Friday 01.02.2019 15:00 to 18:00

The contemporary infrastructural complex of mining and measuring soil depends on software tools for geological data handling, interpretation and 3D-visualisation. Such tools power techno-colonial subsurface exploration through a combination of stratigraphy, diagenesis, paleoclimatology, structural geology, and sedimentology combined with computational techniques and paradigms for acquiring and rendering volumetric data.

Possible Bodies invites you to inject disobedient action-research tactics. Resistant vocabularies, misuses and/or f(r)ictions that could somehow affect the extractivist bias embedded in the computation of earth's depths and densities. The workshop is motivated by the political urgency for trans*feminist experiments with geo-modelling, as an affirmative responsibility-taking for this turbocapitalist momentum. Collectively studying the imagery, architecture and language of free, libre and open source tools for geo-modelling, we will surface tensions between the probable and the possible while attending to the regimes of truth, aesthetics, politics and economics they operate with.

Workshop proposed by Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting and featuring Helen Pritchard). Possible Bodies is a collaborative research, interrogating the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of 3D-tracking, -modelling, -rendering and -scanning.

https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org
https://2019.transmediale.de/content/depths-and-densities-a-possible-bodies-workshop

*schedule

15:00 
Intro: Possible Bodies + Depths and Densities + GeoPlates

15:45
Exploration of GeoPlates, honestly wondering together, based on a set of shared questions, with text fragments scattered around. Collectively gather arguments, observations, bug reports in 5 groups. 

16:45 
Break

17:00
Feedback + brainstorm what it would mean to write a meta-bug-report to the GeoPlates team?

18:00
End

*readinglist of sprinkled texts ' ' , ''

Barad, K. (2018). Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness: on the im/possibilities of living and dying in the void. Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy.

Carey, M., Jackson, M., Antonello, A., & Rushing, J. (2016). Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research. Progress in Human Geography, 40(6), 770-793.

Clark, Nigel. Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society) (pp. 38-39). SAGE Publications.

Possible Bodies (2018). “Ultrasonic dreams of aclinical renderings.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 13. 10.5399/uo/ada.2018.13.7

Yusoff K (2018). A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University Of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis)

Nobes, D. Technical geophysics void interpretation article https://library.seg.org/doi/pdf/10.1190/INT-2018-0049.1

Povinelli, E., (2016) Geontologies. A requiem for late liberalism. Duke University Press.

Nobes, D.C, Interpretation pitfalls to avoid in void interpretation

O'Reilly, R., Rue Methanic

*five vectorial provocations:

1. Standards: standardized time and the GPML + Barad, K. (2018). Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness: on the im/possibilities of living and dying in the void.

2. Vocabulary + languaging: naming conventions, descriptions, interface, code + Yusoff K (2018). A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University Of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis)

3. Geology, life/nonlife, creativity of rocks, magnetics .. + Povinelli, E. (2016). Geontologies. A requiem to late liberalism.

4. Datasets: Computing Velocities + Possible Bodies (2018). “Ultrasonic dreams of aclinical renderings.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 13. 10.5399/uo/ada.2018.13.7

5. Datasets: 3D volume visualisation + Carey, M., Jackson, M., Antonello, A., & Rushing, J. (2016). Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research. Progress in Human Geography, 40(6), 770-793.
+ Clark, Nigel. Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society) (pp. 38-39). SAGE Publications.


*what+when+where <--> Gplates spacetime matterings

Whats: What graphic decisions are implemented and how? What textures, boundaries, strata, layerings and seams?
Whens: What time paradigms can be observed and make themselves evident within this tool? What modes of doing does this techno-ecology carry with it from the past? How is time made determinate, useable, accountable, able to enter into capital flows as a discrete value?
Wheres: What is the space that is generated when this tool is active?  What scales are performed, and how? What dimensions are performed and how?  What where's (local, global, geo, micro, meso , macro) emerge through this tool?
... + a second layer of questions, for pro-users:
Whos: Which are the agents implied (alive or not, human or not, powerful or powerless)? Which agencies are accounted for, and how? Which agencies are obscured, and how? What sets the axis of exclusion here, and how? To what extent are they in(ter)depedent? By who for whom? 

Whys: What inner mechanisms of technological's legacies or path dependencies of the software? What opportunities for fracking/f(r)ictioning? What political, trans*feminist urgencies?

Hows: What techniques? What is density in this software? What is depth? How does it become operational here? What representational and computational paradigms? What vocabularies? How does it speak of a world? Which methods for representing, account-giving and widening of the possible need be unfolded, tested, invented, recuperated?

*more links and references to explore

Download gplates here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gplates/files/gplates/2.1/gplates-ubuntu-xenial_2.1_1_amd64.deb/download

Gplates webportal
http://portal.gplates.org/

Magnesium picks: http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=GSFML
Geology: http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=Geology
EMAG2 Magnetic Anomaly Grid http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=EMAG2_V2

GPlates Markup Language
GPML https://www.gplates.org/gpml.html

Gplates Tutorial 7.1: 3D Volume Visualisation Importing and Visualising 3D Scalar Fields
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oZliPsP0zqKry0BV3xTXVQl7EuPoyQCHQ2p_GEuHu18/pub
Volume Visualisation

EarthByte Gplates Portal Geology 
http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=Geology

G.plates on fictional planet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_hKAc3y-3Q

GPlates Tutorial 1.1: Loading and Saving Data
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLMpa0b4hls&list=PL0F9ejAtqLT8Vu0_uNjwkdgEoydBTcVze

Enhanced Shuttle Land Elevation Data
https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/