Abstract
This paper looks back at historical precedents for how computational systems and ideas have been visualized as a means of access to and engagement with a broader audience, and to develop a new more tangible language to address abstraction. These precedents share a subversive ground in using a visual language to provoke new ways of engaging with about complex ideas. Two new approaches to visualizing algorithmic systems are proposed for the emerging context of algorithmic ethics in society, looking at prototypical algorithms in computer vision and machine learning systems, to think through the meaning created by algorithmic structure and process. The aim is to use visual design to provoke new kinds of thinking and criticality that can offer opportunities to address algorithms in their increasingly more politicized role today. These new approaches are developed from an arts research perspective to support critical thinking and arts knowledge through creative coding and interactive design.
Highlights
Today computational systems have become significantly more abstract, complex, opaque, powerful, pervasive, influential, and opportunistic
Humans are becoming increasingly incapable of comprehending computation in its speed, scale, and structure, and to engage with it and make choices about how we want to live with it
We need to develop visual tools that incite new ways to think about algorithms as socio-political drivers
Summary
Today computational systems have become significantly more abstract, complex, opaque, powerful, pervasive, influential, and opportunistic. The affordances of turtle geometry are laid out as: intrinsic rather than extrinsic, whereby the turtle (and in turn our thinking) does not rely on an external reference system such as the traditional x and y axes; local rather than global, meaning that we calculate geometry based on local information such as position and heading, rather than in the context of a wider system such as the center and edge of an environment; the construction of procedures rather than equations, where procedures are simple, readily modified, and called iteratively, enabling uncomplicated mathematical exploration that is not possible in traditional algebraic formalism; dynamic rather than static; and prioritizing the computer science concept of ‘state’ where movements and procedures are state-change operators These affordances support an embodied approach to dealing with abstraction, by breaking it down into simple repeatable behaviors that people can relate to through existing knowledge of their own bodies in space and motion. That is something to explore further, the focus on structure and process over data so far
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
