Nepantlas #03: Infrastructures for World-building

Nepantlas #03 »So-called Plants: Items from the Possible Bodies Inventory«
Possible Bodies (Femke Snelting and Jara Rocha)

Curated by Daphne Dragona
October 1, 2020, 2–3:30 pm (CEST)

How do »so-called plants« exist with and through technologies, infrastructures, and techniques of 3D? Weaving between technological writing, fiction, and theory, Possible Bodies contributes to Nepantlas with a persistent affirmation of the possibility for radical trans*feminist experimentation with volumetric presences in hypercomputational regimes. We write »plant,« or »so-called plants« to signal the political fiction of treating »plants« as individual entities, as species, and as a kingdom. Possible Bodies wants to problematize these normalized figure-background divides in favor of a multiplicity of potential dysphorias.

Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose so-called bodies, Possible Bodies has by now inventoried more than one hundred items. For this event, they bring together manuals, mathematical concepts, art-projects, and micro-CT images to wonder about the vividness of so-called plants in the context of software tools for botanical data processing, 3D-visualization of plantations and computational vegetation and cracks and porous membranes in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence.

Cracks can be seen as void and sterile spaces in between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable bridges; interporous places to be in relation (non-neutral and also not innocent at all): connecting and fertile surfaces that provide with the blurring travel form one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Rooting for the possibilities of nature-cultural topologies seems important in computational environments in which exciting complexities are routinely erased and weeded out for the sake of efficiency.

Possible Bodies develops alongside an inventory of cases and results in texts, workshops, visual essays, and performances. For this occasion, they will perform a guided tour through several items of the inventory. The tour will be followed by a conversation with Daphne Dragona.

Possible Bodies (Femke Snelting, Jara Rocha) researches how bodies and technologies have been mutually constituted, and interrogates corpo-realities and their orientation through parametric interfaces. It invites the generation of concepts and experimental renderings, wild combinations, and digital and non-digital prototypes for different embodiments.

Possible Bodies has by now inventoried more than one hundred items and cases. For this event, they will offer a performative guided tour through items of interest. Visiting manuals, mathematical concepts, art projects, and micro-CT images, they will wonder about the vividness of so-called plants in the context of various software tools. The tour will be followed by a conversation with Daphne Dragona.

Nepantlas is an online program curated by Daphne Dragona. It focuses on projects that introduce social and technological infrastructures based on relationships of care, respect, and interdependence. Femke Snelting and Jara Rocha are the program’s third guests.

 + info: https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/