In her talk, Ideal Subjects: Abstract People in Data and Culture, Olga Goriunova asks what is the “me” that is profiled on a streaming platform or analysed by a smart watch. The digital subject composed of data, evaluated and spun to make predictions is not a shadow but an abstraction whose making requires some distance. Distance is also core to the idea of the subject’s interiority that we know from the thinking subject of modernity. The distance of digital subjects, therefore, is not only about fractured noisy data groupings but builds on how we are trained to be subjects. Asking how digital subjects as patterns “come back” to us and compel us to want their “truths”, Goriunova suggests that it is through configuring desire in relation to what is abstract that we learn to orientate ourselves towards calculations and projections now managed by data analytics and AI.

Mercedes Bunz follows with her lecture, Release me from your technical collective. The society of individuals that neoliberalism and its digital technology created has given rise to a new distorted form of the collective. Being kept busy worrying about the dividing effects of personalisation isolating the digital subject, this might have slipped from view, and understandably so. Much like its counterpart, the digital subject, the technical collective seems to be nothing but a shell of its former self: instead of shared ideas, values, and commonalities through which relations are built, the technical collective is a sheer collection of data feeding contemporary technologies such as machine learning. This data collective is not addressed but scraped, it is not built on relations but collected, and it is not internally organised but traversed by digital calculation that extracts profit from it. But as with all things – including the digital – there is a flipside. This lecture aims to uncover a power of the technical collective usually overlooked. For this, it explores recent technical work by artists who prototype technical collectives differently to opt for conversations with and about data and digital technologies. ✊

Following their lectures, Goriunova and Bunz will be joined in conversation by Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal.