Introduction for the panel: Anti-Colonial Tech through Resistance and Discomforts, planned for transmediale, 2 February 2024. Prepared by Varia, Constant, TITiPI, Digital Discomfort Workgroup
2.2.24
[not taking place]
11.1.24
Multimodal Appreciation Workshop #1
![]() |
| CC BY Royal Navy 2004 Submarine Escape Training |
TIME: 11-12 January, 202
PLACE: Institute for European Ethnology, Möhrenstaße 40-41, 10117 Berlin
Multimodal Appreciation is a 18 month project. Its main aim is to study current ethnographic experiments with multimodal forms of description, analysis and intervention which has resulted in a proliferation of more-than-textual forms that are difficult to classify and often at odds with institutionalised modes of disciplinary knowledge production. Despite the important openings created by multimodal works, they are rarely seen as of equal value when compared to articles and monographs. The current situation is problematic but to a certain extent understandable, as peers, reviewers and supervisors are confronted with a complex conundrum: What criteria should be employed to evaluate such multimodal singularities? Our project responds to this conundrum through two experimental moments that correspond to the two challenges producing the current impasse, those of evaluation and institutionalization. The first moment is constituted by a set of documentary and immersive exercises designed to describe and compare the affordances of selected more-than-textual or multimodal research artefacts. The second moment is a set of prototyping exercises designed to produce and test a toolkit to facilitate the evaluation and institutionalization of future multimodal research.
+ info and full porgram: https://www2.hu-berlin.de/multimodalappreciation/2023/12/29/multimodal-appreciation-workshop-1-program/
30.1.23
[panel] Sublime Depths | transmediale 2023
In this conversation, Femke Snelting, Georgina Voss, Irene Fubara-Manuel, and Jara Rocha, with moderator Romi Ron Morrison, discuss the problems and promises of volumetric technologies and their seamless movement between entertainment, shopping, ikea catalogues, smart borders, and wildlife preservation. Unpacking the affects of the computational sublime, their conversation aims to bring bodies and data points and spaces back into relation with each other.
+ info: https://2023.transmediale.de/en/event/sublime-depths
13.7.22
Vibes & Leaks goes Elastic II, Berlin Fieldtrip
2nd FIELDTRIP of the Vibes & Leaks Goes Elastic process.
In collaboration with: Kollektiv Bibliotheck New Yorck Bethanien, Ren Britton and Maeve Devine
small outcome of the session: some Prototypes for Archival Redundance
+ info on the project: http://ttttoolbox.net/VibesnLeaks::index.xhtml
26.1.22
abandon all hope ye who enter here | Queering Damage / The Underground Division at transmediale 2022 exhibition
Conjuring artifice and dark humour in the face of extraction, financial fantasies, and the illusions of techno-solutionism, abandon all hope ye who enter here explores the limits of refusal in a computationally ordered and altered world. Bringing together nine artists and collectives, the works in the exhibition materialise the strange realities and cruel attachments that are often obscured beneath the veneers of shiny, seductive interfaces, and inside algorithmic black boxes.
(...)
+ about exhibition: https://transmediale.de/projects/abandon-all-hope-ye-who-enter-here
+ about Queering Damage: https://transmediale.de/artworks/queering-damage
25.9.19
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
29.1.19
Optimization and Its Miscontents: Counterpolitics of Surveillance Capitalism | + the case of Panoramic Unknowns
10:30–18:30
With:
Participating contributors: Ramon Amaro, Dia Kayyali, Dmytri Kleiner, Ben Miller, Phoebe V. Moore, Conrad Moriarty-Cole, Rebekah Overdorf, Martin Pasek, Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Clemens Schöll, Femke Snelting
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Case: Panoramic Unknowns
Depths and Densities: A Possible Bodies Workshop at Transmediale 2019
15:00–18:00
with Femke Snelting, Helen Pritchard & Jara Rocha
https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org
Participants are encouraged to bring their laptops for the workshop.
+ info on workshop and festival: https://2019.transmediale.de/content/depths-and-densities-a-possible-bodies-workshop
11.6.18
How to relate? / Berlin, 5-6-7.07.2018
Annual Conference of the DFG Research Training Group “Knowledge in the Arts"
5–7 July, 2018
Medienhaus (Aula & Galerie), Universität der Künste Berlin
Grunewaldstr. 2–5, 10823 Berlin
How to relate? To each other, to something? Questions
about relations are relevant for a knowledge in the
arts. For just which knowledge can be produced depends
on the success or failure of relations: Knowledge is
implicated in power relations in institutional, social, and
technological infrastructure; it is formed in colliding
demands of hegemony and emancipation; it is created in
the momentum of things and materials.
With appropriation, mediation, and figuration, the conference
will discuss three epistemic ways of relating and the promises
and ambivalences that are bound up with each of them.
The appropriation of knowledge and skills is a foundational form
for carrying out all learning and research, and yet the concept
implies a possible appropriation of cognitive, aesthetic, or
cultural capital. Mediation enables participation in knowledge,
and yet its form—whether in an exhibition space, on the stage,
or in transmission by media—has an effect on the mediated
meaning. And the concept of figuration brings an understanding
of knowledge in the arts as a relational process, as an embodiment in
space-time that arises through the coming together
of heterogeneous actors, materials, and sources. How do such
encounters generate entryways to another kind of knowledge?
Through lectures, discussion, and performances,
practitioners of art, science, and activism will consider
their own interrelatedness in these ways of relating.
Do these ways of relating offer new spaces and imperatives
for action?
+ info: https://www.udk-berlin.de/en/research/temporary-research-institutes/dfg-research-training-group-knowledge-in-the-arts/how-to-relate-appropriation-mediation-figuration/







