https://www.codedmatters.nl/artist/femke-snelting/



Femke’s talk will relate big data and its biases to embodiment, performance and representation. Together with Jara Rocha she activates Possible Bodies, a research project that works with the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of so-called "bodies" in the context of 3D-technologies and -techniques. This collective research interrogates volumetric modeling, tracking and scanning, and how these practices make intersecting forms of systemic oppression resurface. At Coded Matters, Femke will discuss item 069 (Slicer and its Slider) from the Possible Bodies Inventory. Slicer is an Open Source software which interfaces with CT, MRI and PET-scans and the algorithmic process of reverse-reconstructing volumetric "bodies". The talk explores how medical image informatics, image processing, and three-dimensional visualization routinely produce realities and presences with the help of dissection, separation, segmentation and segregation. Can we repoliticize these computational bodies and reclaim their invisible insides from the apparatuses of capture and prediction?

Femke’s talk will relate the big data issue back to topics of embodiment and representation, offering an alternative perspective to the technologically oriented discourses on machine learning and big data. Intersecting issues of race, gender, class, species, age and ability will be applied to examples of body-data collection techniques such as 3D tracking, modelling and scanning to better understand our emerging relationship with digital infrastructures. What norms are shaped through 3D technologies? Who invented those three “dimensions” in the first place and why to stick with them as “true”? Can tools produce realities and presences and if so: what possible bodies do they activate?