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/

[worksession] Possible Bodies Rotation II: Imagined mishearings

Este verano, el Inventario de Possible Bodies rota hacia Hangar para una residencia de dos semanas. Esta investigación bienal opera a lo largo de un inventario que contiene piezas artísticas, scripts, documentación, manuales, visitas guiadas, interfaces, vocabularios, performances, software – demos, herramientas, objetos físicos, animaciones, conceptos matemáticos, juegos, renders, etc. Esta colección móvil es un contexto para prestar atención a los dispositivos dimensionales, notacionales, escalables y organizativos que hacen que los “llamados cuerpos” aparezcan y se co – relacionen.

La segunda rotación se centra en la imagen biomédica 3D y cómo en torno a ella se modelan, escanean y representan los “cuerpos reales”. A PossibleBodies le preocupa la forma en que las industrias farmacopornográficas, hollywoodianas y militares confunden técnicas y tecnologías. En este paisaje tecnocolonial y heteropatriarcal, violentas representaciones capacitistas, antropocéntricas, misóginas y xenófobas siguen emergiendo. En una serie de fanzines, se van a mutar rendiciones de cuentas ficticias de proyectos reales de código abierto como 3D-Slicer, ITK y echOpen con trabajos teóricos de sensibilidad transfeminista. Queremos preguntarnos: ¿cómo la imagen biomédica, tanto en contextos industriales como DIWO, compone, desplaza y segmenta a los “cuerpos”?

Del 20 al 30 de julio, Possible Bodies trabajará desde Hangar, on y offline, con Mercé Ardévol, Ona Bros, Sara Lafuente, Max Lehner, Nicolas Malevé, Peter Westenberg, Kym Ward y otras compañías, estirando y editando el inventario en una serie de fanzines que serán publicados en la web de Hangar y también distribuidos físicamente tras la residencia.

Si te interesa acercarte, estaremos en La Plaza todos los días. Estás invitada a visitar físicamente el inventario y sumarte al proceso de inventariado. Para dar con nosotras, escribe a [jara at riseup dot net].

El jueves 27 de julio a las 17:00 y a las 18:00, Jara Rocha y Femke Snelting harán visitas guiadas a través de los ítems y discutirán algunos asuntos clave del proyecto. El primer tour explorará críticamente varias técnicas de imaginación biomédica; el segundo (en colaboración con Kym ward) usará la noción de “Circluding” como un dispositivo de (des)orientación. Esta actividad es abierta al público, y la entrada es gratuita.

“Possible Bodies Rotation I: Collective Inventorying” tuvo lugar en mayo de 2017 en la Akademie Schloss Solitude / Projektraum Römerstraße, Stuttgart y reunió a performers de software, artistas en bruto, desarrolladoras somáticas, activistas sensibles y académicas desobedientes.

+ info: https://hangar.org/es/residents/activitats-dels-residents/english-possible-bodies-rotation-ii-imagined-mishearings/
+ inventario: http://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?about

[paper] dis-orientation and its aftermath

[EN]

Following Sara Ahmed’s invitation “to think how queer politics might involve disorientation, without legislating disorientation as a politics”, the collective enquiry Possible Bodies research team inventoried three items related to 3D artifacts, following through the implications of the contemporary renderings of “dis-orientation” they invoke. Each in their own way, the items relate to a world that is becoming oblique, where inside and outside, up and down are switching places and where new perspectives become available. They speak of the mutual constitution of technology and bodies, of matter and semiotics, of nature and culture and how orientation and the subjectivities that emerge from it are managed across the technocolonial matrix of representation in turbo-capitalism. The three items allow for a look at tools that represent, track and model “bodies” through diverse cultural means of abstraction, and eventually convoke their aftermath in a call for “disobedient action-research”.

Keywords:
3D, technology, possible bodies, disorientation, inventory

[CAST]

Continuando la invitación de Sara Ahmed a “pensar cómo las políticas queer podrían implicar desorientación, sin legislar la desorientación como una política”, el equipo de la investigación colectiva Possible Bodies inventarió tres ítems relacionados con artefactos 3D, dando seguimiento a las implicaciones que las actualizaciones contemporáneas de “des-orientación” puedan invocar. Cada uno a su modo, los items están en relación con un mundo que está deviniendo oblicuo, donde dentro y fuera o arriba y abajo están cambiando posiciones, y donde nuevas perspectivas se hacen disponibles. Hablan de la mutua constitución de cuerpos y tecnologías, materia y semiótica, naturaleza y cultura; y de cómo la orientación y las subjectividades que de ahí emergen están
gestionadas por medio de la matriz de representación tecnocolonial en el turbocapitalismo. Los tres ítems permiten observar herramientas que representan, monitorizan y modelan “cuerpos”a través de diversos medios culturales de abstracción, y eventualmente convocan sus consecuencias en una llamada a la “investigación-acción desobediente”.

Palabras clave:
tecnología, 3D, cuerpos posibles, desorietación, inventario

DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT / TEXTO COMPLETO PARA DESCARGA:

https://www.inmaterialdesign.com/index.php/mag/article/download/27/22 

INMATERIAL, Vol.2 Num.3 (2017): https://www.inmaterialdesign.com/index.php/mag/issue/view/4

TONGUES IN THE MAKING

Acaba de publicarse el libro del proyecto de archivo de oralidad "Parlez-vous Saint-Gillois?".

Info gral. del proyecto, y expo/acciones relacionadas:
http://www.constantvzw.org/site/-Parlez-vous-Saint-Gillois,187-.html?lang=en

La publicación se puede descargar completa y libremente aquí: 

http://parlezvous1060.be/media/publication.pdf

Y el proyecto se puede visitar/escuchar/leer aquí: 

http://parlezvous1060.be/p/info/

Participé con una contribución textual: Tongues in the making (pág. 89)

scalable archivistics

By addressing our inquiry and practice towards the search of non-explicit relations between agents of a complex technosocial ecosystem, we aim to understand better the disanthropocentrificability  of culture. Off-side relations that can perhaps be performed if we  attend certain hidden ontological structures within those archival  landscapes, inhabited by myriads of agents of diverse sorts (humans and  non-humans). To look at them implies to find dispossessions, reassemblages and displacements of  objectual agencies, and hence to test speculative infrastructures for other possible cultures.

The  very basic toolkit and keywords we are going to use is articulated  throught a methodologial triad: alien phenomenology / remediation /  speculative fiction.

The  result we look towards has the shape of a mediation infrastructure. Its  basic features, are exportability to other archives and  openness/availability to adapt to other specific contexts.

 

Barcelona, June 2015

Keep track of it all here!: objetologias.tumblr.com

ptm

atopia

Ulises A. Mejias in Fibreculture Journal 20: Liberation Technology and the Arab Spring: From Utopia to Atopia and Beyond, 2012

TO-GET-HER(E)

Aitana Cordero + Quim Bigas

la materia contraataca

I Jornada de Objetologías, en Bau (Pujades, 118 - Barcelona)

+ info sobre el coso aquí

+ info sobre el sarao acá

C.F.F.

La Mafe y la Cris se están currando un proyecto bien bonito de ciencia ficción feminista al alcance de lxs madrileñxs, la CFF que está en nuestras bibliotecas.

Poliesferología

Peter Sloterdijk en "Esferas III", sobre la poliesferologia (o ciencia ampliada de invernaderos):

"Desde el principio tiene que quedar claro que este 'leer' en las espumas no puede quedarse en mera hermenéutica, ni detenerse en el desciframiento de signos. Sólo entra en materia como teoría tecnológica de espacios humanamente habitados, simbólicamente climatizados, es decir, como instrucción científico-ingeniera y política para la construcción y mantenimiento de unidades civilizatorias, un ámbito temático que hasta ahora caía dentro de la ética y de sus ramificaciones en politología y pedagogía. La disciplina más cercana a esta teoría heterodoxa de la cultura y la civilización puede encontrarse, por el momento, en la astronáutica tripulada, pues en ninguna otra parte se pregunta tan radicalmente por las condiciones técnicas de la posibilidad de existencia humana en cápsulas que mantengan la vida" (Sloterdijk, 2004/2006)

1m2 - on (off) extitutions

These past weeks we've been lucky to have Femke Snelting in Madrid. >>> I've had the opportunity to have a couple of very very interesting conversations on interfaces with her, and I think we might be re-taking our informal research on interface criticism and politics from now on.

 So... first (clumsy) notes:


/////// On (off) extitutions // Tactical interfaces

>> Looking at interfaces is key to understand sets of relations (->> systems), as they are the assemblage surfaces that facilitate some connections and not others (some performativities and not others).

Interfaces show us the affordances of the agents they connect to (or not).

.. // How can we build interfaces that have space for political affections, that have / sustain critical affordances?

//// performativity → defined through gesture(s) >> Interface → studied from the performativities that are permitted and/or that emerge from it = “zone of affordances”

.. // Hermeneutics of gesture → analysis of the set of gestures that are applied in each set of relations (system) >> Interface is key to understand sets of relations (->>systems), as they are the assemblage surfaces that facilitate some connections and not others (some performativities and not others) → interfaces show us the affordances of the agents they connect to (or not).

.. // The 'if' way of constructing systems is very much based on: Competences: what you can do / affordances: what you might do possible responses.

 .. // So, interfaces are affordance-spaces that we must study, applying what we'll call “the hermeneutics of gesture”: performative interpretation (based on connecting)

>> Hermeneutics of gesture can/could be applied in “interpretation centres” or “hermeneutic spaces”. Interfaces – mediations – extitutions – hermeneutics

 -------------- Italo Svevo Mediating mediation. Layers of interfaces. If everything is an interface, what should we talk about? rendering practice of mediating why did you not make an auto-ethnography Sciences have strategies of rendering. The problem of rendering. mediating gradients models of governance are needed scale, gradient, ... who defines the protocol -- complex cultural eco-systems experimenting mixing generative mediation

 -------------- How to account for the fact that interfaces are often malleable, respond to gestures and not only orient/suggest/direct/shape them? How to go from interpretation to creation? Can we close the loop of hermeneutics – gestures – interfaces?


.. // Can we think of a form of interface that goes deeper than skin, that is compliant rather then surface, that permeates both human and machine (or institution and audience, or …)?

>>> I'm trying to think of mediation as something that is not independent from the medium that it is operated upon, nor from the operation itself.

.. // Would an 'interrogable' interface be more interesting than one that resists interpretation?

>> What would be the performativity of the interface itself, thinking about it as not a separate/separable element but a space that is intimately interlinked with human bodies, thoughts, imagination? …?

Experiencia interfaz. Dispositivos culturales de gestión performativa

"Experiencia Interfaz. Dispositivos culturales de gestión performativa" - Tesina - Jara Rocha