Olga Goriunova

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

Books

• Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet, Routledge, 2011.

• Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (with Matthew Fuller), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019, xxviii+192 pp.

• 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.

• Readme 100 Temporary Software Art Factory, Dortmund: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, 2006.

• Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Paradox and Pain in Computing, New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014, 285 pp.

Book chapters

• "'Male literature' of Udaff.com and other networked artistic practices of the cultural resistance", in Control + Shift. Public and Private Usages of the Russian Internet, eds. Henrike Schmidt, Katy Teubener and Natalja Konradova, Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2006. Re-printed in XXXXX, xxxxx and OpenMute, UK, 2006.

• "From Art on Networks to Art on Platforms" (with Alexei Shulgin), in Data Browser 3: Curating Immateriality: On the Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems, ed. Joasia Krysa, New York: Autonomedia, 2006.

• "Glitch" (with Alexei Shulgin), in Software Studies: a Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller, MIT Press, 2008.

• "Autocreativity. The Operation of Codes of Freedom in Art and Culture", in FLOSS + ART, eds. Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk, London: OpenMute, 2008.

• "Vitalist Technocultural Thinking in Revolutionary Russia (on Piotr Engelmeier)", in Place Studies in Art, Media, Science and Technology. Historical Investigations on the Sites and the Migration of Knowledge, eds. Andreas Broeckmann and Gunalan Nadarajan, Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2009, pp 183-197.

• "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.

• "Material Imagination: On the Avant-gardes, Time and Computation", ch. 12 in Fun and Software, ed. Olga Goriunova, London: Bloomsbury, 2014, pp 253-273, PDF.

• "The Ragged Manifold of the Subject: Databaseness and the Generic in Curating YouTube", in Media After Kittler, eds. Eleni Ikoniadou and Scott Wilson, London: Rowan & Littlefield, 2015.

• "Participatory Platforms and the Emergence of Art", in A Companion to Digital Art, ed. Christiane Paul, Wiley, 2016, pp 297-309.

• "Devastation" (with Matthew Fuller), in General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, eds. Erich Hörl and James Burton, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

• "Technological Macrobiome: Media Art and Technology as Matter", in across & beyond: A transmediale Reader on Post-digital Practices, Concepts, and Institutions, eds. Ryan Bishop, Kristoffer Gansing, Jussi Parikka, and Elvia Wilk, Berlin: Sternberg & Transmediale, 2017.

• "The Bodily Sounds of the Abyss", in AUDINT: Unsound:Undead, eds. Eleni Ikoniadou, Toby Heys and Steve Goodman, Urbanomic, 2019. Publisher.

• more

Selected papers and essays

• "Notes on the Death of Net.Art", Springerin 3, Vienna, 2001.
  • trans., in ESC, Berlin: Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, 2002. (German)

• "Artistic Software for Dummies", in read_me 1.2, 2002.

• "Swarm Forms: On Platforms and Creativity", Mute 2:4, London, Jan 2007.

• "Old Contexts for New Media Cultures (in Russia)", Third Text 3(3): "Media Arts: Practice, Institutions and Histories", 2009, pp 261-269.

• "Autocreativity and Organisational Aesthetics in Art Platforms", Fibreculture Journal 17, 2011.

• "New Media Idiocy", Convergence 19:2, Sage, 2013.

• "Die Kraft der digitalen Ästhetik. Über Meme, Hacking und Individuation", Zeitschrift fur Medienwissenschaft 8: "Medienästhetik", eds. Erich Horl and Mark Hansen, Apr 2013. (German)
  • "The Force of Digital Aesthetics: On Memes, Hacking, and Individuation", Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 24:47, 2015, pp 54-75. [2]

• "Digital Ontologies as Productive Process", Cultural Anthropology, 2016.

• Goriunova, et al., "Chatting through Pictures? A Classification of Images Tweeted in One Week in the UK and USA", Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 67:11, Wiley, 2016, pp 2575-2586. Preprint.

• "The Lurker and the Politics of Knowledge in Data Culture", International Journal of Communication 11, 2017, pp 3917-3933. [3]

• "The Digital Subject. People as Data as Persons", Theory, Culture and Society: "Transversal Posthumanities", 2019. [4]

Interviews

• Lisa Baldini, "Interview with Olga Goriunova, Curator of Fun with Software", Rhizome, 3 Nov 2010.

• Cornelia Sollfrank, "Producing Organizational Aesthetics, Interview with Olga Goriunova", Jan 2019, 29 min. Video. Conducted Oct 2017 at HEK, Zurich. Part of the Creating Commons project.

• "Son(i)a 355: Olga Goriunova", Radio Web MACBA, 22 Jul 2022, 54 min. Podcast.

Links

• Royal Holloway

• Visual Social Media Lab (archived)

• U Warwick (archived)

• U Leuphana