Olga Goriunova
Ideal Subjects: The Abstract People of AI

Lecture
20 November 2025 at 5 PM
Moderna galerija, Ljubljana

Q&A moderated by Neja Berger

Pre-event to the symposium VECTORAL AGENTS: Digital technologies and (in)capacities to act

In this talk, Olga Goriunova presented her book Ideal Subjects, to 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. 

PRAISE

“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