ecologies of algorithms

Amy Li, Yuning Zhang

Tips: Amy and I coworked on every section of this project. I mainly focused on coding and Amy mainly focused on wording.

Introduction

What does it mean to live in a world where every one of your interactions is documented and exploited as resources? Are we the new lab rats? Technological advancement at what cost?

After reading chapter 3: 'Data' in the book Atlas of AI, we wanted to create a speculative machine learning driven content stream that created a critical conversation about how algorithms shaped our interaction with the internet and wider world. Specifically, we created an interface that illustrated the main arguments in the reading.

Reference: Crawford, Kate. The atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. Yale University Press, 2021.

Concept Explanation

Interface

Click on the moving shapes to interact with the interface, you will get a panel pop up like this (try it on computers):

Live site: https://magnificent-simple-dust.glitch.me

Code: https://glitch.com/edit/#!/magnificent-simple-dust

Reflection

Some feedbacks we got:

It was fun to present our idea using metaphor and interface! We realized the collection of data still kind of came from "nowhere," but made obvious with the interactions. We learned a neat iteration might emphasize some of the power/poetics a bit more subtle in the interface, and we could achieve an enticement to click via labels or fun colors/visuals to enhance the data collection.