Depths and Densities: a bugged report / Transmediale Journal

Possible Bodies is an ongoing collaborative research on the technical and lively tensions between so-called bodies and volumetric practices. The inquiry is ready to emerge at any possible intersection that lies between two vectors. One vector is constituted by physical bodies that might be somatic or not, human or not, isolated or not, named or not. The other vector is tensed by the calculation the volume bodies occupy with their very presence in space, being virtual—made of bits—or physical—made of atoms.

The project aims at problematizing the concrete and fictional entities that “bodies” are, in the context of 3D tracking, modelling, rendering, calibrating, and scanning operations towards them. Such operations have perhaps grown in sophistication and speed within the digital realm, but are certainly not new. The particular contemporary topology of volumetrics draws from intricate genealogies of many knowledge clusters of modernity (perspective setting procedures, occupation measuring techniques, scale calibration tools, average volume normalizing, position prediction methods). Protocols and paradigms proliferating and circulating confirm the limitations of how, when, where, and why bodies could or should be considered and measured. In other words, there is a continuum that facilitates the smooth flow of very specific volumetrics (and not others) from architecture to border surveillance—passing through the spectacularization of sports, biomedical practices—to the juridical, the military, and the pornographic. The technoscientific conditions for the smoothness of this flow constitute the rigidity of mere probable trajectories along the continuum of volumetrics and restrict the wild twists and surprising hacks needed to jump from the probable to the possible!

Of course scale affects the mathematics of presence very strongly. Take the scale leap from individual somatic corpo-realities (of, say, zoologically recognized organisms) towards the so-called body of earth. Quite a jump evidences how the infrastructural complex of geo-operations such as mining and the measuring of soil depends on software tool sibling to those used in the biomedical realm (like tomography), but adapted to a different field for geological data handling, interpretation and 3D-visualization. Such tools power both bio-medical imaging and techno-colonial subsurface exploration and keep corpuses of knowledge persistently affecting each other. In Possible Bodies there is an interest in attending to how these parallel technical developments contribute to a crystallization and standardization of such operations.

Under the guise of a one-afternoon workshop at transmediale 2019, Possible Bodies invited a group to collectively study open-source tools for geo-modelling while attending to the different regimes—of truth, of representation, of language or of political ideology—they operate within. It attempted to read those tools and a selection of texts in relation to one another, with the plan of injecting some resistant vocabularies, misuses and/or f(r)ictions that could affect the extractivist bias embedded in the computation of earth’s depths and densities. The workshop was a trans*feminist experiment and proposed to compile a “bug report” as an act of affirmative responsibility taking for this turbocapitalist momentum.

It was a hands-on situation that took the Gplates software platform as a case study. Gplates is an interactive plate-tectonics visualization program and an open-source application software that visually reconstructs very complex datasets of use for the geophysicist community.This platform was chosen as the affected, affective, and perhaps effective infrastructure to converge around—and attend to—for the workshop, while triangulating its visions of the Earth with software technology and bits of critical theory.

The Depths and Densities workshop was populated by a mix of known companions and just-met participants (in total, a convergence of circa 30 voices), each bringing her own particular intensities regarding the tools, the theories, the vocabularies, and the urgencies placed upon the table. The discussions were recorded on the spot and transcribed later. This publication cuts through a thick mass of written notes, transcriptions, and excerpted theoretical texts, sedimented along five vectorial provocations: on the standardisation of time, on software vocabularies, on the activation of geontologies, on the computation of velocities, and on the techniques of 3D visualizations. Each vectorial provocation was taken up by a sub-group of participants, who assumed the task of opening up a piece of the Gplates whole (such as a technical feature, a forum, a tutorial, an interface etc.) and tensioning it with some text matter from a reader pre-cooked by Helen Pritchard, Femke Snelting, and myself. The platform worked as a catalyst for our conversations and hence its community of developers would eventually become deferred interlocutors of a report.

The following cut was made to share a sample of that afternoon’s eclectic dialogues in what could be transferred as a polyphonic bugged report:

--> https://transmediale.de/content/depths-and-densities-a-bugged-report

[euraca] sale programa once / att. a lxs que aman la poesía,

 
Susan Bee, Demonology, 2018 

a lxs que la militan, a lxs que aún creen que tiene cosas pa decir aquí hoy ahora, a lxs que la leen porque saben que cuando pasa, pasa, a lxs que simplemente mueve el don de la curiosidad, a lxs que sospechan enormemente de las posibilidades de un medio tan maltraído pero ahí siguen picando piedra, leyendo, traduciendo, escribiendo, editando:

hola queridxs, 
aquí Seminario Euraca tiene el placer inmenso de invitaros a su programa ONCE  (aunque en verdad son doce los programas que ya hicimos) de poesía non stop organizado en torno a la visita a la península de los poetas Charles Bernstein y Ron Silliman y de la artista Susan Bee a invitación de Aníbal Cristobo / Kriller 71 y Seminario Euraca, con la ayuda de Ana Longoni y Tamara Díaz Bringas (Museo Reina Sofía), Arts Santa Monica y espacio Saliva (Claudia Pagès). Antes de nada, para que todo pueda suceder, guárdense ya las fechas de la cosa:

> Bee & Bernstein en Barcelona en persona:
S 18 oct. en Saliva y  L 21 oct. en Arts Santa Monica 
> Bee & Bernstein & Silliman en Madriz en persona:
X 23 y J 24 oct. en La Ingobernable y V 25 oct. en Museo Reina Sofía > > Sesiones de lectura y curro previas de Seminario Euraca:
V11 ·L14 · X 16 oct. en La Ingobernable

Antes de todo, y para que no no suceda nada, hay que empezar ya a leer una bocha de textos potentísimos y hemosos para la ocasión: https://seminarioeuraca.wordpress.com/programa11/

1) Que nadie deje de venir por no hablar inglés, haced el favor, que esto es Euraca y, por lo tanto, La Lengua se considera Las Lenguas & sus hablantes & el paso entre una y otrxs, u know? Spanglish spoken here, aquí se habla Poesía / poetry y nadie que quiera se queda fuera: hay traducciones a full hechas por nuestrxs own traductorxs Esteban Pujals y Elia Maqueda, y hay sus traducciones simultáneas y hay ganas de estar ahí rato largo pa hablar y leer y entendernos sabiendo que ni en espaniol nunca nos entendemos del todo.

2) Es posible que por las mismas fechas que estemos charlando poesía esté saliendo de imprenta de internet el superesperado número 2 de nuestra revista L/E/N/G/U/A/J/E/o, de título y espíritu clamorosamente calcados de la revista de poesía editada por Charles Bernstein y Bruce Andrews (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) y la de arte editada por Susan Bee y Mira Schor (M/E/A/N/I/N/G).

¿Te vas a perder este pliegue del océano atlántico y cincuenta años de poesía en dos lenguas? ¿Te vas a perder todos esos momentos de intensidad de escucha cuando de pronto no entiendes una mierda de lo que oyes, de malosentendidos entre poetas que se admiran pero nunca jamás se han visto antes, de timidez a raudales, de balbuceo, de entrelenguas, de paciencia infinita y agotamiento cerebral hasta que a la tercera hora de sesión por fin aparece ese brillito que te vuela la cabeza para siempre porque Ah! algo de la lengua en tu cabeza cambió. ¿En qué otra cosa mejor vas a gastar el tiempo de noche que en la noche de la poesía, y de la poesía lenguajeo, además?
De Bernstein y Silliman y Bee qué decir en pocas líneas…? Que lxs tres no sólo hicieron su arte sino que se inventaron dispositivos de recepción y distribución (editoriales, recitales, revistas, listas de correo, archivos sonoros, pdfs online…) que ampliaran y horizontalizaran la conversación y que, una gran parte del tiempo, lo hicieron fuera del mundo académico y cuando entraron siguieron procediendo por cooperación en vez de por competición: por vibración en vez de por secamiento de la poesía en el rigor.

Pero tampoco te vamos a engañar: la obra de poesía que leeremos en este programa no es de las más sencillas ni sexies que te vayas a encontrar, o sí, si lo piensas desde el atractivo que los placeres complejos, tensos y raros y los efectos que generan en el cuerpo…

recuerda que todas las sesiones de Euraca son siempre abiertas y públicas, de libre acceso
y por favor DIFUNDE muxxxo boca-oído& en redes & por telepatía
ah, ¿y qué cómo se llama todo esto? Esto se llama La Lengua radical por precisión ajustadísima del sintagma y el movimiento que el sintagma describe pero también por hacer justicia (verdaderamente poética) con el libro del mismo nombre que armó en su día (en 1992, año de pax neoliberal) el euraca avant-la-lettre Esteban Pujals Gesalí, our own language poet permanently in da haus

SE
https://seminarioeuraca.wordpress.com/

CRAFT: Critiquing and Rethinking Accountability, Fairness and Transparency / Call for contributions

Call for Contributions (Panels, Workshops, Debates, Unconferences, ...)

29/30. January, 2020

Barcelona, Spain

The ACM FAT* conference has predominantly focused on fairness, accountability, and transparency. The success of the field of fairness, accountability, and transparency has also attracted much critique and renewed attention to the limitations of achieving these goals in systems that implement statistical, machine learning, optimization, or autonomous computing techniques. A number of prominent studies acknowledge that addressing societal problems embedded in such computing systems may require more holistic approaches.

In the spirit of reflection and response, we invite academics of all disciplines and people representing different communities of practice (including journalism, advocacy, organizing, education, art, public authorities) to contribute to a program that will be subject to its own review process and that will be embedded in the ACM FAT* conference (the CRAFT call is very much inspired by the NeurIPS 2018 CRACT workshop.) This call invites contributions to that program in the form of workshops, panels, and other formats to:

- address critiques of the field of fairness, accountability, and transparency, such as its blind spots,omissions, or alternative possibilities that take a more holistic approach,

- open future lines of research, collaboration, and practice.

In addition to contributions that explore the problem space in greater depth and from broader perspectives, we particularly encourage proposals that explore solution spaces, indicate mechanisms for positive change, or open possibilities for a greater conversation around countering automated injustices. We value proposals focused on interaction among participants, and we look forward to formats that allow participants to explore starting assumptions, prior experiences, or competing values and to foster community building, shared knowledge production, and future engagement.

Please note that CRAFT emphasizes reflection and critique and differs in important and subtle ways from Tutorials. By offering contributors a space to address blind spots and omissions, offer alternative approaches, and open new possibilities for the field, CRAFT seeks contributions that challenge. By contrast, Tutorials primarily educate and inform. We expect that CRAFT will feature unconventional ideas in engaging and diverse formats. Tutorials, by contrast, might include explainers regarding existing tools, overviews of bodies of literature, or best practices. Some proposals we receive under the CRAFT program may be more appropriate as proposals for Tutorials track, and vice-versa. In such cases, the Tutorial and CRAFT Co-chairs may transfer such proposals to the other program, in consultation with Coordinator(s). In the event that a CRAFT decision suggests your proposal for the Tutorials section of the ACM FAT* 2020 program, you will have one week to confirm whether you accept this choice.

Themes

Theme 1: Modeling and (Non-)Deployment

Theme 2: Values, Assumptions and Context

Theme 3: Generating Higher Order Critiques

Theme 4: Emerging Problems

For further details of the themes, submission guidelines and dates please visit: https://fatconference.org/2020/callforcraft.html

Please contact craft@fatconference.org for any questions.

CRAFT Co-Chairs

Seda Guerses, TU Delft

Seeta Peña Gangadharan, London School of Economics

Suresh Venkatasubramanian, U. Utah

Selection committee:

Nasma Ahmed, Digital Justice Lab

J. Khadijah Abdurahman, WordToRI

Ruha Benjamin, Princeton

Bettina Berendt, KU Leuven

Crofton Black, Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Manuela Bojadzijev, Leuphana University

Rosamunde Elise van Brakel, Vrije Universiteit, Brussels

Ingrid Burrington, artist

Rumman Choudhury, Accenture

Wendy Chun, Simon Fraser

Roderic Crooks, Univ. California, Irvine

Francien Dechesne, University of Leiden

Lina Dencik, Cardiff University

Desiree Fields, Berkeley

Sorelle Friedler, Haverford College

Ryan Gerety, Independent

Brent Hecht, Northwestern/Microsoft

Joris Van Hoboken, Univ. Amsterdam/Free University Brussels

Anna Lauren Hoffman, U. Washington

Lily Hu, Harvard

Ben Hutchinson, Google

Lilly Irani, Univ. California, San Diego

Malavika Jayaram, Singapore Management University

Seny Kamara, Brown

Anne Kaun, Södertön University

Marina Kogan, University of Utah

Joshua Kroll, Berkeley

Manu Luksch, Artist and Filmmaker

Smarika Lulz, Smar KY Inc/Humboldt University

Jedrek Niklas, LSE

Safiya Noble, Univ. California, Los Angeles

Zara Rahman, The Engine Room

Jara Rocha, independent

Hannah Sassaman, Media Mobilizing Project

Andrew Selbst, Data And Society/Univ. California, Los Angeles

Matthias Spielkamp, Algorithm Watch

Carmela Troncoso, EPFL

Berk Ustun, Harvard

Nisheeth Vishnoi, Yale

Zeerak Wassem, Sheffield

Christo Wilson, Northeastern University

+ info: https://fatconference.org/2020/callforcraft.html