In this lecture, Olga Goriunova gives us a preview of her upcoming book Ideal Subjects, which will be published on 23 December 2025 by the University of Minnesota Press.
Ideal Subjects examines how samples of our lives and daily behaviors have come to reside in the world of data and artificial intelligence—and what this means for who we are and what we may become. Detailing how AI-facilitated algorithmic prediction and data modeling make “ideal subjects” of us, Olga Goriunova explores the complex ways we relate to these digital abstractions.
As more and more of our experience is funneled through computational records and models, datafied aspects of our lives are segmented and reconfigured to operate as new entities. Rather than viewing these abstract assemblages as extensions of our selves, Goriunova encourages us to consider these products of computational processes as an entirely new kind of subject, one that is both more and less than a human.
Through close readings of contemporary digital practices and data analytics, Goriunova exposes the profound ethical, aesthetic, and political implications of producing and managing these new digital subjects. Highlighting the distinctive impact of computation on contemporary subject formation while placing the present within a history of shifting conceptions of the subject, she gives us much-needed tools for understanding how our intimate selves are rendered by the abstract entities of big data. Ideal Subjects presents an uncanny and deeply fascinating portrait of modern subjectivity in the technological age.
Q&A moderated by Neja Berger
Pre-event to VECTORAL AGENTS: Digital technologies and (in)capacities to act
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Olga Goriunova
Ideal Subject
Release date:
December 23rd, 2025
232 Pages | 139 x 216 mm
10 b/w illustrations
ISBN: 9781517916527
Series: Posthumanities
"Exciting and important, Ideal Subjects has been needed for a decade, if not longer. Olga Goriunova approaches the theory of the subject in the context of modernity and technology, answering a series of questions that has been both central to yet obfuscated by recent scholarship."
—Justin Joque, University of Michigan
"Olga Goriunova moves deftly between sociocultural analysis and theoretical inquiry to reveal how AI does not simply extract data from human experiences but produces ‘ideal subjects’—abstractions of ideals, desires, and data patterns that change subject-making. This book is compelling reading for anyone seeking to understand how we become ourselves (and something other than ourselves) in the age of algorithmic prediction."
—M. Beatrice Fazi, University of Sussex
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.
Neja Berger is a PhD student in humanities and social sciences and a young researcher at the Social Communication Research Centre at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. She holds an MA in video and new media from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design and a BA in film and television editing from the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television. She is a member of the editorial board for culture and humanities at Radio Študent, former co-editor of the online magazine Disenz and author of numerous journalistic and scholarly texts. For Aksioma, she has conceived and hosted three seasons of the tactics&practice [podcast] series: Scale (2023), (un)real data - real effect (20240), and Are You A Software Update? (2025).
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Production and organisation of the event:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2025 | aksioma.org
In partnership with the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, and Moderna galerija.
In the frame of the symposium VECTORAL AGENTS: Digital technologies and (in)capacities to act organised by Prof. Ksenija Vidmar Horvat, University of Ljubljana, and Dr Jernej Markelj, University of Amsterdam.
