Olga Goriunova | Subjects Desire Abstractions (keynote)
This talk starts with the notions of the subject and of agency: the subject as the tension between the interiority of self and subjective knowledge, on one hand, and the universality of I and objective knowledge, on the other, whilst agency is traditionally conceived as part of reason. Against the background of these modern structurations, I propose the ideal subject as a computational prediction we come to desire. Desiring abstractions, I suggest, builds on the reconfiguration of the socio-political world by statistics, but also depends on seeking truths; both from within the subjective self-forming practices and the objective knowledge-production industries. AI intervenes in both as it performs in the role of the new truth-teller. I argue that we desire the truths offered by computational prediction because the modern subject is stretched alongside the subjective-objective axis, which is being radically reconfigured by AI.
Olga Goriunova is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London and author of Ideal Subjects. The Abstract People of AI (Minnesota University Press, 2025), Bleak Joys. Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (co-authored with Matthew Fuller, Minnesota University Press, 2019) and Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet (Routledge, 2012). She is the editor of Fun and Software. Exploring Pleasure, Pain and Paradox in Computing (Bloomsbury, 2014), co-editor of Readme. Software Arts and Cultures (Aarhus University Press, 2004) and founding co-editor of scholar-led peer-reviewed open access journal Computational Culture. A Journal of Software Studies. Between 2002-2004, she co-curated software art festivals Readme (Moscow, Helsinki, Aarhus and Dortmund) and co-founded Runme.org software art repository.
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Christopher John Müller | From Anaesthetic Power to Anaesthetic Violence: Does the capacity to act hinge on the capacity to feel?
Writing in 1956 in The Obsolescence of the Human, Günther Anders defined a radical maxim that has passed almost entirely without commentary amidst the gradual uptake of his work: “own only such things whose inherent maxims you would will to be the maxims of your own actions”. With this rewriting of the Categorical Imperative, Anders’s text sought to translate back into the sensual realm the insufficiently sensed impacts that arise from our ever greater reliance on things and infrastructures that act on our behalf, while also seeming to show up this moral imperative as doomed from the start. In this paper I revisit Anders’s discussion of outsourced acts to align it to more recent attempts to translate our medial existence back into the realm of imperatives that seem intent on preserving our capacity to act, such as Yves Citton’s “Twelve Maxims of Attentional Ecosophy”. I argue that these attempts can help conceptualise the “anaesthetic” (i.e. numbing feelgood alleviation) that technological mediation can bestow, and thereby also help shift the notions of the “thinking and feeling I” they are seemingly addressed at.
Christopher John Müller is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. His research addresses the intersection of technology and emotion and he also translates media theory. He is the author of Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture, and Human Obsolescence (2016) and has co-edited Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism. His translation of Günther Anders’s The Obsolescence of the Human is forthcoming with Minnesota UP. E-mail: chris.muller@mq.edu.au
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Marija Grech | Planetary Attention: Reorienting Agency with the Blue Humanities
In a time of environmental crisis, the development of a ‘planetary’ sensibility has been espoused as a way of thinking beyond a human-centred world to grapple with anthropocenic realities that, though human-made, seem to far outstrip any possibility of human control. While our inability to act is often thought of as a problem of agency—how to act in the face of something too vast to grasp and too complex to fix—it is equally a problem of attention, one that challenges us to rethink what we pay attention to and why. This talk explores what it might mean to cultivate a form of planetary attention that tries to account for realities we have limited access to. Drawing on work in the Blue Humanities, it considers how different engagements with the sea might effect such a reorientation of thought, while also inviting us to reorient the very way we think attention itself.
Marija Grech is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Malta. She is the author of Spectrality and Survivance: Living the Anthropocene (2022) and co-editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism (2023). She has been a Visiting Research Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and is one of the editors of the online Genealogy of the Posthuman at criticalposthumanism.net.
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Jakko Kemper | Agency, Friction and Silicon Valley Ideologies
The ideologies that guide Silicon Valley’s conduct—e.g., technosolutionism, TESCREALism (Gebru & Torres 2024) and effective accelerationism (e/acc)—are united in the image they paint of a world plagued by frictions that technology can and should eradicate. In this talk, I argue that this technological crusade against friction operates on an impoverished view of human agency. A more sustainable account of agency, I suggest, must embrace the value of friction and its connotations of contingency, difference and resistance for three reasons. First, frictions undermine fantasies of seamless automation and accentuate the material dimensions of the digital. Second, through this material focus, frictions foreground technological fragility and finitude rather than immaculacy and abundance, and thus contour strategies for responsibly inhabiting a world under ecological duress. Third, frictions introduce creative and situated elements of contingency into the space of human-technology interaction and therefore encourage more localized and “technodiverse” (Hui 2023) aesthetics.
Jakko Kemper is Assistant Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Platform Vernaculars at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of the book Frictionlessness (2024), co-editor of the volume Imperfections (2021), and has published work in Theory, Culture, and Society; Media Theory; Critical AI; and Information, Communication, and Society, among other journals.
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Claudio Celis Bueno | Distributed Agency and Power Asymmetries: The end(s) of critique?
During the last few decades, several theoretical schools have championed a more than human idea of agency. Concepts such as distributed agency, material agency, technological agency, etc., attempt to address the growing suspicion that the humanist (modern) notion of agency remains caught in an anthropocentric worldview that reduces nature and technology to mere means for human ends. This ideas resonate strongly with the rapid development of AI technologies in which more and more tasks, decisions, and judgments are being outsourced to technical objects. In this context, Antoinette Rouvroy (2013) speaks of “the end of critique” due to the gradual decline of the modern subject as the locus of power. In light of this, this presentation will ask the following questions: to what extend are these non-human notions of agency complicit with cybernetic imaginaries and the ideologies of connectivity put forth by big tech? Is there still a role for critique in this new socio-technical landscape governed data behaviorism and algorithmic decision-making? How can we challenge the anthropocentric conceptualizations of agency while at the same time remain critical of power asymmetries?
Claudio Celis Bueno is an Assistant Professor in New Media and Digital Cultures at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of The Attention Economy: Labour, Time and Power in Cognitive Capitalism, and several academic articles. His current research focuses on the relation between AI and labour from a (post)Marxist perspective. He also coordinates the AI and Cultural Production research group at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and co-coordinates the AIsymmetries research project.
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Ksenija Vidmar Horvat | Landscapes of posthumanism
In the introductory address to the symposium, we will begin by posing a key question faced by the humanities today: if humanities is the academic field concerned with, in most general terms, the human, what happens with the field when the human has entered the posthuman phase. Namely, how do we account for the changes in basic human intellectual capacities, such as creativity, authorship and autonomy (of reason), when technology, AI and digital media coordinate our channels of communication, and navigate our critical concerns? Is this a completely novel situation or do we need to refresh old warnings about technological determinism, by Raymond Williams in particular, that technology is a social product, shaped and governed by human interest and intensions? In this brief reflection, we will nonetheless ask what is the role of humanities within the technological landscape fueled by algorithmic thinking; and how the legacies of humanist thought can play part in tackling the new challenge.
Ksenija Vidmar Horvat (PhD University of California, Davis) is sociology of culture professor at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, currently serving as vice rector for education, and coordinating the curriculum reform towards green/digital/life-long learning. She is the principial investigator and leader of the research program group The social contract in the 21st century.
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Primož Krašovec | Get your navy suits and feedback loops
By placing Michel Foucault’s lecture series Security, Territory, Population within his broader exploration of power beyond law and repression, I will highlight how Foucault not only moved from discipline to biopolitics and governmentality but also introduced a key concept of ‘security,’ which frames power’s relation to capitalism, risk, and future unpredictability and is ever more relevant given the rise of artificial intelligence. I will examine the shift from disciplinary to control societies, emphasizing technologies of power, surveillance, and machine intelligence. Finally, I will argue that in the 21st century, capitalism itself evolves into a form of technological intelligence.
Primož Krašovec is an Associate Professor of Sociology of Culture at Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. His first book, Tujost kapitala (Alien Capital) came out in 2021.
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Nina Cvar, Andrej Kos, Emilija Stojmenova Duh | The Spiral of Unintelligence: AI, Epistemic Infrastructures, and Posthuman Knowledge Ecologies
As AI systems become increasingly capable and integrated into daily life, humanity risks entering a dangerous spiral of dependence. Outsourcing thinking, problem-solving, and knowledge creation to AI may lead to the atrophy of our own cognitive abilities. Over time, this overreliance could result in humans asking less informed questions, flooding AI systems with low-quality input, and ultimately degrading the very models we rely on. Drawing on Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges and Braidotti’s posthuman theory of subjectivity, this presentation proposes the concept of the ‘spiral of unintelligence’ to examine the epistemological and cultural challenges arising from the everyday mediation of AI.
Nina Cvar is an associate researcher at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Ljubljana. She is currently serving as editor-in-chief of the journal Anthropos. Between 2008 and 2017, she worked as a professional film critic for major Slovenian publications and received the Nika Bohinc Award. In 2025, she was a guest lecturer at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien.
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Jernej Markelj | The masculine urge to ‘rawdog’ life: Male paranoia and the gendering of digital detox
My talk will engage with the online trend of ‘rawdogging’ flights—where men endure long flights without any distractions, entertainment or amenities—to analyse the gendered logic behind digital detox cultures. Presenting my collaborative work with Jakko Kemper, I investigate this trend, a typical instance of digital detox, as a hegemonically masculine practice of resistance to what are experienced as the feminizing forces of digital technologies. I suggest that this experience of emasculating stimulation is shaped by the tendency of networked devices to structure subjectivity in ways predominantly defined by vibes, flows and the capture of affect and attention. The immersive volatility of digital environments challenges perceptual control and corrodes the autonomous agency of the male self, thus triggering a defensive push-back. This response is conceptualised as a form of paranoid masculinity, which relentlessly polices the boundaries of the self and obsessively shores up fantasies of autonomy, rationality and (self-)control to ward off the supposedly emasculating forces of alterity, emotion and stimulation.
Jernej Markelj is a lecturer in New Media and Digital Cultures at the University of Amsterdam and a researcher at the University of Ljubljana. His work analyses the conceptual terrain of digital media cultures in relation to the agential forces that organise it. He investigates how the emergence of networked technologies, which increasingly enable or augment our daily activities, simultaneously challenges the ideas of human autonomy and agency. His research has been published with various academic publishers, including Bloomsbury and Manchester University Press, and journals such as Convergence, NECSUS, and Journal of Posthumanism.