From automated navigation to weather forecasts, data visualizations, and painting, abstraction has an undeniable presence in the contemporary world. Yet, it not only represents but also creates worlds. It is an operative concept that likewise possesses an imaginary thrust for perceiving things otherwise. As such, abstraction comes in many different forms: It is an aesthetic, a technology, an epistemology, and a practice. Therefore, it is also a political attitude, a mode of description, a tool of complexity reduction, and an instruction for intervention. Depending on its context and use, it can take on radically different connotations, ranging from dehumanizing to appealing, from affirmative to critical, from incorporated to autonomous.