born Ulan-Ude, Soviet Union (today Russia)
Lives in London, United Kingdom
Web Academia.edu, Aaaaarg

Olga Goriunova (1977, Ulan-Ude, USSR) is a cultural theorist and curator in the fields of digital media arts and cultures. She works across media theory, continental philosophy and theories of computation. She is Professor in the Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Goriunova graduated in philology from Lomonosov Moscow State University (1999). She completed her Ph.D. on "Art Platforms. The constitution of cultural and artistic currents on the Internet" at Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki (now Aalto University), on the concept of art platforms - forms of autonomous artistic and cultural self-organisation core to the 1990s' and early 2000s' Internet culture. She proposed the notion of organisational aesthetics to conceptualise artistic development of alternative infrastructures and communicative spaces as artwork and form of aesthetics in its own right. Her examples include software art, 8-bit music and amateur literature. Goriunova's doctoral thesis was published as Art Platforms. Cultural Production on the Internet (Routledge, 2012).

She taught audiovisual arts, sociology of art and media theory in Moscow City University and Russian State University for the Humanities and delivered lecture series in art institutions in post-Soviet space, such as Pro Arte Institute, St. Petersburg/Russia (on media theory and philosophy of technology, "Media: history of expansion", 2000-2001), Centres for Contemporary Art in Almaty/Kazakhstan and Chisinau/Moldova (2001, 2006) and speaking at media art and theory conferences world-wide, before moving to Britain in 2008, where she was Lecturer at Goldsmiths University of London, Reader at London Metropolitan University and Associate Professor at Warwick University.

In Moscow, she was involved in Free Software movement, organising events against the adoption of Microsoft OS as a default platform. Goriunova also wrote for art magazines, and was associated with the work of Media Art Lab. In 2001, she curated the round table discussion Copyright in the Age of Digital Reproduction at MediaForum, part of Moscow Film Festival. From 2001 Goriunova was a member of Data Exchange Laboratory. In 2003, she created a satiric art work called Suicide Letter Wizard for Microsoft Word, which was parodying Microsoft Office and Word document templates.

In 2002, she co-curated (with Alexei Shulgin) the first international Readme software art festival which would go on to have four editions in total (Moscow 2002, Helsinki 2003, Aarhus 2004, Dortmund 2005). In 2003, she became a co-founder of software art repository Runme.org. In 2010, Goriunova curated Funware exhibition which was first shown at Arnolfini gallery in Bristol and then traveled to the cultural organisations MU and Baltan, in Eindhoven, The Netherlands (November 2010 – January 2011). Her edited book, Fun and Software. Exploring Pain, Paradox and Pleasure in Computing (Bloomsbury, 2014) responds to the topics explored in the exhibition, situating computing in multiple, conflicting and non-linear histories and modes of thought.

She has written and published on a broad range of topics in cultural theory, art and literature, from glitch and Youtube to the philosophy of the subject and AI. Her trilogy of articles on meme-maker, new media idiot and lurker are widely read.

In 2019, she published, with Matthew Fuller, Bleak Joys. Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (University of Minnesota Press), which deals with slowly unfolding catastrophes as they are 'managed' by computational models, and other methods, to create differential realities around the world. The book mixes existential enquiry and approaches from ecological humanities with the investigation of the history of modelling of nuclear threats, and political economy, arguing for a new mode of ethico-aesthetics.

Her latest book Ideal Subjects. The Abstract People of AI (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) is a philosophical take on data capture and prediction as means of subject-construction. Reviving the philosophy of the subject, Goriunova argues that the way people become subjects today has a lot to do with how their desire for the world gets activated and directed towards computational abstractions which are set up to deliver 'truths' about the selves and the world.

She lives in London.

Publications[edit]

Books
  • Ideal Subjects: The Abstract People of AI, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming Dec 2025, 232 pp. Publisher.
Books edited
  • Read_me Festival 1.2: Software Art/Software Art Games (with Alexei Shulgin), Moscow, 2002.
  • ReadMe 2.3 Reader: About Software Art (with Alexei Shulgin), Helsinki: NIFCA, 2003, 87 pp. [1]
  • Read_me: Software Art & Cultures (with Alexei Shulgin), Aarhus: University of Aarhus, 2004, 396 pp. TOC.
Book chapters
  • "A Life Story of Runme.org, software art repository", in ART ++, ed. David-Olivier Lartigaud, Paris: HYX, 2011, pp 113-140. (French)
  • "Worse Luck" (with Matthew Fuller), in Down by Law: Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze/Nomadic Thought, eds. Rosi Braidotti and Patricia Pisters, New York/London: Continuum, 2012, pp 159-172.
  • "Phrase" (with Matthew Fuller), in Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social, eds. Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford, Routledge, 2012, pp 163-171.
  • "Social Networking Sites" (with Chiara Bernardi), in John Hopkins Guidebook to the Digital Humanities, eds. Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson and Benjamin Robertson, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2013.
  • "Devastation" (with Matthew Fuller), in General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, eds. Erich Hörl and James Burton, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Selected papers and essays
  • "Notes on the Death of Net.Art", Springerin 3, Vienna, 2001.
    • trans., in ESC, Berlin: Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, 2002. (German)

Interviews[edit]

Links[edit]

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