The Tables Have Turned: Desire, Power and Abstraction in the Subject in AI Society with Prof Olga Goriunova

Presented by Prof Olga Goriunova, Royal Holloway, University of London. Supported by funding from the Research School of Humanities and the Arts

Presented in-person and online via Zoom.

This talk proposes the notion of the digital subject – the abstract, predicted subject made out of data about us – and considers the ways in which it works.

I begin by focusing on the ways in which the abstract subject is made: building on the techniques of categories and of tables of data, it appears at a distance from us, as patterns in vector space. While extending the “classificatory impulse”, digital subjects are no longer tied to the ordering by normativity. Instead, reformulating forms of indexicality, they operate as predictions, at levels below and above individuals.

I then explore how such subjects “come back” to us, acquiring the power to attract and direct desire. Here, I consider the emergence of the notion of the norm, in relation to statistical measurement, and, relatedly, the calculation of the new “ideal”. Unlike the norm, the ideal, even if unachievable, can be desired and striven for. Statistical measurement, modelling and prediction in industrialized AI take on the project of the generation of “ideals”, partaking in the orchestration of desire, already trained on abstractions.

Desiring calculated predictions and recognizing them as “one’s own” thus builds on the long tradition of training to respond to the “truth” about oneself and the world being told by, amongst other means, computation, and now, AI. 

Olga Goriunova is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway University of London. She is the author of Ideal Subjects. Abstract People in Data and Culture (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2025); Bleak Joys. Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (with Matthew Fuller, University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet (Routledge, 2012). Editor of Fun and Software, Exploring Pleasure, Pain and Paradox in Computing (Bloomsbury, 2014), she was a co-curator of the software art platform Runme.org (2003) before the age of social platforms. She has also published seminal articles on new media idiocy, memes and lurkers, amongst others. She has curated multiple exhibitions across several European countries and is a founding co-editor of Computational Culture, A Journal of Software Studies.

Image: VERA MOLNÁR, INTERRUPTIONS, 1969. BLACK-AND-WHITE PLOTTER DRAWING.