Olga Goriunova

Olga Goriunova is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a cultural theorist, working across technology, philosophy and aesthetics. Her latest book, Ideal Subjects. The Abstract People of AI (2025) explores how data and artificial intelligence abstract people into new kinds of subjects. The questions of subjectivation in relation to art and technology have been central to her work. Her previous book, Bleak Joys. Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (co-authored, 2019) explores aesthetics, ethics and ecology during times of multiple crises. This work traces connections between large scale systems such as ecologies, technical infrastructures or mechanisms of calculation and processes of subjectivation. Her first book Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet (2012) conceptualises aesthetic and political engagements with technology at the dawn of the World Wide Web, proposing the concepts of organisational aesthetics and art platforms to understand collective art practices and art movements of the 1990s and early 2000s. This book is based on her work as a co-organiser of software art repository Runme.org and a co-curator of software art festivals (four editions of the Readme festival between 2002 and 2005 in Moscow, Helsinki, Aarhus and Dortmund) and other exhibitions. She edited or co-edited four Readme publications, the most significant of which is Readme. Software Arts and Cultures (Aarhus University Press, 2004). She is also the editor of Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Pain and Paradox in Computing (2014) and a co-founder and co-editor of Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies.  

Publication Contribution

The Politics of Suspense

Whatever we think about globalisation, some conditions, and especially large historical shifts, appear to have a global character. Such is the case of the rise of networks, datafication and AI, termed differently during the last thirty-five years: from cyberspace1 and informatics of domination,2 to big data surveillance and – most recently – techno-feudalism and/or -fascism. What unites them is the large-scale re-grafting of various forms of governance, politics, sociality, culture, and so on, onto computational tracks. What divides them is how these are implemented locally – in other words – the local terroir.

While these processes exhibit a global character, they have different effects in different locales. Or rather, the local implementation of computational offering differs substantially between nation states, geopolitical blocks and continents. This does not only mean that Facebook or YouTube work in some countries and not others, and an era of isolated national Internets is upon us, but also that the polyvocality of contemporary computation may be verticalised and funnelled or relaxed and continuously reconfigured, depending on specific power relations and requirements. Decisions do not even need to be definitively taken, with AI and data analytical options readied open – for promised violence at any moment – hanging over people’s heads in the politics of suspense.

The starting point of Áron Lődi’s Body Image Falling Down Corridors of Mineral Sky is the new law passed in Hungary which criminalises public gatherings in celebration and recognition of queer sexuality and gay rights, such as pride parades. Furthermore, it was announced that the police were given powers to use biometric facial recognition systems in all kinds of procedures, including in order to identify participants of such gatherings with the aim of prosecuting them for the violation of the passed law. Áron Lődi set out to map the infrastructures needed for such an endeavour – only to puzzlingly discover a wholly unclear situation. Not only have people not yet been prosecuted on the basis of biometric identification, even though well-attended pride parades have been held since, but the interoperability of various parts of such an infrastructure is in question. Infrastructures conjure the notion of infallibility and absolute reach, yet they have potential failure inscribed into their very being. The government releases paradoxical statements, legislating for enforcement, while simultaneously claiming that no such thing is to be done in an open society such as Hungary.

The uncertainty produced here is material as well as communicative and political. There is also ontological uncertainty, the question of what it is that is capturable and rendered understandable by data surveillance and analysis, and what the fundamental features of politics incorporating such decision-making would be. Biometric facial identification is a technology that promises to capture individual essence, but it operates by identifying persons well enough to distinguish them from others in a given population, with an acceptable probability of error. It is an abstractive operation on another abstraction – the body, and its constructed nature is obscured both by the political rhetoric and by the right to violence that the police, army and border control enjoy exercising.

Philosophy and cultural theory have given us a few terms to deal with the (global) situation of our times. Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception3 and Ulrick Bech society of risk4 join the newer formulations concerning the management of irresolvability.5 These are taken further in the current developments, configured and communicated differently in different locales.

An apparatus is being developed to lie in wait. It can work extremely well for the internal state surveillance or be integrated smoothly across countries sharing a geopolitical alliance. It can also be a non-functional one, where the degree of deviation from the promise of efficiency and analytical accuracy is covered up by the political will that bleeds certain groups of people of human status. This is no longer about discipline or control, or raison-d’état. This is about the normalisation, via technical naturalisation, of extreme, incomprehensible violence that is lying in wait for when it’s needed.

Áron Lődi’s Body Image Falling Down Corridors of Mineral Sky traces and translates between the material expression of light and conditions of visibility, between the infrastructures of fibre-optics and silicon and those of feelings, from fear and indignation to insurgency. Áron Lődi inhabits the arrangements of the new politics of suspense through materially grounded resistance as the basis for hope.

The problem with suspense, when used as an aesthetic device in film or literature, is that its resolution tends to be catastrophic. Perhaps in the new media of AI that now combines rare earth minerals, noble gasses and water (for its computer chips and data centres), it does not need to be resolved to be put to work. At least not in our locale – or those locales that we care for. This seems to be what is logically offered to us as our best hope, with the hope itself conditioned by suspense. Yet, Áron Lődi’s Body Image Falling Down Corridors of Mineral Sky , materially traced and excessive, promises to remain an externality – and that is, after all, our only hope.

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1 Hakim Bey,. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1985), https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-temporary-autonomous-zone-ontological-anarchy-poetic-terrorism.
2 Donna Harraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,’ in Socialist Review vol. 15 (1985), https:///archive.org/details/sim_radical-society_1985_15_index/page/n1/mode/2up.
3 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
4 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage Publications, 1992).
5 Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova, Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

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