Olga Goriunova: Ideal Subjects
20 November 2025 at 5 PM
Moderna galerija, Ljubljana
Academy of Fine Arts and Design (UL ALUO) and Aksioma are pleased to present Ideal Subjects — a lecture by Olga Goriunova, pre-event to the symposium VECTORAL AGENTS: Digital technologies and (in)capacities to act.
Q&A moderated by Neja Berger.
Olga Goriunova will give us a preview of her upcoming book Ideal Subjects, which will be published on 23 December 2025 by the University of Minnesota Press. The book 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.
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.