Ideal Subjects Volume 76

Name: Ideal Subjects Volume 76
Price: 270 AUD
Availability: PreOrder
ISBN: 9781517916510

The Abstract People of AI

Olga Goriunova

$270

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

University of Minnesota Press
01 April 2026

Impact of science & technology on society; Ethical & social aspects of computing; Artificial intelligence

Series: Posthumanities

How data and artificial intelligence create a new, abstract digital subject

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.

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By: Olga Goriunova
Imprint: University of Minnesota Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 12mm
Weight: 397g
ISBN: 9781517916510
ISBN 10: 1517916518
Series: Posthumanities
Pages: 232
Publication Date: 01 April 2026
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Further / Higher Education , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Olga Goriunova is professor of media arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is author of Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet and coauthor of Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (Minnesota, 2019).

Reviews for Ideal Subjects Volume 76: The Abstract People of AI

""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