Ideal Subjects

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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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).