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.
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