Imagining and Enacting Computing Futures with the Arts: Thinking with Bodymind, Movement Improvisation, and Scores
Schopke Gonzalez, Angela · Deep Blue (University of Michigan) · 2025
Ample scholarship, journalism, and advocacy work has identified societal harms that algorithms can perpetuate. Work by data professionals, or people involved in algorithm design, implementation, or application (ADIA), has contributed to these unacceptable algorithmic harms. However, additional scholarship suggests that data professionals can minimize algorithmic harm by integrating principles of data feminism, relational ethics, or data ethics among others into their work. This dissertation draws on early computing theory, cybernetics, new materialism, and the arts to develop and evaluate a collection of theoretical and methodological interventions for data professionals to enact these principles in their day-to-day workflows. By challenging predominant epistemological, moral, social, economic, and political logics ingrained in ADIA, these interventions make space for data professionals to integrate principles like care, embodiment, relationality, and others that scholars propose can mitigate algorithmic harms. At the same time, data professionals describe obstacles to successfully enacting these new ADIA imaginaries in their workplaces: a lack of pre-existing infrastructural support, personal and collegial risk, perceived lack of authority or agency, and workplace emphases on productivity and efficiency. This dissertation concludes by proposing steps towards overcoming these obstacles like future research with sales professionals and upper level management, cultivating community to support data professionals interested in enacting more just and equitable computing futures, and cross-disciplinary collaborations between data professionals and artists.