MakeHuman (Femke Snelting, Jara Rocha)

MakeHuman is an Open Source software for modeling 3-dimensional humanoid characters [1]. Through its curious naming the project evokes the demiurg, dreaming of 'making' 'humans' that resemble his own image. Including MakeHuman into this glossary allows specific entanglements of technology, representation and normativity to be addressed: a potent triangle that MakeHuman sits in the middle of. But it does not only deserve our attention due to the technological power of self-representation that it affords. It is important to understand that as an Open Source project, MakeHuman is shaped by the conditions of interrogation and learning that are guaranteed through its license. Like any other F/LOSS project, it is surrounded by a rich constellation of textual objects, expressed through publicly accessible source code, code-comments, bugtrackers, forums and documentation [2]. This openness facilitated the shaping of an active collective inquiry, activated through experiments, conversations and mediations [3]. In collaboration with architects, dancers, trans*-activists, animators and others, we turn MakeHuman into a 'thinking machine': a device to critically think along physical and virtual imaginaries. Software is culture and hence software-making is world-making. It is a means for relationalities, not a crystallized cultural end [4].

Software: we've got a situation here
MakeHuman is '3D computer graphics middleware designed for the prototyping of photo realistic humanoids' and has gained visibility and popularity over time [5]. It is actively developed by a collective of programmers, algorithms, modelers and academics [6] and used by amateur animators to prototype modeling, by natural history museums for creating exhibition displays, by engineers to test multi-camera systems and by game-developers for sketching bespoke characters. Developers and users evidently work together to define and codify the conditions of presence for virtual bodies in MakeHuman [7]. Since each of the agents in this collective somehow operates under the Modern regime of representation, we find the software full of assumptions about the naturality of perspective-based and linear representations, the essential properties of the species and so forth. The deviceful naming of the project is a reminder of how the semiotic-material secrets of life's flows are strongly linked to the way software represents or allows bodies to be represented [8]. The modern subject, defined by the freedom to make and decide, is trained to self-construct under the narcissistic fantasy of "correct", "proper" or "accurate" representations of the self. These virtual bodies matter because their persistant representations cause mirror affects and effects on both sides of the screen [9].
MakeHuman is 'middleware', a device in the middle: a composition machine that glues the deliriums of the "quantified self" to that of Hollywood imagery, all of it made operational through scientific anthropomorphic data and the graphic tricks of 3D-hyper-real rendering. From software development to character animation, from scientific proof to surveillance, the practices crossing through MakeHuman produce images, imaginations and imaginaries that are part of a concrete and situated cultural assemblage, of hetero-patriarchal positivism and humanism. Found in and fed by mainstream mediated representations, these imaginations generally align with the body stereotypes that belong to  advanced capitalism and post-colonialist projections. Virtual bodies only look "normal" because they appear to fit in that complex situation.

Un-taming the whole
The signature feature of the MakeHuman interface is a set of horizontal sliders. For a split second, the surprising proposal of a continuous parameter for 'gender' promises wild combinations. Could it be that MakeHuman is a place for imagining humanoids as subjects in process, as open-ended virtual figures that not yet materialized? But the uncomfortable and yet familiar presence of physical and cultural properties projected to the same horizontal scale, soon shatters that promise. The interface suggests that by the technique of simply interpolating parameters for 'Gender', 'Age', 'Muscle', 'Weight', 'Height', 'Proportions' and 'Caucasian', 'African' and 'Asian', any representation of the human body can be made. The unmarked extremities of the parameters are merely a way to outsource normativity to the user, who 'blindly' guesses the oucomes of the algorithmic calculations launched by manipulating the sliders. The tool invites a comparison between gender to weight for example, or to decide on race and gender through a similar gesture. Subtle and less subtle shifts in both textual and visual language hint at the trouble of maintaining the one-dimensionality of this 3D world-view: 'Gender' (and not 'Sex') and 'Weight' are labeled in singular but 'Proportions' in plural; 'Age' is not made explicit as 'Young' nor 'Old', while race is made finite in its intra-iterations by naming a limited set of options for mixture.
Further inspection reveils that even the promise of continuity and separation is in fact based on a trick. The actual math at work reveals an extremely limited topology based on a closed system of interconnected parameters, tightening the space of these bodies through assumptions of what they are supposed to be. This risky structuration is based on reduced humanist categories of "proportionality" and "normality". Obviously, not all physical bodies resulting from that combination's would look the same, but software can make that happen [10]. Parametric design promises infinite differentiations but renders them into a mere illusion. The sliders provide a machinic imagination for utilitarianised (supposedly human) compositors, conveniently covering up how they function through a mix of technical and cultural normativities. Aligning what is to be desired with the possible, the sliders evidently mirror the binary systems of the Modern proposal for the world [11]. The point is not to "fix" these problems, quite the contrary. We experimented with replacing default values with random numbers, and other ways to intervene with the inner workings of the tool. But only when we opened up the translation-files we could see how it started to behave differently [12]. Through writing versions and iterations; renaming markers, replacing them by questions and descriptions and by adding and distracting sliders, the interface became a space for narrating through the process of generating possible bodies.
A second technique of representation at work is that of geometric modelling or polygon meshes. A mesh consolidates an always-complete collection of vertices, edges, planes and faces in order to define the topology of  an individualized shape. Each face of a virtual body is a convex polygon; this is common practice in 3D computer graphics and simplifies the complexity of the calculations needed for rendering. Polygon meshes are deeply endebted to the Cartesian perspective by their need for wholeness. It results in a firm separation of first inside from outside and secondly shape or topology from surface. The particular topology of MakeHuman is informed by a rather awkward sense of chastity [13]. With all it's pride in 'anatomical correctness' and high-resolution rendering, it has been decided to place genitals outside the base-body-mesh. The dis-membered body-parts are relegated to a secondary zone of the interface. Consequence of the genitals out of the base-mesh, means that the skin-textures do not fit and "reveal" their whiteness, but also stand out. They conform a satellital mesh. Both a potentiality for otherwise embodied otherness, they are evidently affected by the culture limitation to honestly represent real embodied oneness.
In MakeHuman, two different technical paradigms (parametric design and mesh-based perspective) are allied together to grow representative bodies that are renormalized within a limited and restricted field of cultivated material conditions for possibilities, taming the infinite with the tricks of the 'natural' and the 'horizontal'. It is here that we see modern algorithms at work: sustaining the virtual by providing certain projections of the world, scaled up to the size of a powerful presence in an untouchable present. 
But what if the problematic understanding of these bodies being somehow human, and at the same time being made by so-called humans, is only one specific actualization emerging from an infinite array of possibilities contained in the virtual? What if we could understand the virtual as a potential generator of differentiated and differentiating possibilities? This might lead us towards mediations for many other political imaginaries [14].

A potential for imaginations
By staging MakeHuman through a performative spectrum, the software turned into a thinking machine, confirming the latent potential of working through software objects. Sharing our lack of reverence for the overwhelming complexities of digital techniques and technologies of 3D imaging, we could actively look for its cracks and collectively uncover its disclosures [15]. We could see the software iterate between past and present cultural paradigms as well as between humans and non-humans. It affirmed that bodies and their presences are co-constructed through the imagination of programmers, algorithms and animators. A call for otherwise embodied others suspends the mimicking of 'nature' and makes room for experiences that are not directly lived, but that deeply shape life [16].

Our persistent attention to MakeHuman being in the middle, situated in-between various digital practices of embodiment somehow makes collaboration between perspectives possible, and pierces its own utilitarian mesh. Through strategies of "de-familiarization", the potentialities of software open up: breaking the surface is a political gesture that becomes generative, providing a topological dynamic that helps us experience the important presence of impurities in matter-culture continuums [17].

Exploring a software like MakeHuman hints at the possibility of a politics, aesthetics and ethics that is truly generative. To provide us with endless a-modern mestizaje, an escape from representational and agential normativities, software CAN and MUST provide the material conditions for wild combinations or un-suspected renders [18].

REFERENCES

1. http://www.makehuman.org
2. Free, Libre and Open Source Software licenses stipulate that users of the software should have the freedom to run the program for any purpose, to study how the program works, to redistribute copies and to improve the program. This requires that sourcecode is available; studying and modifying software would otherwise not be possible. In his description of the technoscape of the Linux kernel, Adrian Mackenzie evokes the poly-morphic character of F/LOSS: 'Software (...) is at once thoroughly pervaded by interlinked global standards and conventions (such as communication protocols), and at the same time is anarchically poly-morphic and mutable. New conventions constantly compete with existing standards. Numerous debates, identities, forms of commodification, capitalization, and regulation swirl around software.' Adrian Mackenzie, The Performativity of Code: Software and Cultures of Circulation (Theory Culture Society 22, Sage, 2015)
3. In 2014 the association for art and media Constant organised GenderBlending, a worksession to look at the way 3D-imaging technologies condition social readings and imaginations of gender. The collective inquiry that started from there resulted in several performative iterations: Critical Interfaces (Hangar, Barcelona, February 2015), Daemons and Shellscripts (MuHKA, Antwerpen, June 2015), Unruly Bodies (Sophia, Brussels, October 2015) and Hypertext and games (Merz Akademie, Stuttgart, November 2015). It includes contributions by Rebekka Eisner, Xavier Gorgol, Martino Morandi, Phil Langley, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting and Adva Zakai. http://genderblending.constantvzw.org
4. The potential of software as a "thinking machine" is to allow not-only-textually-based critical theory and to activate mechanisms of knowledge production such as cartographies in the realm of the digital: 'A cartography is a theoretically based and politically informed reading of the present. Cartographies aim at epistemic and ethical accountability by unveilling the power locations which structure our subject-position'. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013) p. 164.
5. 'Makehuman is an open source 3D computer graphics software middleware designed for the prototyping of photo realistic humanoids.  It is developed by a community of programmers, artists, and academics interested in 3D modeling of characters.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeHuman
6. Present and past contributors to MakeHuman: http://www.makehuman.org/halloffame.php
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeHuman#References_and_Related_Papers
8. The Artec3 3D-scanner is sold to museums, creative labs, forensic institutions and plastic surgery clinics alike. Their collection of usecases shows how the market of shapes circulates between bodies, cars and prothaesis http://www.artec3d.com/applications
9. In modeling_modifiers_desc.json, a file that defines the modifications operated by the sliders, a code comment explains that 'Proportions of the human features, often subjectively referred to as qualities of beauty (min is unusual, center position is average and max is idealistic proportions).' https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman
10. humanmodifierclass.py, a file that holds the various software-classes to define body shapes, limits the "EthnicModifier(MacroModifier) class" to 3 racial parameters,  together always making up a complete set: '# We assume there to be only 3 ethnic modifiers. self._defaultValue = 1.0/3' https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman
11. On the MakeHuman bugtracker a user suggests to make the sliders more explicit about the values it operates on: 'It really does not really make any sense for a character to be anything  other then 100% male or female, but than again its more appearance based than actual sex.' Developer Manuel Bastioni responds that it is 'not easy': 'For example, weight = 0.5 is not a fixed  value. It depends by the age, the gender, the percentage of muscle and  fat, and the height. If you are making an adult giant, 8 ft, fully muscular, your 0.5 weight is X. (...) In other words, it's not linear' http://bugtracker.makehumancommunity.org/issues/489
12. MakeHuman is coded in the highly legible Python language which means that the program does not require compilation after changes are made. 
13. When the program starts up, users are warned that 'MakeHuman is a character creation suite. It is designed for making anatomically correct humans. Parts of this program may contain nudity. Do you want to proceed?'
14.The trans*-working field of all mediations is a profanation of sacred and natural bodies (of virtuality and of flesh). It evidences the fact of them being technological constructions.
15. Here we refer to Agamben's proposal for "profanation": "To profane means to open the possibility of a special form of negligence, which ignores separation or, rather, puts it to a particular use".  Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007) p.73.
16. The ergonomic design of interactive media has left behind the algorithmic  "stuff" of computation by burying information processing in the background of perception and embedding it deep within objects (Parisi, p27)
17. Breaking and piercing te mesh are gestures that in "This topological dynamic reverberates with QFT processes (...) in a process of intra-­active becoming, of reconfiguring and trans-­forming oneself in the self’s multiple and dispersive sense of it-self where the self is intrinsically a nonself." Karen Barad, Transmaterialities. Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings (GLQ: Duke University Press, 2015)
18. "Experiments in virtuality -explorations of possible trans*formations- are integral to each and every (ongoing) be(coming)." Karen Barad, Transmaterialities. Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings (GLQ: Duke University Press, 2015)

IMAGES

slider

LITERATURE

*Luciana Parisi, Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space (Technologies of Lived Abstraction). 
*Karen Barad, Transmaterialities. Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings (GLQ: Duke University Press, 2015)
*Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007)
*Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013)
*Matthew Fuller, Softness: interrogability; general intellect; art methodologies in software (Huddersfield University, 2006)
*The Performativity of Code: Software and Cultures of Circulation (Theory Culture Society 22, Sage, 2015)

LINKS TO

OTHERWISE EMBODIED OTHERS , TRANS/POST (HUMAN) GENDER, MONSTER (THE UNHUMAN), BODY COUNTS / BODY AS DATA

BIOGRAPHY

Jara Rocha is a cultural mediator, developing educational and research programmes at Bau School of Design in Barcelona, Spain. She works with materialities of  present infrastructures and queering practices, linking both formal and non-formal  ways of attending interface cultures. Femke Snelting is an artist/designer developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and Free Software. She is a core member of Constant, an association for arts and media that is active in Brussels, Belgium since 1997. Constant generates amongst others performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational experiments. Jara and Femke regurlarly collaborate on the interfaces between gender, representation and technology.

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LEFTOVERS/MAYBE


 urgent need for
To escape from representational and agential normativities, 
Creating imagery and make space for wild combinations or un-normative renders, need for endless mestizaje. 
 In profanating software situations lays the potential for testing the generative (a-modern?) reverses of contemporary objects, by activating their unsuspectedness and exploring their openness. S
as well as stageseveral experiments of bodily coding or system embodiment

 The neat arrangements of these separate and yet interconnected properties is already troubling in itself.
 
  -> race is a lie like gender, and the software makes its efforts to keep that lie the more culturally-camouflaged the better
 but of course does not succeed. Three races; normativity being outsourced to the user, interconnected yet presented as independent, compared horizontality... and only one outcome per result.).

We set out to collectively experiment the tool to understand how the promise of MakeHuman is contained by two different techniques, that of parametric design and that of its mesh-based constitution.

Furthermore, by coding MakeHuman in Python: interrogability of the software [ref: Fuller, MakeHuman cvs]. This configures also a specific type of user and of use: invitation to counter-uses, abuses, etc. [ref: Appropriation] Challenging established "uses" changes the object into a "pure medium": a medium without an end. Understanding the "making" as an open-ended prototying practice.

Another promise of FLOSS is the explicit invitation to "make better" (whatever the scale of values is that "better" responds to). Usually this is imagined as a code-contribution, or otherwise translations or user-testing. Suggestions or "feature requests" are supposed to stay within the technocentric space of bugreports. Bugreport as a very specific mediator: a performative text piece that acts as an opener for possibilities. The unveiling (interrogation?) of it through mediation tactics such as bugreporting is a path towards the opening up the set of possibilities to "make humanoids". [ref: Bugreport].



The unreliable promises of rendering [don't trust that render!]

Re-titling the project from MakeHuman to MakeHumanoid as a simple but important step. Algorithm, computation, incomputable: from parametric to generative. Instead of closed sliders; subject in process, open-ended.

The re-factoring of the complete code-base [ref: MH cvs  year?] from C++ to the Python programming for example, seems evident. xxxxx Python's portability and elegant efficiency aligns the tool with the kind of customization-without-compilation similarly at work in the multi-billion dollar industry of plastic surgery that, also not a surprise, relies heavily on 3D-imaging technologies for both marketing and the limiting liability [ref: Eva 3D scanner].

Tension between the self and the genius [ref: Agamben (not entirely sure; it feels like too much and too heavy. maybe we leave this out?)]

To expand the potential of the "pure medium" into  the potential of impure mediums / impure mediation tactics (like

Sara Ahmed: "Queer Phenomenology. Orientations, Objects, Others" <- JR and FS :) rethink connection to MakeHuman project :-)

Braidotti (using deleuze using Spinoza): We do not know what a body can do
Future project: "Ethology of affirmation"<3
subject of = agent; the power to make world

 in this kind of cultural artifacts that represention-building softwares embody,,,
representation technology. Preassumptions, operations and projections, what came before, possible. Some  examples of problems with the sliders: 
    
 it actually breaks with the basic means of representing cultural  production.

[probable, possible and plausible]. 


[it's a representational technology!] 

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Posthuman Glossary

Edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova

If art, science, and the humanities have shared one thing, it was their common engagement with constructions and representations of the human at the center of their respective realms, as well as their mutual exploration into how people process, document, and analyze their human experiences.
Under the pressure of new contemporary concerns, however—such as the neoliberal economics of global capitalism, migration, advanced technological developments, environmental destruction on a mass scale, the perpetual war on terror and extensive security systems, to name but a few significant markers of our time—the concept of the human as we had previously known it has undergone dramatic transformations. We take this development to mark a “posthuman condition” that combines exciting new developments with a troublesome reiteration of old, unresolved problems.
Posthuman Glossary is a volume providing an outline of the critical terms of posthumanity in present-day artistic and intellectual work. It also builds on the concepts that will be discussed during a series of four gatherings in May-June 2015, focusing on the broad thematic topics of Anthropocene/Capitalocene, eco-sophies, digital activism and algorithmic cultures and security, organised by the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University and BAK, centre for contemporary art.
We welcome contributions that address specific terms, provided in the draft outline below. The essays can vary between 1,600 and 600 words, and the editors would also welcome several contributions from the same author. Authors are also encouraged to propose other entries that are not included in the current outline.

Preliminary timeline:

November 15: Deadline for the first draft of your entry/ies.

We kindly ask you to indicate at least 3 other terms that your entry/ies cross-refer to (for list of terms, see below). We would also be grateful if you could please set your entry according to the style guide that you have received from the editors.

Together with the first draft please provide the following:
-
bibliography for your entry in a separate MS Word document (it can include, apart for the works cited, references to other texts that are crucial for the genealogy or conceptualization of the concept that you are writing about).
-
biographical note of yours (5 lines maximum) in a separate MS Word document.

December 2015: Editors’ feedback
January 2016: Submission of second draft


https://www.oneonta.edu/faculty/farberas/arth/arth200/durer_artistdrawingnude.html


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