Taina Bucher
Taina Bucher is a PhD candiate in Media Studies at the University of Oslo, Oslo, where she is currently working on her dissertation project that deals with the role of software in facilitating different modes of becoming a subject on social networking platforms. She is interested in ways to theorize and investigate issues of subject formation and individuation from a software perspective in the age of Web 2.0. How can we make sense of the algorithms at play in Facebook's news feed, how are friendships formed with the help of people recommendation algorithms? Why do social networking platforms constantly change their features and functionalities and what do these constant changes demand from the subject?
During 2010 she was a visiting scholar at the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University. During spring 2011 she will be a visiting scholar at the Infoscape Research Lab, Ryerson University, Toronto.
She is part of the research group Media Aesthetics at the University of Oslo that explore questions concerning the materialities of mediation, how different media mean and make sense. Her contribution focuses on the aesthetics and politics of software in making visible (invisible) and on the expressive potentialities of software more generally.
Taina holds a MSc in Cultural Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA from Lunds University, Sweden and the University of Oslo in Art History and Media Studies.
