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Provocative, hopeful essays imagine a future that is not reduced to algorithms. What is human flourishing in an age of machine intelligence, when many claim that the world's most complex problems can be reduced to narrow technical questions? Does more computing make us more intelligent, or simply more computationally powerful? We need not always resist reduction; our ability to simplify helps us interpret complicated situations. The trick is to know when and how to do so. Against Reduction offers a collection of provocative and illuminating essays that consider different ways of recognizing and addressing the reduction in our approach to artificial intelligence, and ultimately to ourselves. Inspired by a widely read manifesto by Joi Ito that called for embracing the diversity and irreducibility of the world, these essays offer persuasive and compelling variations on resisting reduction. Among other things, the writers draw on Indigenous epistemology to argue for an extended “circle of relationships” that includes the nonhuman and robotic; cast “Snow White” as a tale of AI featuring a smart mirror; point out the cisnormativity of security protocol algorithms; map the interconnecting networks of so-called noncommunicable disease; and consider the limits of moral mathematics. Taken together, they show that we should push back against some of the reduction around us and do whatever is in our power to work toward broader solutions.

We started reading science fiction as teenagers. We fell in love with the fantastic worlds, the strange societies, the alien cultures and the amazing technologies. As we got older, though, we began to notice the lack of Native people in those futures. In fact, there were barely any nonwhite people at all.

Community + Culture features practitioner perspectives on designing technologies for and with communities. We highlight compelling projects and provocative points of view that speak to both community technology practice and the interaction design field as a whole. Tad Hirsch, Editor

Writing practices that integrate dynamic and interactive strategies into the making and reading of digital texts are proliferating as more of our reading experiences are mediated through the screen. We argue that rarely do current approaches to creating digital texts operate at the basic textual level of the letterform itself, and that this neglect is partially due to the fact that current font technology is based on print paradigms that make it difficult to work programmatically at the level of individual letters. Work produced in our lab suggests the creative possibilities in being able to easily specify behaviours at such a level, and leads us to propose that writers, typographers and programmers start thinking beyond Postscript-like formats such as OpenType or TrueType to collaboratively develop a new ComplexType format (or formats) that is designed for the twenty-first century as opposed to a simulation of the fifteenth.

Making the “I Still Remember” documentary's memory floating bubbles interactive with audience's participation using a near day-to-day OpenGL (aimed at later enhancements with haptics). We describe a simple process of making a passive documentary interactive using available tools and preserving the aesthetic and emotional appeal. Moreover, the good comparison of the linear convention film and its nonlinear narrative version with audiences' body movement involvement may give answers to some of the artists who are still hesitating to adapt their projects to the dramatic developed new technology.

Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC) conducted the Skins workshop to explore a pedagogy that integrated North American Indigenous cultural frameworks into the design of video games and virtual environments. Skins provides instruction in digital design, art, animation, audio and programming within a context of Aboriginal stories and storytelling techniques. In the pilot workshop with Mohawk youth at the Kahnawake Survival School, students developed interactive environments based on traditional stories from their community in a process that required them to reflect on how they knew those stories, who had told them, and which stories were appropriate for such remediation. In the process, AbTeC found that the discussions about these stories in the context of the technical skills development provided substantial motivation for both further inquiry into the stories and greater participation in the skills development. This paper describes the curriculum and strategies of the Skins pilot workshop.

In this paper we describe Taking Sides, a performance using a real-time speech visualization software system called TextEngine. Taking Sides is a collaboration between our research studio and Montreal hip-hop artist Dwayne Hanley. Our primary goal was to create a strong conceptual link between the text visualization, the content of the artist's lyrics, and his performance style. Additionally we wanted to test the flexibility of TextEngine in developing customized performance applications. Pursuing these goals led us through a three month development effort that cycled tightly between design, performance and programmatic iterations.