Computational Thinking & Aesthetic Doing
Computational Thinking & Aesthetic Doing
To grapple with the overwhelming scale and urgent stakes of emergent technologies like large-scale AI systems, we need new language, shared vocabularies, and experimental approaches. This research area at the KHM combines critical–creative approaches to reveal, interrogate, reimagine and resist algorithmic systems, with a current emphasis on power and ideology in machine learning. We do a lot of co-learning: programming, tinkering, reading, pondering, artmaking, researching, troubleshooting, zine-making, and eating snacks together. No matter your experience with code so far, you are invited to join us!
What is 'Computational Thinking & Aesthetic Doing'? By 'Computational Thinking' we do not mean computers that think, but instead critical engagement with the logics of computation. Our challenge is to question the assumptions that have been built into sociotechnical systems throughout their histories, in order to expand the scope of possibilities for computational thinking. This requires uncovering counter-histories of algorithmic systems, creating artistic experiments that examine and expose existing tools, and sustaining embodied practices with/out technology that propose alternative futures.
'Aesthetic doing' means making and being in-process, doing as action and activism, aesthetics as both politics and form. For example, how do computational forms shape and limit language and thought? We take up code as our artistic material to reflect upon systems across scales, from the single line of code to the billion-parameter machine learning model to the infrastructures that support them. The more terms like "language" and "understanding" become recalibrated towards interactions with and between machines, we need to create access points for engaging with high-stakes algorithmic systems on new terms, as part of a community of practice that produces shareable, accessible instruments and resources. We believe that artistic research in critical–creative coding can make tangible interventions that have direct social and political impact.
