We Are Tectonic!

Out now @ Lagoonscapes Journal:
We Are Tectonic! A Queer Geophysics for Intra-Solidarities and Resisting the Cloud Regime

Img: The Underground Division / TITiPI

 

[abstract]

This paper analyses how Big Tech and global consultancy firms are asserting control over carbon removal certification and governance through infrastructure solutions and technical standards. We argue that defining gaps in the underground constitutes a global takeover of material sovereignty, encompassing both knowledge and geological formations. We unearth Big Tech’s strategies of infra-solutionism to demonstrate, drawing on the work of inhuman geographer Kathryn Yusoff, how this takeover reinforces geological grammars and essentialises racialised and sexualised categories that disconnect us from the Earth. Drawing on queer poetry together with work of Marxist agronomist Amílcal Cabral we advocate for resistance to dominant geopower and form transnational solidarities against the cloud regime.

Full article: https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/media/pdf/article/the-venice-journal-of-environmental-humanities/2025/1/art-10.30687-LGSP-2785-2709-2025-01-008.pdf
 

Cascading animation: https://ddivision.xyz/rockrepo/crystals

Open access to full number, Cracking the Surface at Lagoonscapes Journal:  https://edizionicafoscari.it//it/edizioni/riviste/the-venice-journal-of-environmental-humanities/2025/1/

 

 

In the mouth of a polar bear: The undead feeling of the world

by Cassandra Troyan and Helen Pritchard

commissioned by DONE 5 (Foto Colectania)

PROJECT'S WEBSITE: http://theantimenagerie.net/2021_In_the_mouth_of_a_polar_bear/

In this artistic research project Helen Pritchard and Cassandra Troyan engage with the production of transpecies animacy in the domains of edu-tainment, policing, and the military industrial complex. They interrogate the capacities of “legged robots designed to be used by the military, industrial, mining, energy, public safety and last-mile delivery” by Ghost Robotics, to animatronic spy animals made to look believable in natural history BBC programming, “Spy in the Wild”. All violent scenes dependent on visualizing technologies of feeling the world through aggressive sensing, scanning and surveillance.

Posing as either helpful or harmless machines, such as the Boston Dynamics dogs that can pick up your laundry, to more-than-animate soldier combatants dancing to tracks such a “Do You Love Me”. These robots are often posed as feeling the world, although not through embodiment, but with undead visual practices. In their physicality, they are a spy, spirit, or wraith –– witness to the world they sense and scan, yet beyond and removed from the consequences of its material realities. A viewer is constantly left with the place where a face should be looking back at you, or to look into the eyes of an animal expecting recognition only to see a camera lens or computational sensor returning your gaze.

Through the para-fictional scenarios explored in these viral video poems they investigate how transpecies storytelling and visual sensing technologies if not countered otherwise can be imploded as a mode for structuring the racist western imaginary of militaristic carceral imperialist fantasy. Using the visual and sonic principals of clickbait trauma-porn against itself, they reject a negative world-building project by instead approaching these techniques from a perspective of queer decolonial solidarity –– seeking to ultimately abolish the category of the species, along with the injurious technologies that could name, sense, and scan it as well.

[presentación y conversación online el 30.09.21 a las 19h CEST | última actividad de la 5ª edición de DONE] 

+ info: https://done.fotocolectania.org/edicion5/en/creation/in-the-mouth-of-a-polar-bear-the-undead-feeling-of-the-world/#DONE

>>> RECORDING OF THE EVENT >>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1-6zkgr9lw

 

 

The Underground Division at live event with Hackers & Desginers' BodyBuilding: A Platform in Transition

On Wednesday 24th of June Hackers & Designers will launch their online platform, a website dedicated to publishing works from the BodyBuilding exhibition commissioned by Tetem. BodyBuilding was a process-driven exhibition curated by H&D, with the aim to investigate the intersection of technology and the agency of the (human, post-human, non-human) body from a maker's perspective. The physical and interactive structure, through which visitors were able to move, view, experience, and interact with the different artworks was on view only for a short duration due to the outbreak of COVID-19.

Join us on 24 June at 19.30 on the self-built streaming platform by H&D for a conversation with The Underground Division (Helen Pritchard, Femke Snelting and Jara Rocha) about their work ROCK REPO - questioning inhuman materialities and how they matter [in] the world, the crushing exploitations and extractions of normative 3D processes of geocomputation, and the act of translating between the 'physical' and the 'digital'. In addition to our conversations, we'll also listen together to a sound recording of 'Ultrasonic dreams of aclinical renderings' by The Underground Division and have a talk by Anja Groten on the notion of the platform and platformization. The audience will be able to join in the conversation via the chat.

With this website launch, and accompanying online event, H&D aims to translate the physical installation at Tetem into a digital space, taking the occasion to discuss digital platforms and hosting initiatives that currently gain a lot of attention. The event will pay attention to self-hosted video streaming and live video chat possibilities, as well as less conventional formats for online encounter, and invites the audience to join the discussion about the importance of challenging proprietary, commercial platforms such as Zoom, Teams and Google Hangouts that exploitat users' reliances on communication infrastructures in times of crisis.

Link to the live event and platform: https://live.hackersanddesigners.nl/

Spread the word and join the conversation!

More info:
https://bit.ly/2BiLOhU

Rock Damages

An Underground Division's performative lecture by Helen Pritchard + Jara Rocha at Sonic Acts, Amsterdam 2020.

We Have Always Been Geohackers

As the so-called earth spun before us, the universalist geologic commons emerged. A particular regime embedded within the software that imbues the histories of colonial earth-writing and a geologics in which “[e]xtractable matter must be both passive (awaiting extraction and possessing of properties) and able to be activated through the mastery of white men.” In these scenes of turbocapitalism, the making present of fossil fuels and metals as waiting for extraction heavily depend on software tools, such as Gplates, for handling, interpreting and 3-D visualization of geological data. These entangled softwares form an infrastructural complex of mining and measuring. Such tools belong to what we refer to as “the contemporary regime of volumetrics,” meaning the enviro-socio-technical politics––a computational aesthetics––that emerge with the measurement of volumes and generation of 3-D objects. A regime full of bugs. 

We Have Always Been Geohackers, To be published in: How to Relate, UdK (Universität der Künste), Berlin [forthcoming]

+ access to full online version at the Volumetric Regimes wiki.

BodyBuilding: ROCK REPO

The Underground Division (Helen Pritchard, Femke Snelting, and Jara Rocha) contributes to BodyBuilding, an exhibition curated by Hackers & Designers @ Tetem, Enschede. Opening 20 February 2020.

Change detection based on LiDAR data. In: Hutchinson, D. Jean, Matthew Lato, Dave Gauthier, Ryan Kromer, Matthew Ondercin, Megan van Veen, and Rob Harrap. “Applications of remote sensing techniques to managing rock slope instability risk.” In Canadian Geotechnical Conference, Quebec City, pp. 20-23. 2015.

 

 

 

 

 

ROCK REPO

The ROCK REPO is a device built by a team of trans*feminist post-normal scientists for thinking with rock. Managing rock slope instabilities by LiDAR, optimising strata modelling for fracking, rendering cavities in 3D for gaming, and algorithmically smoothed rock shaders are all deposited in the REPO. The REPO inquires into these banal, exquisite, kitsch, static, carbonivourous figurations to fracture the normative 3D processes of geocomputation and their crushing exploitations and extractions.

Through making a collection of ROCKS, The Underground Division gets close to particular ROCKS and their unstable stories, as told through scientific and technological practice. Recognising that rocks have their own lively forces, the unruly team studies rocks’ 3D imaginings, the softwares and hardwares that rocks intervene on and builds new glossaries on the go. Their studies operate as a chipping away at what limits the resistant and destructive capacities of rocks.The ROCK REPO device crosscuts with rocks as ‘bodies’ in a purposeful move away from the somatic corporealities of individual humans. This shift allows the team to ask about inhuman materialities and how they matter [in] the world.

The REPO is an inquiry into what ROCK is, what it could be and the ways in which ROCK is seen or considered as an entity separate from its environment. It works with the ‘deep implicancies’* of this moving between figure and ground, asking what happens as result of this cut, and what other formations could appear. Sharpened by queer and anticolonial sensibilities, investigates the way ROCKS are quarried, measured, quantified, historicized, visualized, predicted, classified, modelled. The REPO as an instrument itself crystallizes other stories of spatial and temporal geologic processes and throws rocks through the glaciated windows of turbocapitalism.

* A term Denise Fereira Da Silva and Arjuna Neuman borrow from forensic genetics to talk about implications and entanglement in a non-linear way.

Also contributing: Kiki Mager and Nazanin Karimi. In collaboration with architect and designer Thomas Rustemeyer, H&D has developed an interactive exhibition structure which will host the works and invite you to actively participate in the (de) constructing the works.

+info: https://tetem.nl/event/bodybuilding/

Volumetric Ecologies: Environments, bodies and mediated worlds / Goldsmiths, U. of London / 14.06.2019

Bringing together researchers, artists and theorists to investigate the implications and possibilities of volumetric imaginaries of environments.

Building up or digging down, simulating more-than-human bodies, imagining new and fantastical volumes or managing resources, volumetrics are continuously figuring and refiguring life and living. From the fossil fuel industry to the so-called creative industries, computational practices are being deployed to imagine and materialise new volumes to exploit and inhabit. Computational arts practices such as 3D Scanning, Rendering and Animation, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality have been a significant agent in shaping this volumetric turn. Consequently these new volumetric practices are in relentless dialogue with both the calculation and measurement of environments and the extraction and entertainment industries. This event seeks to explore critical volumetric practices capable of generating new political and affective ecologies and challenging dominant forms of geopolitical and industrial volumetric power.

With this in mind, Volumetric Ecologies brings together researchers, artists and theorists to investigate the implications and possibilities of volumetric imaginaries of environments. As part of the volumetric turn we explore more-than-human immersive technologies and the ways in which they figure environments across an expanded field of practice. The workshop will critically reflect on the agency of computational arts practices as a significant force in shaping the volumetric turn. The evening keynote by Deborah Levitt will explore how the world-building capacities of animation and VR technologies bring into being new forms of cosmotechnics. This two-day explorative forum presents a diversity of perspectives and practices which reimagine and recast the constructs of environment, bodies and mediated worlds through the articulation of volumetric practices.

Hosted by ICE, Computational Arts at Goldsmiths, and in partnership with the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology at Birkbeck, University of London. Organised by Helen Pritchard, Rachel Falconer and Joel McKim.

Friday June 14
11.00am - 1.00pm | Volumetric Demo open to public | VR Lab
1.00pm - 5.00pm | Workshop | VR Lab

Demo and research workshop providing an opportunity to engage with current practice and research across the volumetric field. Including work by artists and practitioners Nishat Awan, Marta Di Francesco, Clareese Hill, Hyperbation, Hyphen-Labs, Maggie Roberts aka mer, Possible Bodies: The Underground Division (Jara Rocha, Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting), Jane Prophet and more tba.

With responses from Maria Dada, Claudia Dutson, Rebecca Coleman, Federico Fasce, Deborah Levitt, Joel McKim, Shela Sheikh, Chaired by Rachel Falconer.

+ info https://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=12597

Optimization and Its Miscontents: Counterpolitics of Surveillance Capitalism | + the case of Panoramic Unknowns

Workshop

Sun, 03.02.2019
10:30–18:30

K1

HKW, Berlin

Taking as its starting point a framing of optimization and its miscontents, this one day-long workshop takes a deep dive into the technologies and applications underlying optimization logic. Participants examine artworks and scholarly projects that attempt to gauge and broaden our conception and understanding of optimization systems, and offer techniques to expand our political agency under these circumstances. Through these counter-political strategies, participants situate our relationship with these systems and explore the means at our disposal—be they subversion, queering, resistance, or militancy—for engagement within and outside of the optimization regime.

With: 

Zeljko Blace

Baruch Gottlieb

Seda Gürses

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

Proposed by: Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting)

Unknown Object Tracking [1] is being applied on an industrial scale in robotics, car traffic control and 'intelligent' surveillance systems; think Amazon warehouses and Google street view. This technique employs panoramic cameras, which provide 360-degree views that are processed by specialised software in order to locate volumes in space. But when surveying areas like factories, big halls, streets or even a single room, there are always many 'blind spots' and 'unknown objects'. Machine Learning is currently being employed to optimize such known unknowns.

Possible Bodies [2] is a collaborative research on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that "bodies" are, asking what matter-cultural conditions of possibility render them volumetrically present. For Optimization and its miscontents we invite participants to use their political/aesthetic/technical sensibilities towards the computation of volumetrics. We invite you to attend to Unknown Object Tracking [UOT] as a spacetime mattering that is not necessarily organized from the outside to the inside (as the optimised god-like sight) but from the inside-out, somehow both adjusting to and reversing a 3D paradigm of convergence into a "point of origin". 

The seamlessness that a 360 capture demands is based on the analysis of tiny 'features' that are sophisticatedly attended to by Computer Vision agencies. Features are differences, anomalies, visual anchors, identifiers that are considered to be specific for a single capture.

UOT depends on processing past data and simulations that are kept, learned and trained before being projected into the future, while real time data from the camera is used to adapt to changes. Their predictive claim is based on past measurements that make optimization systems vulnerable to unexpected change and/or wild surprises, as the unknown can only be detected if it falls within the boundaries of the probable. Where is the possible in considering panoramic unknowns? What if we consider the unknown not only as risky but fundamental to an orchestation of spacetime that is not necessarily harmonic and predictable, but also dissonant and accidented?

[1] https://vision.unipv.it/CV/materiale2016-17/4th%20Choice/0293.pdf

[2] http://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org

+ info: https://2019.transmediale.de/content/optimization-and-its-miscontents-counterpolitics-of-surveillance-capitalism

Depths and Densities: A Possible Bodies Workshop at Transmediale 2019

Workshop

Fri, 01.02.2019
15:00–18:00

K2

HKW, Berlin

The contemporary infrastructural complex of mining and measuring soil depends on software tools for geological data handling, interpretation, and 3D-vizualisation. Such tools power techno-colonial subsurface exploration with computational techniques and paradigms. Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, and featuring Helen Pritchard) invites you to collectively study open source tools for geo-modelling while attending to the different regimes they operate within. It will inject 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 is a trans*feminist experiment and an act of affirmative responsibility-taking for this turbocapitalist momentum. Possible Bodies is a collaborative research, interrogating the concrete and, at the same time, the fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of 3D-tracking, -modelling, -rendering and -scanning.

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 

[workshop] Queering damage

Workshop colaborativo con Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha y Laura Benítez en el marco de la Biennal del Pensament.

Queering damage: metodologías para reparaciones parciales… o no

19 octubre 2018 / de 10 h a 18 h - Hangar

A medida que los organismos genéticamente modificados “diseñados” como componentes informáticos se inscriben en los devenires ambientales de la remediación, y proliferan nuestras salvajes fantasías de (micro)bio-analítica generando capital vivo, los enredos tecno-ambientales y sus ficciones políticas están invocando prácticas a la escala del “hacer-mundo”. La computación ambiental y su producción de nuevos arreglos ecológicos se extiende mucho más allá del laboratorio -explotando intensivamente las labores vivas y las fricciones de animales y organismos no humanos a través de prácticas afectivas, semióticas y materiales cada vez más aceleradas-. Nuestras co-composiciones/devenires tanto con internet como con otras redes y/o dispositivos digitales se enredan cada vez más en nuestros “nosotres” no-locales. Estas escenas explotan organismos no humanos para sostener modos particulares de vida; sin embargo, estas explotaciones también crean oportunidades para reparaciones y para la impugnación creativa – ¡lo que provoca la urgencia de queerificar los “cómo se hace”! Nuestro reto colectivo es que la tecnociencia queer no es lo suficientemente queer como práctica de investigación y necesita sacarse del medio algunas antroponormatividades. ¿Cómo podemos generar caminos que nos lleven más allá de las narrativas reparadoras o de la utopía benévola hacia una vida más que humana?

En un taller de un día, nos reuniremos temporalmente para indagar juntes sobre el potencial analítico queer de la tecnología microbiana, animal, vegetal, mineral y cosmológica, situándonos en estas escenas mundanas y seductoras — tomaremos el taller como una invitación a considerar estas labores e imaginar una vida colectiva diferente. Reflexionaremos sobre las posibilidades y limitaciones de la informática; y tomaremos en serio las fuerzas afectivas de máquinas y animales no humanos. Nos preguntamos ¿cómo podríamos desplegar teorías queer que se refieren lesiones no sólo a personas sino a conjuntos más que humanos para considerar los daños compartidos por humanos y no humanos? ¿Qué modos nos llevarían más allá de las narrativas reparitivas o del utopinaísmo benévolo hacia una vida más que humana?

Buscamos dotarnos de un “hacer” queer en entornos computacionales siniestros y en lugar de centrarnos en el co-florecimiento de seres humanos y no humanos, proponemos prestar atención a los daños, lesiones, sufrimientos y limitaciones que se imponen a las posibilidades de la vida y que se producen a través de la informática y las tec nociencias. Si nos centramos en una genealogía de lesiones en los estudios queer, ¿podemos reconocer la voluntad de investigar aspectos más oscuros de la experiencia? ¿Cómo podríamos redirigir las fricciones de la tecnociencia queer como algo que se relaciona con la poderosa negatividad de queer como una forma de política punk en lugar de un límite establecido o centrarse en las prácticas sexuales de cuerpos ontológicamente seguros y esencialmente fijos? Este taller se propone, por tanto, como una composición colectiva de “cómo hacer” investigación parcialmente reparadora, ¡¡sin garantía!!. El taller será absolutamente dependiente de los daños y dificultades metodológicas que cada participante traiga consigo.

Este taller es Anti-Copyright
Sucederá en inglés
Inscripción gratuita

Acceso por convocatoria abierta: por favor enviar un pdf antes del 8 d’octubre a laura[at] hangar[dot] org con la siguiente información:

• Nombre
• Información de contacto
• Párrafo de motivación (en inglés)

 + info:

https://hangar.org/en/programa-hangar/formacio-continua/workshop-collaboratiu-amb-helen-pritchard-jara-rocha-i-laura-benitez/ 

https://www.biennalciutatoberta.barcelona/es/helen-pritchard