Son[i]a #355
Olga Goriunova
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Olga Goriunova is a scholar and curator in the fields of digital media arts and cultures. She lives and works in London, which is precisely where her Digital Subjects project started as the byproduct of a chance discovery – which she recounts at the beginning of our conversation – related to a marketing technique known as “hyperlocal advertising”. This rather random realisation gave rise to her research on digital subjects: a thorough investigation into the political and technological implications of current data collection practices, but also into the actual concept of the digital subject itself. “People as data as persons”, as Olga put it in her first paper on the topic. Essentially, she looks at how the notions of self and subjectivity intersect with massive databases, privacy, machine learning, and all of our misconceptions.
In this podcast, Olga Goriunova talks about the shelf life of marketing data, about digital subjects and legal persons, reading statistics as poetry, and the many mysteries of personalised targeting.
Ramon Amaro
The researcher and lecturer Ramon Amaro introduces the basics of machine learning, its criteria for assigning value, the collision between blackness and the artificial, its flaws, and the problem of impunity that all too often accompanies them. He also calls for a techno-resistance that would require us to sacrifice our current view of the world and of ourselves.
Matthew Fuller
Matthew Fuller talks about sleep, procedural imperialism, big data, post-humanity, and what he calls “denial of service attacks on people’s brains”.