send to: info@inmaterialdesign.com
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title: The Possible Bodies Inventory: dis-orientation and its aftermath / El inventario de Possible Bodies: desorientación y sus consecuencias
keywords: 3D, technology, possible bodies, disorientation, inventory, / tecnología, 3D, cuerpos posibles, desorietación, inventario,
authors: Femke Snelting (Constant Association for Arts and Media), Jara Rocha (Bau Design College of Barcelona)
contact info.: jara.rocha@baued.es / snelting@collectifs.net
category: investigación experimental
bio:
Jara Rocha is a cultural mediator, developing educational and research programs at Bau
Design college in Barcelona, Spain. She works with the materialities of infrastructures and queering
practices, linking both formal and non-formal ways of attending to 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.
---
no ground---
"A fall toward objects without reservation, embracing a world of forces and matter, which lacks any original stability and sparks the sudden shock of the open: a freedom that is terrifying, utterly deterritorializing, and always already unknown. Falling means ruin and demise as well as love and abandon, passion and surrender, decline and catastrophe. Falling is corruption as well as liberation, a condition that turns people into things and vice versa. It takes place in an opening we could endure or enjoy, embrace or suffer, or simply accept as reality." (Steyerl, 2012)
For this item, we follow Hito Steyerl in her reflection on disorientation and the condition of falling, and we drag it all the way to the analysis of an animation generated from a motion capture file. The capture of a person jumping is included in the Carnegie-Mellon University Graphics Lab Human Motion Library [1]. Motion capture systems, including the one at Carnegie Mellon, typically do not record information about context, and the orientation of the movement is made relative to an arbitrary point of origin (see item 007: World).
In the animated example, the position of the figure in relation to the floor is 'wrong', the body seems to float a few centimetres above ground. The software relies on perceptual automatisms and plots a naturalistic shadow, taking the un-grounded position of the figure automatically into account: if there is a body, a shadow must be computed for. Automatic naturalisation: technology operates with material dilligence. What emerges is not the image of the body, but the body of the image: "The image itself has a body, both expressed by it's construction and material composition, and (...) this body may be inanimate, and material." (Steyerl, Ripping Reality).
'No ground' is an attempt to think through issues with situatedness that appear when encountering computed and computational bodies. Does location work at all, if there is no ground? Is displacement a movement, if there is no place? How are surfaces behaving around this no-land's man, and what forces affect them?
The found-on-the-go ethics and “path dependence" that condition computational materialities of bodies worry us. It all appears too imposing, too normative in the humanist sense, too essentialist even. What body compositions share a horizontal base, what entities have the gift of behaving vertically? How do other trajectorialities affect our semiotic-material conditions of possibility, and hence the very politics that bodies happen to co-compose? How can these perceptual automatism be de-clutched from a long history of domination, of the terrestrial and extraterrestrial wild (Haraway, 1992), now sneakily entering into virtual spheres?
We suspect a twist in the hierarchy between gravitational forces. It does not lead to collapse but results in a hallucinatory construction of reality, filled with floating bodies. If we want to continue using the notions of 'context' and 'situation' for cultural analysis of the bodies that populate the pharmacopornographic, military and gamer industries and their imaginations, attending to their immediate political implications, we need to reshape our understanding of them. It might be necessary to let go of the need for 'ground' as a defining element for the body's very existence, though this makes us wonder about the agencies at work in this un-grounded embodiments. If the land is for those who work it, then who is working the ground [2]
"Disorientation involves failed orientations: bodies inhabit spaces that do not extend their shape, or use objects that do not extend their reach"(Ahmed, 2006: 160)
The co-constitution of bodies and technologies shatters all dream of stability, the co-composition of foreground and background all dreams of perspective. When standing just does not happen due to a lack of context or a lack of ground, even if it is a virtual one, the notion of standpoint does not work. Situation, though, deserves a second thought.
The political landscape of turning people into things and vice-versa recalls the rupture of 'knowing subjects' and 'known objects' that Haraway called for after reading the epistemic use of standpoint in Harding (Harding, 1986), which asked for a recognition of the 'view from below' of the subjugated: “to see from below is neither easily learned nor unproblematic, even if 'we' 'naturally' inhabit the great underground terrain of subjugated knowledges” (Haraway, 1998: 584). This emancipatory romanticism of Harding does not work in the virtual renderings neither. The semiotic-material conditions of possibility that unfold from Steyerl’s above description are conditions without point, standing, or below.
What implications would it have to displace our operations, based on unconsolidated matter that in its looseness asks for eventual anchors of interdependence? How could we transmute the notion of situatedness, to understand the semiotic-material conditionings of 3D rendered bodies, that affect us socially and culturally through multiple managerial worldlings?
The body in the example is not static nor falling: it is floating. Here we find a thing on the 'situatedness' of Haraway that does not match when we try to manage the potential vocabularies for the complex forms of worldmaking and its embodiments in the virtual. What can we learn from the conditions of floating brought to us by the virtual transduction of modern perspective, in order to draft an account-giving apparatus of present presences? How can that account-giving be intersectional with regards to the agencies implied, respectful of the dimensionality of time and ageing, and responsible with a political history of groundness?
Floating is the endurance of falling. It seems that in a in a computed environment, falling is always in some way a floating. There is no ground to fall towards that limits the time of falling, nor is the trajectory of the fall directed by gravity. The trajectory of a floating or persistently falling body is always already unknown.
In the dynamic imagination of the animation, the ground does not exist before the movement is generated, it only appears as an afterthought. Everything seems upside down: the foundation of the figure is deduced, not pre-existing its movement. Does this mean that there is actually no foundation, or just that it appears in every other loop of moment? Without the ground, the represented body could be understood as becoming smaller and that would open the question on dimensionality and scaleability. But being surface-dependent, it is received as moving backwards and forwards: the modern eye reads one shape that changes places on a territory. Closer, further, higher, lower: the body arranges itself in perspective, but we must attend the differences inherent in that active positioning. The fact that we are dealing with an animaion of a moving body implies that the dimension of time is brought into the conversation. Displacement is temporary, with a huge variation in the gradient of time from momentary to persistent.
In most cases of virtual embodiment, the absolute tyranny of the conditions of gravity does not operate. In a physical situation (a situation organised around atoms), falling on verticality is a key trajectory of displacement; falling cannot happen horizontally upon or over stable surfaces. For the fleshy experienced, falling counts on gravity as a force. Falling seems to relate to liquidity or weightlessness, and grounding to solidity and settlement of matters. Heaviness, having weight, is a characteristic of being-in-the-world, or more precisely: of being-on-earth, magnetically enforced. Falling is depending on gravity, but it is also - as Steyerl explains - a state of being un-fixed, ungrounded, not as a result of groundbreakingness but as an ontological lack of soil, of base. Un-fixed from the ground, or from its representation (Steyerl, 2012).
Nevertheless, when gravity is computed, it becomes a visual-representational problem, not an absolute one. In the animation, the figure is fixed and sustained by mathematical points of origin but to the spectator from earth, the body seems unfixed from its 'natural soil'. Hence, in a computational space, other 'forced' directions become possible thanks to a flipped order of orientation: the upside-down regime is expanded by others like left-right, North-South and all the diagonal and multivortex combinations of them. This difference in space-time opens up the potential of denaturalized movements.
Does falling change when the conditions of verticality, movement and gravity change? Does it depend on a specific axis? Is it a motion-based phenomenon, or rather a static one? Is it a rebellion against the force of gravity, since falling here functions in a mathematical rather than in a magnetic paradigm? And if so, 'who' is the agent of that rebellion?
At minute 01:05, we find a moment where two realities are juxtaposed. For a second, the toe of the figure trespasses the border of its assigned surface, glitching a way out of its position in the world, and bringing with it an idea of a pierceable surface to exist on ... and opening up for an eventual common world.
In the example, the 'feet' of the figure do not touch the 'ground'. It reminds us that the position of this figure is the result of computation. It hints at how rebellious computational semiotic-material conditions of possibility are at work. We call them semiotic because they are written, codified, inscribed and formulated (alphanumerically, to start with). We call them material since they imply an ordering, a composition of the world, a structuring of its shapes and behaviours. Both conditions affect the formulation of a 'body' by considering weight, height and distance. They also affect the physicality of computing: processes that generate it pulses in electromagnetic circuits, power network use, server load, etc.
When the computational grid is placed under the feet of the jumping figure, materialities have to be computed, generated and located "back" and "down" into a "world". Only in relation to a fixed point of origin and after having declared its world to make it exist, the surrounding surfaces can be settled. Accuracy would depend on how those elements are placed in relation to the positioned body. Accuracy is a relational practice: body and ground are computed separately, each within their own regime of accuracy. When the rendering of the movement makes them dependent on the placement of the ground, their related accuracy will appear as strong or weak, and this intensity will define the kind of presence emerging.
Thinking present presences can not rely on the lie of laying. A thought on agency can neither rely on the ground to fall towards nor on the roots of grass to emerge from. How can we then invoke a politics of floating not on the surface but within, not cornered but around and not over but beyond, in a collective but not grass-roots movement? Constitutive conditioning of objects and subjects is absolutely relational, and hence we must think of and operate with their consistencies in a radically relational way as well: not as autonomous entities but as interdependent worldlings. Ground and feet, land and movement, verticality and time, situatedness and axes: the more of them we take into account when giving account of the spheres we share, the more degrees of freedom we are going to endow our deterritorialized and reterritorialized lives with.
The body is a political fiction, one that is alive (Preciado, 2008), but a fiction is not a lie. And so are up, down, outside, base, East and South (Rocha, 2016) and presence. Nevertheless, we must unfold the building insights of those fictions to better understand their radical affection on the composition of what we understand as 'living', whether that daily experience is mediated fleshly or virtually.
[1] http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/
[2] https://vimeo.com/45615376
--------------------
Bibliography
Ahmed, S., 2006. Queer Phenomenology. Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke.
Barad, K., 2012, Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers. In Dolphijn, R. and van der Tuin, I., New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.
Copeland, R., 2004. Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance. New York, Routledge
Haraway, D., 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599.
___, D., 1992. The promises of monsters : a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others. In Lawrence Grossberg/Cary Nelson/Paula A. Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies, New York, 1992, pp. 295–337.
Harding, S., 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/76-327A/readings/Harding.pdf
Portanova, S., 2013. Moving Without a body. Cambridge, MIT.
Preciado, P.B., 2008, Pharmaco-pornographic Politics: Towards a New Gender Ecology. Routledge, Paralax, vol. 14, n.1, 105-117 http://urome.miami.edu/media/college-of-arts-and-sciences/content-assets/center-for-humanities/docs/irg-pdfs/Preciado.pdf
Rocha, J., 2016. Testing texting South: a political fiction. In Machine Research
Snelting, F. and Rocha, J., 2017 (forthcoming). MakeHuman. In Braidotti, R. et al (eds.), The Posthuman Glossary. Bloomsbury: Bloomsbury Academic.
Stengers, I., 2013. Une culture du dépaysement, Hermès, La Revue (n°67), p. 201-201.
Steyerl, H., 2012. In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective. E-flux journal. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought-experiment-on-vertical-perspective/
___, H., Ripping reality: Blind spots and wrecked data in 3D http://eipcp.net/e/projects/heterolingual/files/hitosteyerl/print
[blender.jpg]
Screenshot Blender 2.69 (2017)
--------
TO DO LIST
[JR]
Harvard-> for this i need the raw list of bibliography in one doc, to brush it and translate it to harvard style -- super -- in your mailbox
abstract (max 250 words, biblingual)
keywords: dis-orientation, 3D mesh,
notes...
FS 00:15-01:00
images --> both inserted, and in folder apart: jpg or tiff at min 300ppi -- will insert once you are finished with the doc
insert image credits
format: font, size, lines etc
--> we have this
[JR]
names, "institutional affiliation", order, etc
brief "academic" trajectory, email addresses etc
choose a category for the article between these: 3) experimental research
FS 23:30-00:15
Rephrase No Ground
Re-read, rephrase aftermath
FS 22:47-23:30
*Fix World
*Fix Loops
AND THIS?->
FOR THE FUTURE THAT WIILL BE WONDERFUL, YEARS OF PLEASURE TO COME :-) :-) :-)
and we wonder about their...
semiotic/inscripted/notated->
material->
conditions-> parameters, circumstances, limits/obstructuons
possibility-> over the probable and through the plausible along the preferrable
No ground might bring resistance, if with Mar Medina we understand that to resist perhaps we first have to surrender, bodily, interdependently.
-----------------------
A question of agency?[ --> perhaps this question and its notes can go to Aftermath?]
*under-ground settings? the politics in the basement?
*somatopolitics
An affective/affected presence not based on fixed properties:
*movimiento de los trabajadores 'sintierra' / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landless_Workers%27_Movement
No ground might bring resistance, if with Mar Medina we understand that to resist perhaps we first have to surrender, bodily, interdependently.
Not isolated, even if we do not have a vocabulary for the political agencies of the emergent floating subjectivities of unrooted non-trajectoriality. The not-only represented bodies of the yet unknown people to come.
Looking at the animation, we can see that if there is no ground, the definitions of situation, context, surface, position, location change. How to re-think this constellation, in political terms? in theory, standpoint was critiziced by Donna Haraway and that grew up to situatedness...xxx ... we wonder about the political implications -and subsequent vocabulary needs- unfolded from 3D conditioning of these terms, due to the strong implications of their industrial (military, pharmacopornographic, gamers) applications. Situation, context, surface, position, location.
/afterword
link from inventorying to dis-orientation --- through the body (and the computational tech around it)
something of our experience while doing this <--- important ok
displaying that it is a demonstration of what inventorising couldmean.
disorientation as a demo.
the consequential body
of
decolonising the archive (museum) in digital tech there is the possibility of exploring relations and re-affirming them according to hegemony <-- this tension is in the hypothesis of our project
mathematical importance / double sense of "aftermath"
desire -> from technical observation into a "want"
where we see potential (where we see this go) / disorientation cluster and PB as a whole.
problematisation of naturalness and realness!
--
These three items in the Possible Bodies inventory help us formulate a number of questions that could be a startingpoint for thinking "how queer politics might involve disorientation, without legislating disorientation as a politics" (Ahmed).
.
First one is related to the semiotic material- what body, what matter, what world
Second one calls for an attention to conditions- political fictions, parameters, math
Thrid one opens up a wonder on possibility- over the probable and through the plausible along the preferrable
And the fourth: limits of the fictional construction of fleshy matters: what computes as a body
The political implications of this set-up (a situation without ground?) are isolation and individuality. In a situation without ground, relationality is a potential -not a condition- that appears only in exquisite moments of "accurate" rendering. It is strongly hierarchical, if we understand how individual settings absolutely need to preceed relational settings. [have to think about the 'need', if that is always the case? in another way, you could say that everything is relational; all objects are both independently, locally defined AND related to the global. i don't know, i need to believe your experiemtns here as i have not put my hands on :-/ me neitherr, there is only probing, no 'putting hands on' unfortunately with calculation ? Soooo. ... maybe we can go back to the animation, as our probe ok! movement then / time dimension! yeah--- to see what we can understand in relation to the relationality ? hmmm ok but it is still a bit tricky, as we are at risk of saying that relationality and interdependence only are activated when time appears on scene, and/or movement becomes an issue... and i would agree that a radical politics of 3D would need to involve a claim for basic interdependency of all agencies. So we can formulate this as a desire, rather than a statement?i would feel more conformtable, yes. It is like that "potentially" and not so much a given so... aftermath? :)
This is the wonder of the global existing simultaneous to the local (pre-rendering). Ok so let's make it explicit because here is where the politics of the text appears very evidently.isnt't it?. yes ...]hahaha if that's the case, i'm much happier. But then the discourse we used up is not "accurate", as we said forst world is declared and then ordering/calculation happens. Not all at the same time.
The ideological implications are interchangeability of context; existence de-linked from any situation [but linked to computation/math. this is context too?] <- perhaps we can differenciate context from situation? (thinking on situated knowledges, along which situation is not geographical but more intersectional?)
"By implication, we learn that disorientation is unevenly distributed: some bodies more than others have their involvement in the world called into crisis. this shows us how the world itself is more 'involved' in some bodies than in others, as it takes such bodies as the contours of ordinary experience" (Ahmed, 159)
Conditions and the possible
matters of fact, concern and care
"insistence of/on the possible", Stengers
Bodies as political fictions, Preciado/Foucault
the culture of borders and spectacularisation
militainment
&
: the military, the pharmacopornographic, the gamer.
but
alligned with ...the enchantments of infrastructure (Harvey & Knox)
+ obedience to positional conditions relates directly to orientation ¿?
FROM THE CALL
'polyhedral bodies' ? = polygon mesh ? -> A polygon mesh is a collection of vertices, edges and faces that defines the shape of an object
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygon_mesh
[three stills from the animation]
"A fall toward objects without reservation, embracing a world of forces and matter, which lacks any original stability and sparks the sudden shock of the open: a freedom that is terrifying, utterly deterritorializing, and always already unknown. Falling means ruin and demise as well as love and abandon, passion and surrender, decline and catastrophe. Falling is corruption as well as liberation, a condition that turns people into things and vice versa. It takes place in an opening we could endure or enjoy, embrace or suffer, or simply accept as reality." [1]
For this item, we follow Hito Steyerl in her reflection on disorientation and the condition of falling, and we drag it all the way to the analysis of an animation generated from a motion capture file. The animation is included in the Carnegie-Mellon University Graphics Lab Human Motion Library. Motion capture systems, including the one at Carnegie Mellon, typically do not record information about context, and the orientation of the movement is made relative to an arbitrary point of origin (see item 007: World).
In the animated example, the position of the figure in relation to the floor is 'wrong'. The body seems to float a few centimetres above ground but the software relies on perceptual automatisms and plots a naturalistic shadow, taking the un-grounded position of the figure automatically into account: if there is a body, a shadow must be computed for. Automatic naturalisation: technology operates with material dilligence. What emerges is not the image of the body, but the body of the image: "The image itself has a body, both expressed by it's construction and material composition, and (...) this body may be inanimate, and material." [Steyerl, Ripping Reality].
'No ground' is an attempt to think through issues with situatedness that appear when encountering computed and computational bodies. Does location work at all, if there is no ground? Is displacement a movement, if there is no place? How are surfaces behaving around this no-land's man :-), and what forces affect them?
The found-on-the-go ethics and “path dependence" that condition computational materialities of bodies worry us. It all appears to be too imposing, too normative in the humanist sense, too essentialist even. What body compositions share a horizontal base, what entities have the gift of behaving vertically? How do other trajectorialities affect our semiotic-material conditions of possibility, and hence the very politics that bodies happen to co-compose? How can these perceptual automatism be de-clutched from a long history of domination, of the terrestrial and extraterrestrial wild [footnote to Haraway's promises of monsters], now sneakily entering into virtual spheres?
We suspect a twist in the hierarchy between gravitational forces. It does not lead to collapse but results in a hallucinatory construction of reality, filled with floating bodies. If we want to continue using the notions of 'context' and 'situation' for cultural analysis of the bodies that populate the pharmacopornographic, military and gamer industries and their imaginations, attending to their immediate political implications, we need to reshape our understanding of them. It might be necessary to let go of the need for 'ground' as a defining element for the body's very existence, though this makes us wonder about the agencies at work in this un-grounded embodiments. If the land is for those who work it, then who is working the ground [note: Zapatista's]?
"Disorientation involves failed orientations: bodies inhabit spaces that do not extend their shape, or use objects that do not extend their reach" (Ahmed, 160)
The co-constitution of bodies and technologies shatters all dream of stability, .. the co-composition of foreground and background all dreams of perspective. When standing just does not happen due to a lack of context (a lack of ground, even if it is a virtual one), the notion of standpoint does not work. Situation, though, deserves a second thought. Samewise, a revision on the deffinitions of 'location', 'position' and 'stability' is part of the larger Possible Bodies project.
The political landscape of turning people into things and vice-versa recalls the rupture of knowing subjects and known objects Haraway claimed for after reading Harding epistemic use of standpoint, which asked for a recognition of the “view from below” of the subjugated: “to see from below is neither easily learned nor unproblematic, even if 'we' 'naturally' inhabit the great underground terrain of subjugated knowledges” (Haraway, Situated Knowledges, p.584). Certainly, this romanticism shows to not work in the virtual renderings and the semiotic-material conditions of possibility that unfold from Steyerl’s description are conditions of no point, no standing, and no belowness. [this par could use some rephrasing for legibility]
What implications would it have to displace our operations based on a loose matter that in its looseness asks for eventual anchors of interdependence? How could we transmute the notion of situatedness, to understand the semiotic-material conditionings of 3D rendered bodies, so socioculturally affecting us along a big number of managerial worldlings?
In addition, the body in the example is not static nor falling: it is floating. Here we find a thing on the “situatedness” of Haraway that does not match neither while trying to manage the potential vocabularies for the complex wolrdmaking and its embodiments in the virtual; what can we learn from the conditions of floating that virtual transduction of modern perspective bring, in order to draft an account-giving apparatus of present presences that is intersectional in regards of the agencies implied, respectful with a dimensionality of time and ageing without being naïve about endurance on one hand (persistence, sustainability etc.), and that is responsible with a political history of groundness, on the other? (!) [this par could use some rephrasing for legibility]
Floating is the endurance of falling. It seems that in a in a computed environment, falling is always in some way a floating. There is no ground to fall towards that limits the time of falling, nor is the trajectory of the fall directed by gravity. The trajectory of a floating (persistently falling) body is always already unknown.
[After analyzing the spatial implications of this abstract complex and the questions raised regarding situatedness, positionality, stability and location, we can attend their collateral temporalities and the moves that might come with them (like for example, falling).] ..
In the dynamic imagination of the example, the ground does not exist before the movement is generated, it appears as an afterthought. Everything seems upside down: the foundation of the figure is deduced, not pre-existing its movement. Does this mean that there is actually no foundation, or just that it appears in every other loop of moment? Without the ground, the represented body could be read as diminishing (and that would open the question on dimensionality and scalability), but with the surface dependency it is received as moving back and forwards: the modern eye sees one shape displacing along territory. Closer, further, higher, lower: the body arranges itself in perspective, but we must attend the differences inherent in that active positioning. The fact that we are dealing with an animated composition of a moving body implies bringing time dimension into the conversation. Movement implies time, so displacement is temporary (and that temporarity can hugely vary in the gradient of time from momentary to persistent). wah!
In a physical situation (a situation organised around atoms), falling on verticality is a key trajectory of displacement (though counting on the absolute tyranny in gravitational conditions that to start with, could not be the case in a big number of virtual embodiments); falling cannot happen horizontally upon or over stable surfaces. For the fleshy experienced, falling counts on gravity as a force. Falling seems to relate to liquidity or weightlessness, and grounding to solidity and settlement of matters. Heaviness, having weight, is a characteristic of being-in-the-world, or more precisely: of being-on-earth, magnetically enforced. Falling is dependent on gravity, but it is also -as Steyerl explains [Steyerl, In free fall]- a state of being un-fixed, ungrounded, not as a result of groundbreakingness but as an ontological lack of soil, of base. Un-fixed from the ground, or from its representation.
Nevertheless, when gravity is computed, it becomes a visual-representational problem, not an absolute one. In the animation, the figure is fixed and sustained by mathematical points of origin but to the spectator from earth, the body seems unfixed from its "natural soil". Hence, in a computational space, other "forced" directions become possible thanks to a flipped order of orientation: upside-downess regime is expanded by others like left-right, north-south and all the diagonal and multivortex combinations of them. This space-time difference opens up the ratio of the denaturalized –moving possibles.
We might then ask: does falling change when the conditions of verticality, movement and gravity change? Does it depend on a specific axis? Is it a motion-based phenomenon, or rather a static one? Is it a rebellion against the force of gravity, since falling here functions in a mathematical rather than in a magnetic paradigm? (and if so, “who” is the agent of that rebellion?).
[at minute 01:05, we are happy to find a moment where two realities are juxtaposed. For a second, the toe of the figure trespasses the border of its assigned surface, glitching a way out of its position in the world, and bringing with it an idea of a pierceable surface to exist on... and opening up for an eventual common world]
In the example, the 'feet' of the figure do not touch the 'ground'. It reminds us that the position of this figure is the result of computation. It hints at how there are computed semiotic-material conditions of possibility at work, rebelling. We call them semiotic because they are written, codified, inscribed and formulated (alphanumerically, to start with). We call them material since they imply an ordering, a composition of the world, a structuring of its shapes and behaviours. Both conditions affect the formulation of a 'body' by considering weight, height and distance. They also affect the physical computational (circuited electromagnetic pulses, power network use, sometimes server hosting) processes that generate it.
When the computational grid is placed under the feet of the jumping figure, materialities have to be computed, generated and located "back" and "down" into a "world". Only in relation to a fixed point of origin and after having declared its world to make it exist, the surrounding surfaces can be settled. Accuracy would depend on how those elements are placed in relation to the positioned body. Accuracy is a relational practice: body and ground are computed separately, each within their own regime of accuracy. When the rendering of the movement makes them dependent on the placement of the ground, their related accuracy will appear as strong or weak, and this intensity will define the kind of presence emerging.
[jump?] An urgent thought on present presences can not, neither, rely on the lie of laying. A thought on agency can neither rely on the ground to fall towards nor on the roots of grass to emerge from. How can we, then, invoke a politics of floating not on the surface but within, not cornered but around and not over but beyond, in a collective but not grass-roots movement? Constitutive conditioning of objects and subjects is absolutely relational, and hence we must think of and operate with their consistencies in a radically relational way, as well: not as autonomous entities but as interdependent worldlings. Ground and feet, land and movement, verticality and time, situatedness and axes: the more of them we take into account when giving account of the spheres we share, the more degrees of freedom we are going to endow our deterritorialized and reterritorialized lives with.
The body is a political fiction (one that is alive [footnote to Preciado]), but a fiction is not a lie. And so are up, down, outside, base, east and south [reference], and presence. Nevertheless, we must unfold the building insights of those fictions to better understand their radical affection on the composition of what we understand as “living", whether that loose experience is mediated fleshly or virtually.
FOOTNOTES:
- animation
-steyerl
-ahmed
-haraway
-harding
- Preciado
- South
- multivortex: https://www.khwiki.com/Multivortex
-----------------------------
SOURCES NO GROUND
mojoDallas (2008), 2600 Animations for Free https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZakpoLqXhyI
mojoDallas (2008), Converting the Carnegie-Mellon University Graphics Lab Motion Capture Database for Poser http://mojodallas.blogspot.be/2008/09/converting-carnegie-mellon-university.html
Carnegie-Mellon University Graphics Lab Motion Capture Database: Locomotion > Jumping http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/search.php?maincat=3&subcat=3
Hito Steyerl, In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective (2012) http://www.e-flux.com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought-experiment-on-vertical-perspective/
Hito Steyerl, Ripping reality: Blind spots and wrecked data in 3D (xxxx) http://eipcp.net/e/projects/heterolingual/files/hitosteyerl/print
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599.
Haraway, D. (1992) The promises of monsters : a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others, in Lawrence Grossberg/Cary Nelson/Paula A. Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies, New York, 1992, pp. 295–337.
Harding, S. (1986). The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/76-327A/readings/Harding.pdf
Preciado, P.B., (2008), Pharmaco-pornographic Politics: Towards a New Gender Ecology. Routledge, Paralax, vol. 14, n.1, 105-117 http://urome.miami.edu/media/college-of-arts-and-sciences/content-assets/center-for-humanities/docs/irg-pdfs/Preciado.pdf
Rocha, J., (2016)Testing texting South: a political fiction
Zapata, E., https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emiliano_Zapata
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<< this to AFTERMATH>>
A question of agency?[ --> perhaps this question and its notes can go to Aftermath?]
*under-ground settings? the politics in the basement?
*somatopolitics
Zapata: “The land belongs to those who work it” https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emiliano_Zapata
An affective/affected presence not based on fixed properties:
*movimiento de los trabajadores 'sintierra' / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landless_Workers%27_Movement
No ground might bring resistance, if with Mar Medina we understand that to resist perhaps we first have to surrender, bodily, interdependently.
Not isolated, even if we do not have a vocabulary for the political agencies of the emergent floating subjectivities of unrooted non-trajectoriality. The not-only represented bodies of the yet unknown people to come.
Looking at the animation, we can see that if there is no ground, the definitions of situation, context, surface, position, location change. How to re-think this constellation, in political terms? in theory, standpoint was critiziced by Donna Haraway and that grew up to situatedness...xxx ... we wonder about the political implications -and subsequent vocabulary needs- unfolded from 3D conditioning of these terms, due to the strong implications of their industrial (military, pharmacopornographic, gamers) applications. Situation, context, surface, position, location.
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NOTES NO GROUND
accelerometer measures magnetic position, not accelerationism nor productivist speed in rigid verticalisation
*no foundation? no fundamentals?
*notion of "live-gathered-data" <- what makes a life material? https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/veranstaltung/p_76800.php
* conditions of contemporary "volatility" of image industry (Steyerl)
* "Cinema has presented us with visionary states where the three-dimensional material object or landscape itself is the vision (Herzog’s Heart of Glass), and with realms, mainly in dance films,
where space is not three-dimensional but has a fractional dimension between 2 and 3, a space between a surface and a volume" (Toufic, the Subtle Dancer, pg. 24) http://d13.documenta.de/research/assets/Uploads/Toufic-The-Subtle-Dancer.pdf quoted in Steyerl's Ripping Reality
*how does No-Ground relate to Barad's on touching and rejection analysis?
*how dos No-Ground relate to the notion of de-territorialization?
*perhaps this has some connection with the visual analysis of forground-background perspective parameters?
*similarities and differences with the metaphor of the glass ceiling
*potentials? -> openendedness
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for some other time...:
>Is there a surface when there is no exteriority?
"What happens when disorientation cannot simply overcome by the 'force' of the vertical? What do we do, if disorientation itself becomes worldly or becomes what is given?" (Ahmed, 159)
In the mathematic worlds we build, inhabit, share, beyond the world of forces and matter (Steyerl),
there is no outside, as [some bridge missing here?] there is no possible orient in the mesh that models the declared (computated, abstract, virtual, imagined) world. Samewise, the imposition of the vertical axe does not assure situatedness. Bodies can inhabit it [what?] being both subjugated to the vertical and disoriented in an apparently neverending mesh of calculated surfaces. No underground with no visibility. No groundbreaking tactics of direct action... as we knew them.
We live in the monster's belly, Donna Haraway [reference/footnote: promises of monsters]reminds us -- but some more centrifugal than others, we add. There is no exteriority to the virtually surfaced matrix where worlds and bodies take shape and place, not even a mathematical one. Building life within it is a must as there is no outside in this computed monster's belly, and sharing the ways of composition seems a quite fair and reasonable xxx [can you maybe give an example?].
One important stage is to problematise is that "we". [the we from Ahmed you mean? from Haraway and Ahmed]
In a world that asks to be declared [see item 007] and is ready for non-unity, we can speak of the non-singularity of bodies; but asks for sharing surfaces, its composition still drag the representational pulse of Cartesian perspective [I don't think we have explained the issue whith that ... hmm ... would be good], force of gravity, standstilllness. [and how does that connect to the problemitising of 'we'?]
Over where? – the (absolute) where is over...
"Surfaces connect bodies and make them indistinguishable. They connect bodies to grounds and other objects they happen to be in touch with. Surfaces capture bodies as a waveform, entangled with their material environment." (Hito Steyerl, Ripping Reality) + "there are nothing but surfaces and that all these surfaces are missing some or other part of the information"
[accuracy of Cartesian axes as an absolute and universal belief can not proceed to next stage… what is next stage hahah in History :P.. but maybe we can bring the "bug report" feeling here, so... "next generation of worldprocessors"?]
*tyranny of verticality (taking Jo Freeman's feminist critique of the tyranny of structurelessness as a learning situation...)
->
Leftovers that would be GREAT to find a place for: / the sudden shock of the open / / / / endurance / reality