transmediale 23:
combining:
so-called plants
industrial continuum of 3D


Dear Manetta, Susan, Romi, Helen, Simone, Maria, Geoff and Magda, 

Many contributors to Volumetric Regimes are here at transmediale! To celebrate the publication (there have been many booklaunches already, but none with so many of you in one place), we would love to invite you for a drink at ADK. If you have time and energy left on Friday, we can meet at 20h at the bar and enjoy sharing some spacetime :-)

With joy and gratitude, in solidarity

Femke & Jara





We are sending this email because we are all somehow related to the book Volumetric Regimes (as contributors, editors, reviewers, endorsers) and it felt a bit like an invitation to gather informally, with no other purpose than celebrating thought and praxis in collectivity. It is not a booklaunch of any sort, rather seeing if you would like to have a drink with us and enjoy the situation of being able to chat sharing the same spacetime?
With joy and gratitude, in solidarity
Femke & Jara



People in transmediale 2023:
    - Manetta Berends
    - Susan Schuppli
    - Romi Ron Morrison
    - Helen V. Pritchard
    - Simone Niquille
    - Maria Dada
    - Geoff Cox
    - Magda Tyżlik- Carver
    - Femke
    - Jara
    - 




email to printer and Gigi:
https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.publication.prints



- print for course exercise: 2 files: measures, leggenda, text
- we need to be at WDKA at 12:30
https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.wdka
- Alex & Manetta: https://pad.vvvvvvaria.org/volumetric-regimes
- booklaunch https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.launch
---


BRUSSELS
Sophie Boiron - bring
Pierre Huyghebaert - bring
Nicolas Malevé - bring
Sina Seifee - bring
Femke Snelting / 5
Constant library - bring
Alex & Steph - bring
Seda - bring
-> Helen V. Pritchard - bring 

UK -> sending 15€ p/book
Maria Dada -  25 Time Square, Colvestone Crescent, Hackney, E8 2LT, London (UK)
Kym Ward - 47 Wright Street, Wallasey , CH448BD (UK)
Nerea Calvillo - 105 Myddleton Avenue, N4 2FN, London (UK)
Phil Langley - 
Bryden Wood Technology Ltd
100 Gray's Inn road
London
WC1X 8AL

US
Romi Ron Morrison - 347 S. Catalina St. Los Angeles CA 90020 USA -- 25.70€

BCN
Jara Rocha / 6: Alejandra Gabrielidis, Marta Echaves, Eric, Winnie, Cassandra, ... .
Blanca Pujals - bring

NETHERLANDS
Simone C. Niquil
Hagedoornplein 18
1031 BV Amsterdam
Varia library - bring
Alex Zakkas - bring

ITALY 
Magda - send
Dept. of Digital Design and Information Studies, 
Aarhus University 
Helsingforsgade 14, building 5347, room 125 
8200 Aarhus N 
Denmark 

SWEDEN
Eric - bring

GERMANY
Nora - transmediale e.V. Silent Green, Gerichtstr. 35, 13347 Berlin, Germany

SPECIAL EDITIONS
Martino
Helen
Elodie
Livia
Loren
Eric
Winnie
Cassandra
Eric


30 special editions; 5 to Jara, 10 to Femke




https://www.dgi.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/image1-2.jpg
"3D Model of a geothermal area with cross sections of 3D seismic and density profile along a proposed EGS well pair. The EGS wells were planned going through microseismic from a previous stimulation study. Surface microgravity data and temperature logs from offset wells are also shown."

With the addition of temporal data, parameters such as heat flow, surface microgravity, micro-seismic events along the reservoir can be monitored with time. Additionally, a 4D geospatial model allows asset teams to:                         

                        

BLURB LEIPZIG --   159 wrds

Figurations of timely extraction
Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting (on behalf of The Underground Division)

The contemporary infrastructure of fossil extraction is fueled by software and hardware for geological data handling, interpretation and modelling of subterranea. Geocomputation has become increasingly entangled with the dimension of time, deploying temporality for mining as well as for geology. In this talk, we engage with three figurations of timely extraction (Consortium, Borehole and Amalgam), to narrate time-space complexities that emerge from the connections between extractivism, computation and semiotic-material conditions. Those rocky figurations expose interdependencies at work in transnational alliances, gold mining and digital tools, and how they shape life/non-life temporalities. The dynamic crossings of time and matter that Consortium, Borehole and Amalgam are embedded in, settle latent regimes of repeated damage and maintain ecocidal and epistemicidal forces and practices. We amalgamate the clock time of experience, with the velocity of turbo-computing, with the megaannums at the recursive timeline of digitally-mediated rocks to present agential combinations of exclusion and occlusion that each create unique modes of oppression and privilege.

BIO

The Underground Division is a trans*feminist research project on techniques, technologies and infrastructures of subsurface rendering and their imaginations, fantasies and promises. It is dug by Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting, with the help of many others. Which are the presences, latencies, absences and potentials that need to be accounted for, in relation to that deep and thick complexity? The Underground Division bugs and queers contemporary regimes of volumetrics that are applied to extractivist, computationalist and geologic damages. http://ddivision.xyz/



Dear Helen,

How are you in your new location?

After some days of plotting and dreaming in the dry Catalonian countryside, our heads and hearts are spinning, foreseeing future crossings :)

In the midst of that, we needed to prepare blurb+cv for Leipzig, and we are sharing with you the remix/update that we ended up with.

We decided to start from the timely exctactions text, which feels very much at the crossing of Volumetric Regimes, The Underground Division and TITiPI interests/research. And also, it is already written ;-)

We have started to think about the Underground Division as one of the ongoing projects of titipi, which works in our minds, but we feel we need to make some other moves before announcing the talk as such. Also when writing the bio, it felt quite ok to talk about The Division as a "collective research project".

How does this feel, on your side? 

Big hugs,
Jara + Femke





Any | One Day the Future Has Died. Impossible Possibilities of Artificial Intelligence
Sedimented Temporalities of Geodigital Landscapes (panel with Orit Halpern http://www.orithalpern.net/)






Bug reporting, the practice of submitting an account of errors, flaws, and failures in software, proposes ways to be involved with technological development that not only tolerates, but necessarily requires other modes of expertise than writing code. Bug reporting is a lively technocultural practice that has come to flourish within free software communities

Geomodelling software contributes to technocolonial subsurface exploration and extraction by enlisting, among other things, geophysics stratigraphy, diagenesis, paleoclimatology, structural geology, and sedimentology combined with computational techniques and paradigms for acquiring and rendering volumetric data. Following the industrial continuum of 3D, the same techniques and manners that power subsurface exploration are operationalized within other domains, such as, for example biomedical imaging, entertainment industries, and border policing.

This talk follows the operations of Gplates, a software platform that emerges from a complex web of academic, corporate, and software interests. It allows communities of geophysicists to reconstruct, visualize, and manipulate complex plate-tectonic data-sets. For users with other types of expertise, Gplates provides a web portal with the possibility of on-the-fly rendering of selected data sets, such as LiDAR Data, Paleomagnetic Data, and Gravity Anomalies.

According to its own description, Gplates offers a novel combination of interactive plate-tectonic reconstructions, geographic information system (GIS) functionality and raster data visualization. GPlates enables both the visualization and the manipulation of plate-tectonic reconstructions and associated data through geological time.

As the so-called earth spun before us, the universalist geologic commons emerged. A particular regime embedded within the software that imbues the histories of colonial earth-writing and a geologics in which “[e]xtractable matter must be both passive (awaiting extraction and possessing of properties) and able to be activated through the mastery of white men”. In these scenes of turbocapitalism, the making present of fossil fuels and metals as waiting for extraction heavily depend on software tools, such as Gplates, for handling, interpreting and 3D visualization of geological data. These entangled softwares form an infrastructural complex of mining and measuring. Such tools belong to what we refer to as “the contemporary regime of volumetrics”, meaning the enviro-socio-technical politics — a computational aesthetics — that emerge with the measurement of volumes and generation of 3D objects. A regime full of bugs. 





---

Triggered by a lack of trans*feminist experiments with volumetric geocomputation techniques and the necessity to engage with a counterhistory of geologic relations, the Underground Division took a leap of both scale and time, which implicated a jump from inquiries into the field of body politics to considerations of geopolitics.

Collectively we explored the volumetric renderings of the so-called earth and how they are made operative by geocomputation, where geocomputation refers to the computational processes that measure, quantify, historicize, visualize, predict, classify, model, and tell stories of spatial and temporal geologic processes.

collectively report bugs found through/on Gplates, a free software tool and web portal for tectonic plate modeling.

 What emerged in the bug reporting was the urgent need to generate figures and operations that are not dependent on the expertise of technocrats, experts, or technoscience. As a way into this, in this chapter we mobilize the methodological figures of disobedient bug reporting and disobedient action research to ask — what affirmative forms of responsibility-taking might be possible through taking up these figures within the processes and practices of volumetric geocomputation? The Depths and Densities workshop triangulated Gplates’ visions of the earth with critical software and interface analysis, poetics, and theoretical text materials. Working through Gplates is a consideration of volumetric regimes as world building practices. 
 
in part a response to Yusoff’s call for “a need to examine the epistemological framings and categorizations that produce the material and discursive world building through geology in both its historical and present forms”. In this way, we attended to the material-discursive amalgam of Gplates: the different regimes of truth, histories, representation, language, and political ideology that operate upon it. While staying close to an approach that holds that the underground is no longer (or never was) the exclusive realm of technocrats or geophysics experts



CONFERENCE BLURB

Abstract
One day the future has died, the future of Artificial Intelligence.

Perhaps the future had died when the hope for a borderless, genderless, raceless, classless cyberspace turned into the ignorance of dealing with differences (Chun 2021). Perhaps, the future as we speak of today embedded in cyberspace was already born dead as the assumption that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and algorithms were related to the invention of the computer (cárdenas 2022), and not, for example, to that of the loom. The death of the future could also be traced back to the year 1976, when the first generation of 'computer rock stars' celebrated their Woodstock, but LSD already served only the entrepreneurial interest of the network society and not the only little trafficable expansion of consciousness (Lee 2021).
 
Nothing one knows exactly.

However, in this conference, we aim to understand whether it is possible to embrace Artificial Intelligence despite of it's controversial application and employment in today’s digitalized society. By looking at the promises of AI that go beyond the understanding of pure cognition, this conference aims at exploring AI as an embodied experience, as a sensual, magical, mysterious, poetic technology. A technology that reveals not only the inequality and injustice embedded in the digital and social codes, but is also an experimental attempt, a lab, that is enthusiastic about to discover the possibilities of a decolonial, queer-feminist, capitalist-critical and ecological networked society.

For that, the end of the future is needed in the first place.

To invoke a future of AI, as is currently done in the context of many events and funding programs, risks perpetuating a notion of future that is teleological in the context of Western knowledge production, purpose-oriented, and thus it is little opposed to the solutionism inherent in AI discourse. In this sense, then, the future is dead for us. It provides nothing to the marginalized, not even to the privileged, would the connection between digitalization, extractivism and climate change-induced provincialization of man increasingly come to the fore. The eroded notion of future in view of the destroyed planet cannot help an AI discourse stuck between paranoia and lethargy. Floating in this impasse, we are not presenting a new Atlas of AI (Crawford 2021) with this conference.

We stay with the impossibilities, to interrogate them as possibilities. Without depending on the future. 

With the Impossible Possibilities we think AI with Kara Keeling. We are concerned with the presence of AI, with what goes beyond its expression and produces a surplus that cannot be seen or understood, but is nevertheless present: "Whatever escapes recognition, whatever escapes meaning and valuation, exists as an impossible possibility within our shared reality, however one describes that reality, and therefore threatens to unsettle, if not destroy, the common sense on which that reality relies for its coherence." (2019: 83). What is impossible to recognize is the possibility of AI. For what defies re-cognition exists in a world that is real but not fed into the normative discourse of AI as predictive computation. With this conference, we turn our attention to paradox as a condition of existence that has the potential to shake the common sense of AI. 
Impossible Possibilities not as binary, but as paradox. 
With the pair of opposites, we are not so much interested in trying to define or examine AI through the lens of each diametrically opposed concept (McHardy et al. 2022: 17). Instead, the juxtaposition points to what runs counter to certain assumptions in unexpected ways. Precisely because what is possible cannot be known, AI, in our understanding, operates in the realm of the unexpected and unbelievable, too. We want to discuss AI against the fixations as either dystopian or utopian. To this end, we are organizing scientific-artistic panels and educational-political workshops whose goal is to dwell in paradox.


BLURB VARIA

https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.launch.
glossary terms for plants by numbers:

FS 1. Volumetric computation --> can we claim it as a term emerging from PB research?      
[2. Natureculture continuum] --> It's Haraway.
JR 3. Industrial topology --> not sure what to say about that <-- exchange with the continuum, or re-direct to the continuum?
JR 4. Techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism --> you should have some definition already?  <- not really! haha --- shall we give it a try, together? it's not in a single place...
JR 5. Totalitarian innovation -> this is our own crop... but don't know if it's worth defining it?
6. Informatics of domination --> this is also Haraway.
JR 7. trans*feminist --> copy existing def 
FS 8. Post-exotic --> we explain in a note (but the note is not in the text anymore), so we can copy and adjust? 
[9. matters of care] --> it's De la Bellacasa
FS 10. paranodal space --> copy existing def <<-- it's Zach Blas & Ulises Mejias
FS 11. circluding --> copy existing def (it's Adamceck and Ward)
12. Queer angles --> fun!


3hrs together

TODO
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Image upload
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Abstract
Bio
Keywords
Finish note and send corrections to txt
Finish glossary

Abstract
Chapter abstracts should give an overview of the content of each chapter, including the introduction and conclusion, in no more than 150 words per chapter. 
Where possible please use an impersonal voice rather than personal pronouns.

Keywords
between five and ten keywords for each chapter. Keywords are equivalent to terms in an index in a printed work. They should distinguish the most important ideas, names and concepts in the book or chapter. Keywords are generally single words, though two and three-word specialist terms may be used. Each keyword should also appear in the abstract. It is acceptable to draw a keyword from the book or chapter title, but it must also appear in the text of the abstract. 

Bio


Abstract[251 words... it needs to be max 150...]

Thinking along the volumetric presence of so-called plants in the context of computational tools for botanical data processing, 3D-visualization and informatized vegetation, this chapter presents a plant-based selection of four items from the inventory of the disobedient action-research project “Possible Bodies”, which features manuals, mathematical concepts, art-projects and micro-CT images to wonder about the agency of artifacts of the monoculture of volumetrics. Agitating trans*feminist techno-sciences, this chapters tries to detect the possibilities of a number of modern apparatuses for designation and occupation. The chapter starts with Item 102: Grassroot rotation: a poetic rendering of a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional roots from X-Ray. It continues with Item 109: The Removal of Trees, bringing up how volumetric height mapping reproduces extractivist modes of measuring. Item 110: Interporoussness thinks along Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect, trying to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations. Item 035: Difficult forest starts from a work by artist Sina Seifee and follows the dream of isomorphism between objects in the Amazonian forests perceptible by humans, and by 3D-scanning. Weaving between technical writing, fiction and theory, the chapter asks how “plants” grow with and through the technologies, infrastructures and techniques of 3D. The chapter offers a navigation along these inventory items that could be read as a persistent affirmation of the possibility for radical trans*feminist experimentation, especially in an environment that tends to erase the exciting complexities of naturecultures for the sake of efficiency.

Keywords
Volumetrics, trans*feminist technosciences, intensive worlding, systematic vegetation, agro-optimization, monocultures of 3D, lively math, possible complexities

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

Jara Rocha works through the situated and complex forms of distribution of the technological with a trans*feminist sensibility. They tend to be found in tasks of in(ter)dependent imagination, curation, pedagogy and disobedient action-research. With collective processes like those activated by Possible Bodies, The Underground Division, Vibes & Leaks, Infras Antifas or The Cell for Digital Discomfort they ongoingly study the co-constitutions of technosciences and patriarchocolonial turbocapitalism.

Femke Snelting...

Jara Rocha is an interdependent researcher/mediator who tends to attend to the semiotic-material urgencies of present cultures with a trans*feminist sensibility. They work with infrastructural politics and aesthetics, text logistics, body inscriptions and tests non-formal ways of learning in collective situations like Euraca Seminar, Las promesas de los algos, Relearn Summerschool, or The Darmstadt Delegation. 
Femke Snelting works as artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of feminisms, design and free software. In various constellations, she has been exploring how digital tools and practices might co-construct each other. She is a member of Constant, a non-profit, artist-run association for art and media based in Brussels. 

Totalitarian innovation

Totalitarian innovation is a provocative shortcut to remind us of the rampant hegemonic continuities between sovereignity, domination and absolutism, and how they play together in the ongoing naturalized acceleration of technologies and techno-ecologies. Innovation assumes a particular one-directional relation to futurity, and relies heavily on solutionism, optimisation, techno-fixes and limitless growth. Totalitarian innovation actively imposes developmentalism as the only option and technically prohibits emerging experiments with other forms to govern life that are complex, renegotiable or non-aligned.[1] It sets the conditions for unavoidable dependencies that lead to the persistence of monocultural forms and paves the way for the invention of the elitist formulas of eco-fascism. This provocation fires up a public conversation on the need to disinvest innovation, and to inventively co-exist and organize with the complex of latencies, discontinuities, recursions and absences of techno-nature entanglements.

[1] See informatics of domination

Circluding

"A new term, one that has been missing for a long time: 'circlusion'. It denotes the antonym of penetration. It refers to the same physical process, but from the opposite perspective. Penetration means pushing something — a shaft or a nipple — into something else — a ring or a tube. Circlusion means pushing something — a ring or a tube — onto something else — a nipple or a shaft. The ring and the tube are rendered active. That’s all there is to it."[1]

[1] Bini Adamczak, “On Circlusion,” Mask Magazine, 2016, maskmagazine.com


Volumetric computation

Volumetric computation describes the calculative technologies, infrastructures and techniques for tracking, capturing, modeling and scanning matter measured as volume. In contemporary computation, Volume-metrics are often collapsed with "3D" and its implications are increasingly hard to escape, given its proliferating applications in climate prediction modeling, advanced biomedical imaging, monitoring crop irrigation or throughout the gamify-all approach of overarching industries, from education to agro engineering. [1]

[1] See Volumetric Regimes: Material Cutures of Quantified Presence https://volumetricregimes.xyz


Post Exotic

'Post-exotic' is a term coined by feminist ethnographer and geo-poet Livia Alga: "In the common sense, nostalgia is the malady of return, an attraction that in itself is paradoxical: it is the urge to return to a place to which one cannot stay or cannot imagine parts of one's life to be. Nostalgia fuels 'tourist' or 'duty' returns, and is linked to the idea of having moved inexorably forward. Forward also means forgetting: nostalgia is half-remembering; when you need forgetting it allows you to do so. Memory is constant, we need it wherever we move. In this sense you could say that nostalgia is exotic, memory is post-exotic."

Livia Alga, “there is always someone coming from the south,” (translated by Possible Bodies)''Postesotica'', weblog, accessed October 6, 2020, http://postesotica.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_33.html/


Paranodal Space

Metaphores such as "tree-structure", “nesting” and “rhizomes” mimick vegetation to naturalize nodes as cornerstones of network topologies. Paranodal Space instead shifts attention to “the space that networks leave out, the negative space of networks, the noise between nodes and edges.”[1] The term was also used by artist Zach Blas in his installation Counter Internet, to open up a space for building infrastructural alternatives and for making comprehensible and imaginable that which is beyond the network form.[2] Over-emphasizing moments or points of connection reifies relational hegemonies like the family tree or plant-breeding, and squeezes out any space for the intersectional infrastructures relating bastards, the adopted, the viral, the grafted, the non-aligned.

[1] Mejias, Off the Internet
[2] https://thenewinquiry.com/beyond-the-internet-and-all-control-diagrams/


Queer Angles

Queer Angles are a geometry — for and with the vegetal — which moves beyond the cubic realities formed by Square Angles. Queer Angles deviate from Euclidian geometry, a paradigm with its own straight system of truth, stipulating that parallel lines will always be parallel. Within Euclidanism, non-straight relationships (corners, vertexes or angles) are formed by two lines that meet at a common endpoint, or when a single line deviates from its trajectory. Angles, seen like this, are relational entities that produce their own qualities and quantities, but that are still bound to the core paradigm of paralellism. For reasons of efficiency, hardware optimization, path dependency and compatibility, Euclidean geometry has become the standard for any spatial analysis, including algorithmic vegetation modeling, growth orientation measurement, and irrigation planning. But more-than-human modes of existence are affected by many more complex relations which are constantly and partially re-negotiated. These modes necessitate relational options beyond sameness and straightness, and expanded possibilities for obliqueness. Queer Angles are a mathematical basis for the theory and practice of hyperbolic relations, multiple transversality, open-ended askewness and overt crookedness.


Industrial topology

The existence of so-called plants is increasingly intervened on by various vegetation data processing techniques. Industrial topology is a term to pay attention to the interconnectivity and inter-dependence of the agents involved in the making of the industrial complex of volumetric computation. As a topology, it is invariant under any continuous deformation [1], as a figuration, it makes a statement about the sociopolitical shaping forces and damaging governance by means of industrial exploitation and profit making. The arrangement of the invariant polygons that form its surface matters, as well as the connected dots of a thick continuous network of production paradigms, tools, fabrication techniques and market epistemes that conform a kind of inward-folding surface with very little outside: often deformed, never abolished. The agility with which the industrial topology flows, convokes a type of space-time that is both fast and ubiquitous, while relegating the naturecultural implications of its industrial operations to a blurry background.[2]

[1] Somatopologies https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Somatopologies_(materials_for_a_movie_in_the_making)
[2] The Industrial Continuum of 3D https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=The_Industrial_Continuum_of_3D


Trans*Feminist

Trans*feminist is a denomination which convokes all necessary intersectional and intrasectional aspects around that star (*). Starting from a positioning on the side of trans-gender struggles and against trans-exclusionary forces, the star provokes a halt for the reader, to start a conversation about the distribution of privileges and oppressions which this specific situation or case is implicated in.[1] The star is a powerful element for thickening complexity in the diverse and mutating experiences of needily plural feminisms, walking side-by-side with anti-racism, anti-colonialism, anti-classism, anti-capitalism, anti-specism, anti-ableism, or anti-ageism. In non-Anglo-Saxon cultures, the English term "queer" usually remains untranslated, and the trans*feminist formula provides a more grounded notion.

[1] “The asterisk hold off the certainty of diagnosis.” Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 4.






N O T E S


EXAMPLES IN SO-CALLED PLANTS

virtual landscape design economizing the distribution of wet and dry surfaces;[2] algorithmic vegetation modeling in gaming which renders lush vegetation on the fly;[3] irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies, diminishing water supplies to the absolute minimum;[4] micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:[5]
moisture/heat/dessertification


Volumetric Computation

The proliferating computational technologies, infrastructures and techniques of tracking, modeling and scanning of volumes which are increasingly hard to escape. Computational volumes occupying the world. 3D now used as a synonym for volume-metrics. Given its application in border-patrol devices, for climate prediction modeling, in advanced biomedical imaging or throughout the gamify-all approach of overarching industries, from education to logistics, asking about what is up with 3D becomes especially urgent. How can we at the same time use, problematize and engage with the cultures of volume-processing that converge under the paradigm of 3D?

https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Introduction

Industrial topology / Industrial continuum of 3D

we could call it 3D-industrial complex, to make a clear statement on the sociopolitical shaping forces and damaging limitations by means of exploitation that 3D industries are engaged in, almost without exception.
but we call it topology instead to pay attention, simultaneously, to the interconnectivity and inter-dependence of the agents involved in the making of such complex, invariant under any continuous deformation. The order of these invariant points matter, as well as the connected dots of a thick flowing network of (often deformed, never abolished) paradigms, tools, techniques and epistemes that conform a kind of inward-folding surface with very little outside.[1] The agility with which this topology flows convokes a type of space-time that is both fast and ubiquitous, while relegating the implications of its industrial operations to a blurry background. The phenomenon/figuration of the continuum "points at the damage that results from the convenient assumption that complexity can be an afterthought, an add-on delegated to the simple procedure of parametric adjustment in the post-production stage".[quote ourselves?]

as applied to plants by numbers, we could the industrial topology an artificial phenomenon, but we prefer to call it a sociotechnical phenomenon [2] to not commit to the erasure of the social but rather enlarge it with nature-cultures of many sorts: soil, mineral, moist, crops, genetics, geoengineering systems, agro memories, etc. To put it bluntly: plants, by numbers, make the so-called social flow in specific directions -- tyranically directed, by now, by the industrial continuum of 3D.


[1] somatopologies
[2] industrial continuum of 3D


The industrial continuum of 3D is a sociotechnical phenomenon that can be observed when volumetric techniques and technologies flow between industries such as biomedical imaging, wild life conservation, border patrolling and Hollywood computer graphics. Its fluency is based on an intricate paradox: the continuum moves smoothly between distinct, different or even mutually exclusive fields of application, but leaves very little space for radical experiments and surprise combinations.

(...) show how the consistent contradiction is established, to see the way power gathers around it, to get closer to what drives the circulation of industrial 3D and to describe what is settled as a result. We end with a list of possible techniques, paradigms and procedures for “computing otherwise”, wondering what other worldings could be imagined.
 
Legitimated areas of research spill into management zones with oppressing practices, and in the entrepreneurial eyes of old Modern scientists, the research glitters with startup hunger, impatient to serve the cloudy kingdom of GAFAM.

The continuum continuously expands, scales up and down, connecting developed arenas with others to be explored and extracted. Volumetric scanning, tracking and modeling obviously share some of the underlying principles with neighboring hyper-computational environments, such as machine learning or computer vision, but in three-dimensional operations, the industrial continuum intensifies due to their supercharged relationship to space and time.

By referring to this phenomenon as a “continuum”, we want to foreground how rather than prioritizing specificity, it thrives on fabricating similarities between situations. Its agility convokes a type of space-time that is both fast and ubiquitous, while relegating the implications of its industrial operations to a blurry background. The phenomenon of the continuum points at the damage that results from the convenient assumption that complexity can be an afterthought, an add-on delegated to the simple procedure of parametric adjustment in the post-production stage. 
Our intuition is that 3D goes through a continuously smooth, multi-dimensional but concentric and loopy flow of assembled technicalities, paradigms and devices that facilitate the circulation of standards and protocols; and hence the constant reproduction of hegemonic metrics for the measurement of volume. Such intuition is nevertheless accompanied by another: that computation can and should operate otherwise. This text therefore makes claims for an attentive praxis that activates a collective technical dissidence from the continuous flows of deadly normality, both in the material sense and in the discursive arrangements that power it. 

under the mandate of optimisation, industrial topology escapes from clarity to enter transparency

flow 
...on topology:

topology as the continuos surface that connects points of pre-arranged similarity?

Somatopologies consists of texts and 3D-renderings with diverse densities, selected from the Possible Bodies Inventory. Each of them wonders from a different perspective about the regimes of truth that converge in volumetric biomedical images. The materials investigate the coalition at work between tomography and topology that aligns math, flesh, computation, bone, anatomic science, tissue and language. When life is made all too probable, what other “bodies” can be imagined? In six sequences, Somatopologies moves through the political fictions of somatic matter. Rolling from outside to inside, from a mediated exteriority to a computed interiority and back, it reconsiders the potential of unsupervised somatic depths and (un-)invaded interiors. Unfolding along situated surfaces, this post-cinematic experiment jumps over the probable outcomes of contemporary informatics, towards the possible otherness of a mundane (after)math. It is a trans*feminist exercise in and of disobedient action-research. It cuts agential slices through technocratic paradigms in order to create hyperbolic incisions that stretch, rotate and bend Euclidean nightmares and Cartesian anxieties.

The specific vectors that make the Industrial Continuum of 3D indeed continue, are first of all those related to what we call “optimized complexity”. It is a particular way to arrange volumetrics in the interest of optimized computation, such as drawing hyper-real surfaces on top of extremely simplified structures or the over-reliance on average simulation. We see this eschewed attention for certain complexities and not for others in how simplified color-coded anatomy travels straight from science books into educational software, and biomedical imaging alike.



Techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism

Totalitarian innovation

Trans*Feminism

Post Exotic

'Post-exotic' is a term coined by feminist ethnographer and geo-poet Livia Alga. "In the common sense, nostalgia is the malady of return, an attraction that in itself paradoxical: it is the urge to return to a place to which one cannot stay or cannot imagine parts of one's life to be. Nostalgia fuels 'tourist' or 'duty' returns, and is linked to the idea of having moved inexorably forward. Forward also means forgetting: nostalgia is half-remembering; when you need forgetting it allows you to do so. Memory is constant, we need it wherever we move. In this sense you could say that nostalgia is exotic, memory is post-exotic."

Livia Alga, “there is always someone coming from the south,” ''Postesotica'', weblog, accessed October 6, 2020, http://postesotica.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_33.html/.

(need to say we translated? and what does it have to do with plants maybe?)

Paranodal space

Plant-based metaphores such as "tree-structure", “nesting” and “rhizomes” naturalize moments or points of connection as cornerstones of network topologies, infrastructural lay-outs or relational hegemonies. Paranodal space shifts attention to “the space that networks leave out, the negative space of networks, the noise between nodes and edges.”[1] The term was adopted by artist Zach Blas for the installation Counter Internet, to open up a space for building infrastructural alternatives and for making comprehensible and imaginable that which is beyond the network form.[2]

[2] https://thenewinquiry.com/beyond-the-internet-and-all-control-diagrams/
[1] Mejias, Off the Internet




NOTES

The term 'paranode' was adopted by Zach Blas from Ulises Ali Mejias and his book Off the Internet. For Blas, the paranodal opens up a space for imagining a new commons in between the Internet’s network nodes. "I am attracted to the concept of the paranode because it calls forth at least two militancies: the practical work of building infrastructural alternatives (which are often still network alternatives), and the intellectual or artistic task of making comprehensible and imaginable that which is beyond the network form."[paran] For Mejias, it is “a term that conceptualizes that which is other to — or an alternative to — a network configuration. (...) Derived from neuroscience, the paranode is the space that networks leave out, the negative space of networks, the noise between nodes and edges.”[off]
 
[paran] https://thenewinquiry.com/beyond-the-internet-and-all-control-diagrams/
[off] Mejias, Off the Internet 

Also, it was in the transmediale affective infra conversations, interesting the so-called plant thinking connection?

https://archive.transmediale.de/content/affective-infrastructures-a-tableau-altar-scene-diorama-or-archipelago

Dominant trope of trees, rhizomes, nesting
node = articulation = internode
intra-nodal matters?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_anatomy#/media/File:Plant_Anatomy.svg
node is where you cut
relational hegemony also uses plants for representation of blood-based networks: family tree...
"Rhizome ... is a modified subterranean plant stem that sends out roots and shoots from its nodes."
bastards, foundlings, adoptions, ...

Circluding

"A new term, one that has been missing for a long time: 'circlusion'. It denotes the antonym of penetration. It refers to the same physical process, but from the opposite perspective. Penetration means pushing something — a shaft or a nipple — into something else — a ring or a tube. Circlusion means pushing something — a ring or a tube — onto something else — a nipple or a shaft. The ring and the tube are rendered active. That’s all there is to it."

Bini Adamczak, “On Circlusion,” Mask Magazine, 2016, maskmagazine.com

inside-outside linearity of rings, growth
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0981942822002042
Penetration
Acquifer -- what invades what
soil's circluding ability/ability to penetrate, not just to be worked, used, fertilized etc.

graft
https://www.ugaoo.com/knowledge-center/what-is-grafting-in-plants/
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Grafting-techniques_fig9_322631246
https://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/faculty/davies/pdf%20stuff/ph%20final%20galley/M12_DAVI4493_00_SE_C12.pdf

"Procedures in making a whip-and-tongue graft: (a) Slice cut is made across both the rootstock and scion. (b) A second cut is made to the tongue; the grafter’s hands are locked together to avoid injury. (c and d) Fitting and locking the tongues of the graft partners. (e) Wrapping the whole-root apple graft with grafting tape."

Queer Angles

An angle is formed when two straight lines or rays meet at a common endpoint. The common point of contact is called the vertex of an angle (node!). There is very little world-distance between an angle and a curve, but their technical distance makes it immediately a technopolitical issue.

...
According to Proclus, an angle must be either a quality or a quantity, or a relationship 
[--- renegotiation of their quality/quantity as the basis of queer angles?]
Eudemus, who regarded an angle as a deviation from a straight line


Euclidian geometry is a mathematical paradigm with its own straight system of truth. It is centered around an axiom that stipulates that parallel lines will always be parallel. For reasons of efficiency, hardware optimization, path dependency and compatibility, Euclidean geometry has become the neutral spatial norm for any volumetric analysis, including plants: algorithmic vegetation modeling, growth orientation, pollen transmission, or irrigation planning by agro-engineering. Within Euclidanism, non-straight relationships (corners, vertexes or angles) are formed by two lines that meet at a common endpoint, or when a single line deviates from its straight trajectory. Angles, seen like this, are relational entities that produce their own qualities and quantities, but they are still bound to the core paradigm. What are the queer relational options beyond sameness, parallelism  straightness of lines, that turn them into renegotiable entities? Queer Angles is a mathematical basis to theorize and practice hyperbolic relations, multiple transversality, open-ended obliqueness and overt crookedness.

Queer Angles are a geometry for and with the vegetal which moves beyond the cubic realities that can be drawn by Square Angles. Queer Angles deviate from Euclidian geometry, a paradigm with its own straight system of truth, stipulating that parallel lines will always be parallel. Within Euclidanism, non-straight relationships (corners, vertexes or angles) are formed by two lines that meet at a common endpoint, or when a single line deviates from its straight trajectory. Angles, seen like this, are relational entities that produce their own qualities and quantities, but that are still bound to the core paradigm of paralellism. For reasons of efficiency, hardware optimization, path dependency and compatibility, Euclidean geometry has become the neutral norm for any spatial analysis, including algorithmic vegetation modeling, growth orientation measurement, and irrigation planning. But modes of existence are affected by many more complex relations. We (more-than human queer existences which are constantly and partially re-negotiated with forms of vegetal life) need relational options beyond sameness and straightness, and possibilities for renegotiable obliqueness. Queer Angles are a mathematical basis for the theory and practice of hyperbolic relations, multiple transversality, open-ended askewness and overt crookedness. 



https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-020-78243-z/MediaObjects/41598_2020_78243_Fig7_HTML.png









 [while staying with the rigour that volumetrics as a field requires.]

straight angles vs queer angles


"5. If a line intersects two other lines such that the sum of the interior angles on one side of the intersecting line is less than the sum of two right angles, then the lines meet on that side and not on the other side. (also known as the Parallel Postulate)"


In other words: queer rigour shall also involve plants, and numbers.


, and where all corpo-real volumes are located in the cubic reality of their square angles












against straightness as an operational basis
obliqueness, transversality, crookedness
discomfort/roughness?

from our texts:

in introduction:
 The three Cartesian axes both constrain and orient the chapter, as they do for the space of possibility of the volumetric. It takes seriously the implications of a mathematical regime based on parallel and perpendicular lines, and zooms in on the invasive operations of virtual renderings of fleshy matter, but also calls for queer rotations and disobedient trans*feminist angles that can go beyond the rigidness of axiomatic axes within the techno-ecologies of 3D tracking, modeling and scanning. 

in x,y,z:
    trans*feminist angles that can go beyond the rigidness of axiomatic axes within the techno-ecologies of 3D tracking, modeling and scanning. It is an attempt to think along the agency of certain cultural artifacts, hopefully widening their possibilities beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being. 

in somatopologies:
    
    
Euclidean geometry is located at the intersection of metric and affine geometry. 
It is based on 5 axioms: 
1. A straight line can be drawn between any two points. 
2. A straight line drawn between two points can be continued infinitely 
3. A circle is defined as all of the points a certain distance (radius) from any point. 
4. All right angles are equal. 
5. Parallel lines will maintain an equal distance from one another Non-euclidean geometry is what happens when any of the 5 axioms do not apply.It arises when either the metric requirement is relaxed, or the parallel postulate is replaced with an alternative one. In the latter case one obtains hyperbolic geometry and elliptic geometry, the traditional non-Euclidean geometries. When the metric requirement is relaxed, then there are affine planes associated with the planar algebras which give rise to kinematic geometries. 

in invasive imagination:
slices are aligned with the rigidity of Euclidean geometry, a mathematical paradigm with its own system of truth, a straight truth.[8] It relies on a set of axioms or postulates where the x, y and z axes are always parallel, and where all corpo-real volumes are located in the cubic reality of their square angles.[9] For reasons of efficiency, hardware optimization, path dependency and compatibility, Euclidean geometry has become the un-questionable neutral spatial norm in any software used for volumetric rendering, whether this is gaming, flight planning or geodata processing. But in the case of biomedical imaging, x, y and z axes also conveniently fit the “sagittal”, “coronal” and “axial” planes that were established in anatomical science in the 19th century.[10] The slices have been made to fit the fiction of medicine as seamlessly, as they have been made to fit the fiction of computation.

in Ultrasonic Dreams

Data layering on top of one another to form the entire superuser organism. As the machine body rotated, electrons continued to be produced. Electrons colliding with atoms, transmitting through the entire body these electrons sources. A pleasuring intensity of measurements at all possible partial angles. They were awash with a thickness, a plurality of experiences occurring simultaneously – like a person walking by. Intensities began to break up, the different transition rates, and a voice started to sound numbers. As the final time-stamp was called, the gnu begun to gather on the edges of the drill site, occasionally drinking from the runoff pools, with their blunt muzzles and waiting for the signal. 

in so-called plants:
    Queer angles can only arrive afterwards, and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. 









  1. Sophie Boiron <sophie@speculoos.com>, Maria Dada <m.dada@fashion.arts.ac.uk>, pierre Huyghebaert <pierre@speculoos.com>, Phillip Langley <langley.phillip@gmail.com>, Nicolas Maleve <nicolas@constantvzw.org>, <morr052@usc.edu>, Simone Niquille <simone@niquille.com>, helenvpritchard@riseup.net <helenvpritchard@riseup.net>, Sina Seifee <sina.seifee@gmail.com>, kym ward <kymberleyward@googlemail.com>, Cox, Geoff 8 <geoffcox@lsbu.ac.uk>, Krysa, Joasia <J.M.Krysa@ljmu.ac.uk>, manetta berends <mail@manettaberends.nl>, Dick Reckard <dickreckard@autistici.org>, Ramon AMARO <ramon.amaro@gold.ac.uk>, Alejandra López Gabrielidis <cleonike@gmail.com>, Marie Lechner <ml@dadabase.fr>, king hussein <seda@collectifs.net>, francois zajega <frankiezafe@gmail.com>, adva zakai <advazakai@gmail.com>, Tere Badia <tbadtod@gmail.com>, Laura Benítez <laura.benitez.valero@gmail.com>, Ona Bros <onabros@gmail.com>, Emile Devereaux <E.Devereaux@sussex.ac.uk>, Daphne Dragona <contact@daphnedragona.net>, Laura Fernández <laura@medialab-prado.es>, Guenther, Antye (TSS) <a.guenther@maastrichtuniversity.nl>, Zoumana Méïté <zoumeite@gmail.com>, Dennis Pohl <dnnspohl@aol.com>, spideralex <spideralex@riseup.net>, peter <peter@constantvzw.org>, Nerea García Garmendia <nerea@medialab-prado.es>, Eric Snodgrass <eric.snodgrass@lnu.se>, magda tyzlik-carver <magda@thecommonpractice.org>, Marc Herbst <mherb012@alumni.gold.ac.uk>

(Carmen Romero missing)

===
Olga
Celia Lury C.Lury@warwick.ac.uk
Susan Schuppli s.schuppli@gold.ac.uk
Ramon Amaro r.amaro@ucl.ac.uk
+++?
===
Dear xxx,

We hope this email finds you well. We write you to ask another question for Volumetric Regimes, the publication that we were in contact about already a year ago. The book will be finally printed in the coming days, and we have pre-launched it in its wiki form [1] in a number of contexts and with a diverse number of interlocutors [2]. Great experiences so far!

For the paper object, we would like to ask you if you could be interested in writing a small endorsement? We would really be very happy to read your words about it, as we know for certain that your sensibility is going to make it shine :))))

As you know, the length of such endorsement is not longer than a paragraph or a couple of sentences. And it will be excellent to receive them by the end of this month so that Open Humanities Press can circulate them together with the paper object.[3]

Please let us know how this invitation sounds and if you have any concerns in relation?

Looking forward to hearing from you, we send you our kindest regards,

Femke Snelting + Jara Rocha

[1] https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.publication
[2] https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?presentations
[3] http://data-browser.net/db08.html





TO-DO with Manetta:

JARA

chase brochure writer!
- colophon should indicate 2022?
- Hyphenation:
- add Spanish versions on the wiki: imaginación invasiva, continuum, desorientación


FEMKE

-so-called plants text: change totally, or just key parts? CHANGED for new version
-Item index: added new entries (but need to check crossreferences in latest pdf)
the circluding sidebands of circluding 
add clause: "we have done our best to find copyrightholders" 
check image descriptions 
corrections Continuum 

MANETTA

COVER - It looks good but is quite close to DB07 in colour. Could you make the difference more profound? Is there another colour you'd be happy with - less blue/purple? The gradient - although breaking the template (again, as you like to do) - looks good, and your justification seems pretty convincing. /// deeper blue, starker contrast (#3741ea) -- check on dummy
MULTI REMIX - should the circle have more weight to match the other characters? /// NO = Multi Remix
PAGE NUMBERS - need adjusting to run from first inside page. I have made a note. /// page 9 = page 7 OK!
BROKEN WORDS - don't break words across pages as general rule.  130 + 150 + 152 + 165 + 168 + 170 + 171 + 248 /// ask pagedjs: about hyphens on page breaks + hyphenate-limit-chars

LINE BREAKS - after names in page 15 + 239 /// solved in web version, to check how PDF saves it

line breaks before pull quotes: in the leaflet p204: mixing lists and non-lists, needs space
p223, 225 /// before "pull quotes" ... is coherent/decision; decided to do same for conclusion/The Possible Continuums of 3D (local coherence!)

Remark from Geoff: 'endnote numbers looks large in caption text' // Manetta scales!

Page 138, 140 etc. in quotation div: note ref not italics /// sup in quote non-italic Manetta styles!

Q about bold intros /// ignore

Breaking indent rule on 154/in interview /// hahah yes, agree that it is awkward but tried without and it looks worse. So this is the best of two not great options; or introduce linebreaks between paragraphs which seemed too much breaking.

MakeHuman trans*activists = Needs The Good Star /// double check the regex

So Called Plants flow :-/ /// no problems!!!

 — --> small spaces around? /// halve witruimte? --> regex voorbeeld: Clumsy Volumetrics

// redirects in TOC title names

Missing The Good Star: T*fRP, The Extended Trans*feminist Rendering Program

p316 breaking of list "measures" ... left alignment is off in this list

Geoff comment your name on the letter: "is bold necessary? maybe an em dash and indent is better?"

Item index: 



mb updates Nicolas image

Inspired by the motto of the Libre Graphics Research Unit, “TOOLS SHAPE PRACTICE SHAPE TOOLS”, https://osp.kitchen/.
--> Shall we link to the LGRU instead? Ai but the website is down http://www.lgru.net/
OK to keep link to the OSP design! ok!

--> shall we add a link to the inventory in the item index for the print?

---

ONE LAST ROUND
- after item index
- after last details typography + images



check urls op biography
Quote on p221 Romi needs citation
TITLES - We need a consistency of capitalisation for all titles, use of upper and lower case. See comments. 
Dis-orientation and its aftermath (not Dis-orientation and its after-math)
(...) = [...]
Titles -- capitalize; after colon: capital, but not capitalized.
We hardly encounter ... leave as is --> FS
SUPERSCRIPT NUMBERS - again consistency is needed + not italics for footnote numbers when following italics.
USE OF ITALICS/INVERTED COMMAS - check consistency when emphasis is needed throughout.
EM DASHES - again needs consistency, suggest longer em dash and gap either side. Search and replace:  — (Clumsy Volumetrics)
ENDNOTES - full stops after URLs, etc., and plenty of copyedits. 
REFERENCES - in a couple of places only so suggest making Notes as well - see comments. /// we only found/changed in Kym


EMAIL TO GEOFF

explain order of names





---

Dear Helen,

Thank you again for your precise comments, we had a good time going through the paragraphs again and it feels sharper now. We addressed almost all of them so we hope this has helped unfold and clarify this chapter? We used the version that was edited for Volumetric Regimes, and copied over your comments, hopefully this works for you.

In relation to the glossary, we ran out of time before getting to them and also did not know how to start. You pointed at some terms but for example Deep implicancy or Natureculture continuum are notions that we use from others' vocabulary toolboxes. These are the ones you referred to in your comments:

Volumetric computation
Techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism
Deep Implicancy
Natureculture continuum

Could you please help us with deciding which 2-3 terms we can take care of, finally?

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Big big hugs,
F+J


TODO LAST ROUND VR
- add so-called plants edit to VR




rendering research feat elodie https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.renderingresearch


VOLUMETRIC 
http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyingmuros, accessed October 6, 2020, https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk.


Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: 
1. that [switching of agencies] of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics 
and 
2. that [switching of agencies] of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the realistic establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.


  there is always someone coming from the south

nostalgia is exotic, memory is postexotic

nostalgia was a very strong push, an emotion that oriented us to become aware of what was lost and that we would have continued to lose by heading north or west.

in the common sense, nostalgia is the disease of return, an attraction that is paradoxical in itself: it is the tension of returning to a place in which, in any case, one is unable to stay or imagine parts of one's life. nostalgia fuels "tourist" or "duty" returns and is based on the idea of having gone inexorably forward.
moving forward also means forgetting: nostalgia is half-remembering, when you need to forget it allows you to do so.
memory is constant, we need it wherever we move.
in this sense we could say that nostalgia is exotic, memory is postexotic.
since we have returned to the south and the east, and to all our histories, nostalgia has not played such an important role anymore. we have memory, and no longer just nostalgia, of our origins.

the stamp notebooks I made as often as I or someone around me felt the need to exercise memory.
there is always the risk of forgetting.
some words are not just words, they are fruits, things, gestures, ways of loving.  



                                     
Inventories operate in line with other Modern devices for numbering, modelling and calculating so-called plants: herbaria, which function as a physical re-collection of concrete plant specimens; genetic notebooks, which trace lines around and between individuals; Latin nomenclatures, which produce and reproduce taxonomies of species within so-called families within so-called kingdoms; sketchbooks filled with naturalist drawings captured during explorations; and even botanic gardens that arrange lively exotic samples to be experienced in the overseas environments of the metropolis. An inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, and — in contrast with a collection or an archive — they allow easy access to items for re-ordering, removal or replacement. Just like almanacs used in observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories play a role in the becoming of computational herbaria as contemporary apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.





https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342621161/figure/fig1/AS:908665909432321@1593654243643/Botanical-drawing-of-cultivated-black-pepper-a-Lateral-branch-b-Terminal-stem-node.jpg


IMAGE PERMISSIONS: https://cryptpad.fr/sheet/#/2/sheet/edit/SlUdcZjCNO9wog8ZbYi-reTm/

TO-DO:
JR:
- CHECK ALL CREDITS AND LINKS TO IMAGES <-- still need to do this
- email thread of Dendochronology paper: find <-- sorry, currently unavailable as it is on my lost emails threads :(
- change dendochronology image on wiki <-- DONE

FS:
- check National Geographic ref
- find new rootrack image
- check with Sina


------

How "Fair Use" is implemented in Europe (and still in UK too)

3. Member States may provide for exceptions or limitations to the rights provided for in Articles 2 and 3 in the following cases:
(a) use for the sole purpose of illustration for teaching or scientific research, as long as the source, including the author's name, is indicated, unless this turns out to be impossible and to the extent justified by the non-commercial purpose to be achieved;
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32001L0029:EN:HTML

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/intellectual-property-and-the-transition-period
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/448273/Exceptions_to_copyright_-_Guidance_for_consumers.pdf

Fair use of screenshots of games

http://digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/ScreenshotsFairUseRecommendations_DiGRA.pdf







MakeHuman
Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting
[INTERFACE IMAGE]
Default settings, detail of MakeHuman's main interface (MakeHuman version 1.0.2)

MakeHuman is an Open Source software for modeling 3-dimensional humanoid characters.1 Thinking with such a concrete software object meant to address specific entanglements of technology, representation and normativity: a potent triangle that MakeHuman sits in the middle of. But MakeHuman does not only deserve our attention due to the technological power of self-representation that it affords. As an Open Source project, it is shaped by the conditions of interrogation and transformability, guaranteed through its license. Like many other F/LOSS projects, MakeHuman is surrounded by a rich constellation of textual objects, expressed through publicly accessible source code, code-comments, bugtrackers, forums and documentation 2. This porousness facilitated the shaping of a collective inquiry, activated through experiments, conversations and mediations.3 In collaboration with architects, dancers, trans*-activists, design students, animators and others, we are turning 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 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 6. 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. Through its curious naming the project evokes the demiurg, dreaming of “making” “humans” to resemble his own image, the deviceful naming is a reminder of how the semiotic-material secrets of life's flows are strongly linked to the way software represents or allows so-called 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 to us because their persistent 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 into 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 to list “gender” as a continuous parameter, promises wild combinations. Could it be that MakeHuman is a place for imagining humanoids as subjects in process, as open-ended virtual figures that have 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 the technique of simply interpolating parameters labeled “Gender”, “Age”, “Muscle”, “Weight”, “Height” “Proportions”, “Caucasian” “African” and “Asian” suffices to make any representation of the human body. The unmarked extremities of the parameters are merely a way to outsource normativity to the user, who can only blindly guess the outcomes of the algorithmic calculations launched by handling the sliders. The tool invites a comparison between “Gender” to “Weight” for example, or to decide on race and “Proportions” 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” (not “Sex”) and “Weight” are labeled as singular but “Proportions” is plural; “Age” is not expressed as “Young” nor “Old”. The last row of sliders appears as a matter of fact, right below other parameters, as if they are equal to the others, proposing racialised features as compareable and ojective vectors for body formation. They are represented as finite (and consequently factual) because they are named as a limited set of options for mixture. We want to signal two things: one, that the persistent technocultural production of race is evidenced by the discretisation of design elements such as the proportion of concrete bodyparts, chromatic levels of so-called skin, and racialising labels; and two, that the modeling software itself actively contributes to the maintenance of racism by reproducing representational simplifications and by performing the exclusion of diversity by means of solutionist tool operations.

Further inspection reveals that even the promise of continuity and separation is 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”. Parametric design promises infinite differentiations but renders them into a mere illusion: obviously, not all physical bodies resulting from that combination would look the same, but software can make it happen. 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, they 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 started rewriting the interface, we could see it behave differently.12 By renaming labels, replacing them with questions and more playful descriptions, by adding and distracting sliders, the interface became a space for narrating through the generative process of making possible bodies.
A second technique of representation at work is that of geometric modeling 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 indebted 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, together with other accessories such as hats and shoes. As a consequence, the additional set of skin-textures included in MakeHuman does not include the genital add-ons so that a change in material makes them stand out, both as a potentiality for otherwise embodied otherness and as evidence of the cultural limitations to represent physical embodiment.
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, 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 collectively uncovered its disclosures and played in its cracks.15 We could see the software iterate between past and present cultural paradigms as well as between humans and non-humans. These virtual bodies co-constructed through the imagination of programmers, algorithms and animators call for otherwise embodied others that suspend the mimicking of “nature” to make 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. Computing and re-computing an endless a-Modern mestizo, an escape from representational and agential normativities, software CAN and MUST provide the material conditions for wild combinations or un-suspected renders.18

planning moved here --> https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.publication.planning
letter to Stuart pad --> https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/publication.lettertostuart
wiki-to-print --> https://volumetric-regimes.vvvvvvaria.org
other files --> https://cloud.constantvzw.org/s/bC5GtbqJax5MBQJ
acknowledgements --> https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.publication.acknowledgements
index logic --> https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.publication.index
permissions tracking sheet: https://lite.framacalc.org/9q88-vr_permissions

PRESENTATIONS:
- Madrid Ada Lovelace Day (with Alejandra, Carmen, Marta and Blanca) https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/adalovelace.madrid.2021
- CSNI (with Martino Morandi) https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/VR_presentation_CSNI
- ...

CHECKLIST

- Barad: they
- check urls intern (when move to volumetricregimes.xyz) -> later with Manetta
- homogeniz/se grammar, "" etc. -> Marc
- FS check payments
- Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey
- Simone C Niquille (no dot)
- Helen V. Pritchard (V.)
- Romi Ron Morrison (not: Romi R. Morrison or Romi (Ron) Morrison)
- When using the term bodies without qualifier (virtual, xxx) in PB texts, always use "" or so-called. 
- F/LOSS (not FOSS, FLOSS or F/LOSs)
- Modern (capital) --- but Romi uses it without
- Denise Ferreira da Silva 
- Python programming language
- LiDAR
- treat items as titles: Item 33
- trans*feminism (with star) --- ??? (we use TransFeminism in a-clinical + LiDAR on the rocks?)
- check: soLiDARity hahahahah (left it in continuum txt) ;-))
- x, y, z (not: X, Y, Z)
- Axis/Axes --> Marc
- Trans*feminism (we use TransFeminism in a-clinical + LiDAR on the rocks?) --> explain also local context
- in referencing our own work, do we prefer sources published elsewhere (ie transmediale journal) or 'in this book'?
- Check for: double spaces, ', ", ....

TODO

Needs something: skipping over the race sliders a bit too fast (MakeHuman) ---> Make a connection to Romi exchange?
Check footnotes Nicolas/Maria --> on the way, Deadline: 18 October
Permission emails + biographies
Endorsements
Read + comment prologue
Check + integrate Marc's comments
Integrate comments from Helen on intro??? ---> after 20th
Export and re-import into wiki
Intro: (maybe) Modern (+try to bring the euclidean/cartesian anxieties there) Cartesian and Euclidian ???
cross-referencing of item numbers ---> later / needs a print
Finish editing Manetta's letter -> JR 

---

PERMISSION EMAILS

https://psu.libanswers.com/faq/333836
https://www.collegeart.org/programs/caa-fair-use/best-practices

Blanca Pujals + bio check (no images?)
Sina Seifee + images + bio check (screenshots/media) !!!!!!
Nicolas Maleve + images + bio !!!!
Simone C Niquille + images + bio check !!!!
Maria Dada + images + bio check (ok?)
Phil Langley + bio check (no images)
Helen V. Pritchard (Clumsy computing, Geohackers, Lidar on the rocks, Ultrasonic) + images + bio check (Sina + Pascale)
Kym Ward (Circluding, Open Boundary) + fee + bio (use graph?)
Sophie Boiron / Pierre Hughebaert + bios + Spec bio (their own imgs)
Romi Ron Morrison + bio check (no images)
Manetta Berends (no images)
Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting (screenshots, cunningham, re-use, painting lynn reynolds) !!!! ---> image credits

notes from call with geoff

- color check with issue 7, 8 color is not there yet
- footnotes: oke to keep the arrows

Forms!
Endorsements ... ?! Kathryn? Celia Lury? Susan Schuppli? 
PB + Geoff

Process of review to OHP?
A dummy

+or- known...

Blanca Pujals https://www.blancapujals.com

Katrina Sluis https://soad.cass.anu.edu.au/people/associate-professor-katrina-sluis
Maria Dada
Maria Ptqk
Alberto Corsín Jiménez 
Ramon Amaro
Nishat Awan
Eric Snodgras
Olga Gourinova
Carmen Romero
Annet Dekker
Goda Klumbyte
Jennifer Gabrys
Sayid Mustapha Ali
Cristina
Martino
Seda
Dennis Pohl
Michael Murtaugh
Aymeric Mansoux
Florian Cramer
Mónica Bello
Susan Schuppli
Preciado --> asked but no answer
Geoff
Cecilia Lury https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/people/celia-lury
Janneke Wesseling

unknown... cold calls
Aud Sissel Hoel
Da Silva
Luciana Parisi https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_topic/control_societies/
Wendy Chun
Stacy Alaimo

Deadline 22 October? (means postponing the handing in to OHP?)

woking with Manetta:
    https://volumetric-regimes.vvvvvvaria.org/
    https://volumetric-regimes.vvvvvvaria.org/pagedjs/
    


===

Look-a-like considerations
- author names on cover: use titles instead?
- cover: use stuarts software, to then use it as masks for an image
- look-a-like cover: when looking through half-closed eyes the cover should look the same

===

Archive before purge 04/09/2020: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.publication/timeslider#39252

https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.bookdata
https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.publication.intro
https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.design
https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.publication.spec - mockup https://citerne.speculoos.com/s/26FTnkMpFHsR4Pt#pdfviewer
unfolded https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/book/index.php?title=Unfolded
https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/publication.lettertostuart


intro:

whole book:

Plan B

---

Dear Paul,

¿Cómo estás?

We are writing you from the spacetime tangle of Possible Bodies: a para-academic queer, transfeminist, antifa, anticolonial and artistic  "disobedient action-research" project on the mutual constitution of so-called bodies with techniques, technologies, protocols and infrastructures involved in the metric of volumes. 

Right now, the 5-year process is materializing in a multi-track book which will be published under the title "Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence", by Open Humanities Press this fall. Since we started editing the publication, we dreamt, sometimes joked, about asking you for a bonus track, but never dared. Last week when we read your short piece 'Nos salvará la creación colectiva', we again felt a direct affinity with your project to call for (and inventing) "a collective creative praxis that re-invents social institutions and ways of reproducing life on the planet", so here we are.

Possible Bodies has been deeply affected by your work, both because of the analytical rigour and also your persistent radical affirmation of the urge for a widening of what's indeed techno/somatopolitically possible. We are pasting the introduction below, in case it facilitates the landing.*

Concretely, our question is whether you would be interested and have time to invent an accompaniment to this publication? We are closing the editing in the end of September and since it is a bonus track, its manners can be as experimental as you choose them to be.

Of course we would be more than happy to jump on a call to speak about this all live, in case that helps?

Thank you so much in advance for considering this,

Un fuerte abrazo,

Femke Snelting and Jara Rocha


* What is going on with 3D!? This question, both modest and enormous, triggered the collaborative research trajectory that is compiled in this book. It was provoked by our intuitive concern about the way 3D computing quite routinely seems to render racist, sexist, ableist, speciest and ageist worlds.[1] Asking about what is up with 3D becomes especially urgent observing its application in border-patrol devices, for climate prediction modeling, in advanced biomedical imaging or throughout the gamify-all approach of overarching industries, from education to logistics. The proliferating technologies, infrastructures and techniques of 3D tracking, modeling and scanning are increasingly hard to escape.

Asking "What is going on with 3D?!" meant to fabricate many more questions: Why is '3D' now used as a synonym for 'volume-metrics'. Or: how did the metric of volume become naturalized as '3D'? How are volumes calculated, accounted for and represented? Is the three-dimensional technoscientific organization of spaces, bodies or objects only about volume, or rather about the particular modes in which volume is culturally mobilized? How, then, are computational volumes occupying the world? What forms of power come along with 3D? How are the x, y, z axes established as linear carriers or variables of volume, by whom and why? If we take 3D as a noun, it points at the quality of being three-dimensional. But what if we follow the intuition of asking about 'what is going on' and take 3D as an action, as an operation with implications for the way we can world otherwise? Can 3D be turned into a verb, at all? How can we at the same time use, problematize and engage with the cultures of volume-processing that converge under the paradigm of 3D?

One important question we almost overlooked. What is volume, actually!? Let's start by saying that volume is a naturalized construction, a representation of mass and of matter, by means of calculation. The concept of volume is therefore inextricably connected to particular ways of measuring dimensional worlds. The cases and situations compiled in this book depart from this important shift: volume is not a given, but rather an outcome, and volumetrics is the set of techniques to fabricate such outcome. 

Full intro here: https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/book/index.php?title=Introduction
All materials here: https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/book

----




Dear Eric,

How are you, these days?

We (Jara and myself) are so happy to announce that the compilation stage of the Possible Bodies publication (titled "Volumetric Regimes: Material cultures of Quantified Presence") is done. So we now need to subject it to review! 

Knowing of your nuanced abilities as an editor, we dreamt of you reviewing the introduction to the book -- and this is why we are writing. Would you be interested and available to read and comment this text in the coming months? It is not a very long text (4200 words), but we care for it to open up the volume  in a generous way.

We know we ask at an awkward moment now the academic year is closing, and we hope it is still something that could fit your plans for the coming month. The deadline would be already soon, 1 September.

Please let us know about your thoughts, and also of course don't hesitate in contacting us for any questions/doubts/needs!

Once we know if you are interested in doing this, we'll send the material your way :)

Warmest regards,

Jara + Femke


---

Querida Nerea,

¿Cómo estás? ¡Tantos días! 
(te escribimos en inglés porque es un mail conjunto)

Remember where we were that time you came to our presentation in Hangar? :) We (Femke and myself) are so happy to now announce that the compilation stage of the Possible Bodies publication is finally over (it will be titled "Volumetric Regimes: Material cultures of Quantified Presence", it will be published at the data-browser series of Open Humanities Press). So we now need to subject it to review.

Knowing of your nuanced attention and transdisciplinary sensibility as a researcher, we dreamt of you as the perfect companion for an overall-reviewing the content of the book -- and this is why we are writing. Would you be interested and available?

The deadline for that task would be 1st of September; if that is really not possible we can stretch until 15 September.

Once we know if you are interested in doing this, we'll send the material your way :)

Please let us know about your thoughts, and also of course don't hesitate in contacting us for any questions/doubts/needs!

Warmest regards,
Jara + Femke



---

Dear Magda,

(In my dreams I had already sent you this message in April but I cannot find back a trace of it so maybe I was indeed ... dreaming?)

I/We are writing you with a question, 'we' being Possible Bodies in this case. Over the last year, we have worked on bringing together the Possible Bodies research that you crossed at multiple moments, for example during that first bugreport, and around the Depth and Densities workshop in transmediale.

I am not sure if or how much you followed, but the publication will come out this fall at OHP. The material is diverse (scripts, texts, images, graphic contributions) and written partially by us and partially by interlocutors.

We were wondering if you would have time and energy to review the book as a whole; this means to look at the structure, different contributions etc. and to help us understand if there need to be any changes in order for it to work as a volume. It looks like there is not a formal structure for this, so we could discuss your impressions at some point or you send us notes or ...

We know we are sending you this at an awkward moment and the deadline for that task would be already 1st of September; if that is really not possible we can stretch until 15 September.

For your orientation, here is the material which we are compiling on a wiki: https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/book/index.php?title=Unfolded If you are interested in this task, we will send you the pdf.

We are unfortunately not able to pay for this but we are ready for doing a task in exchange.

Please let us know about your thoughts, and also of course don't hesitate in contacting us for any questions/doubts/needs!





(it is not the letter I was going to write you ;-)) 



Dear Pau,

We are writing you with a question, 'we' being Possible Bodies in this case (Femke and Jara). Over the last year, we have worked on bringing together the Possible Bodies research that you crossed already on the project's wiki: https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/book/index.php?title=Volumetric_Regimes

We are not sure if or how much you followed, but the publication will come out this fall at OHP (Open Humanities Press). The material is diverse (scripts, texts, images, graphic contributions) and written partially by us and partially by interlocutors.

We were wondering if you would have time and energy to  peer-review the book as a whole; this means to look at the structure, different contributions etc, and give us general feedback.

Knowing of your editorial sensibility and our shared concerns, it would be great to count on you for this task.

Let us know about your thoughts on this and please don't hesitate in contacting us for any questions/doubts/needs!

All the best,
Femke + Jara

---

Hello, Susan

We have met now many years ago in Malmö, when you joined the Bug Reporting workshop on emoji skin modifiers that I proposed with Peggy and Roel. [1] This work was continued with Jara Rocha (in cc) during the last years into a project called Possible Bodies [2]. During this journey we have returned to your inspiring work on material presences regurlarly, and are very touched by your precise and persistent rendering of traces and evidences in your recent publication, "Material Witness". xxxxx

As a wrap-up operation of the Possible Bodies endeavour, an edited volume is now in preparation, which is the reason that we write you. We can of course explain a lot more, but we wanted to ask you if you would be interested in writing a short foreword (of circa 1500 words?) to this publication. It would be an honour for us if you could find the time to do so.

The book is titled "Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence", and it will be published by the DATA_browser series of Open Humanities Press (OHP).
We are now at the stage of entering P2P reviewing process, with the kind accompaniment of Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa as the editors of the series. 

The book will be published this fall, which means that we would need your foreword by mid September latest.
We are of course more than happy to organize a call, to speak through this proposal and answer to your potential questions live or by email :)

Please let us know what you think? 
Looking forward to hearing from you!

Warmest wishes,
Femke Snelting + Jara Rocha


[1] Modifying the Universal: xxx
[2] Possible Bodies: xxx
[3] Volumetric Regimes: xxx
-------------

Dear Geoff and Joasia,

We are so happy to be able to finally send this package to you!! Please find the pdf here: xxxxx (generated from the wiki); if that is more helpful we can eventually also provide the materials as .odt.

Hereby some notes on the forthcoming workflow:

Some of the materials have already been discussed intensely with peers, others (like the introduction) are more fresh. Our idea for the additional P2P review process is, to ask these scholars (apart from yourselves, of course!):


We haven't asked any of them yet; maybe you have other proposals? Please let us know and we go from there. We would like to do this as soon as possible, so we can hopefully propose August 1 as a deadline and aiming to end the final editing in September.

A few other things that we plan from now on:
- Manetta Berends is already working on the re-making of the layout.
- We have written Susan Schuppli to ask her for a short foreword. We are waiting for her response, and will keep you posted!
- There are still some conceptual repetitions between texts, due to the iterative research process. It is a bit hard for us to address them now, so we will edit out after (and with the help of) the reviews.
- We will deal with the homogeneization of references/footnotes later, also after review.
- Missing from the pdf are obviously the foreword, and all of the annexes.

From now on, and until the publishing moment, the wiki will stay frozen to avoid attention loops :)

Looking forward to hearing from you!
Warmest wishes,
Femke + Jara





After having sent you this email, we will not edit the wiki until the review process is done.



on bibliography/references formatting:

    - Sina, uses this model (and has Notes + References): 
    - Dis-orientation uses author-date model (and has Notes + References): 


TODO before deliver

SATURDAY UNTIL 15h
- intro - JR last round any time before 10 april. notes to be done JR> FS will wrap-up
- continuum - references and come back to items
- conversion mediawiki -> .odt?
- chase/include/edit workshop script Lidar FS -> JR last round any time before 10 april. Decide if scripts go in or out? FS DONE merged with Prospectus
-- convert footnotes So-called plants and Helen, convert footnotes Disorientation? FS

SATURDAY AFTERNOON
--try Manetta's system to convert to .odt
- check stylesheet OHP, notes + bibliography, Chicago http://www.data-browser.net/style-guide.html >>
-- fix references at our own texts. FS
-- how to refer to materials in our own book? 'in this same book'



read all in pdf for flow and repetition (and silly mistakes)

14:00 stop edit on the wiki, FREEZE.
write Schuppli 30m
Write Geoff 30m
- plan for p2p review: list of proposed reviewers (Magda, Nerea, Eric, Pau, ...) 
- 'we have written Schuppli' 
- there are repetitions, no homogenization of footnotes yet
- the wiki will stay, freezed.
- plan for workflow after: Manetta, 
export to .odt, send email




LATER
-- fix references in other people's texts  -- I would like to propose to outsource this task, as the transcripts... what do you think, FS?


- images Helen FS weekend
- Combine / edit Visual essay: Somatopologies (materials for a movie in the making) (2017) + text/transcript: somatopologies: a guided tour II (2019) FS Sunday -> JR last round any time before 10 april
- notes + edits continuum -- FS 1 April, on wiki
- kym: DONE // she needs to send it to us!!!! + write (FS) add to wiki (FS)
- check with Helen: Plants by numbers, yes DONE: Bloomsbury book will come out only in 2022 so it will be a reprinted/v2 for their book
- Convert Continuum anecdotes into Items? YES, JR
- re-title Disorientation and So-called plants? YES, JR
- transcribe + edit phil FS> Phil 5/4


SUNDAY:
- print and read through from cover to cover :-D
- edit out doublings (re-introduction PB, inventory, prospectus! ... repeated use of same material) --> sunday
- letter to stuart (do we mention it already? or only once we actually started it?) YES (announce it will be there), close to the colophon
- prologue invitation: Ramon Amaro / Susan Schuppli / Luciana Parisi / Olga Gurianova 
- Phil interview PB = FS? (Femke thinks about it)
- JR email to Geoff: Qs about notes&bibliographic style (but Executing practices uses autor,date) so please clarify what's needed?, anonymization, general tips for this stage of the process?, 
- JR takes care of Preciado and Wynter's refs in continuum, reference items

LATER
- (can be after review) References to where texts were earlier ... gather on a page 'Note on sources' (ref. Haraway Reader)? consider making a page called "Resources" to indicate sources of texts from elesewhere.

new item:
    125
    the disappearing things around us
    
    “Whether it is cultural heritage, archeological sites or the natural world”, his personal mission is to build technologies that help explore the world and the disappearing things around us. The engineer and entrepreneur aims an arsenal of synchronized cameras at a caged rhinoceros, and explains: “In the end, you will be able to stand next to the rhino, look into the animal’s eye and this creates an emotional connection that is beyond what you can get from a flat video or photograph. The ultimate application will be, to bring the rhino to everyone.”

    Elizabeth Claire Alberts, Mongabay, 21 October 2020, “The rhino in the room: 3D scan brings near-extinct Sumatran species to virtual life” https://news.mongabay.com/2020/10/the-rhino-in-the-room-3d-scan-brings-near-extinct-sumatran-species-

Img (Harapan in the enclosure with the cameras. Image by Corey Jaskolski): https://imgs.mongabay.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2020/10/21143934/IMG_0087.jpg





ok will super need you for the references etc. this is freaking me out. the titans, or the format? the heavy academic hat. yes, samewise. in general, to reference. yes. this is going to be needed for the continuum, and for example the wynter stuff i have no handle on...

sooo this just to say that the closing will involve putting still some hrs by each of us, besides the moments on 1 and 6 april.
i am trying to do as much as i can, yes I know, I see it -- and i am very sorry if i can't put more! I would love to have all the time for this. It is super important as a moment!
it is really ok, really and i am SUPERRRR motivated but some things i just can not do yes yes understood / not on my own no no, and you shouldn't.

do you think we can then postpone the work of Estuary a bit?
i am wondering... the thing is the week after i start XPUB (which I have basically NOT prepared haha)
and the weekend of 10-11?
maybe i can ask Ona is she's on with me taking those days? so she can meet her dad and go for excursions or anything.
that weekend i can do!! ok let me try!
hpew
maybe it is not necessary, and then we go have weekend :-D but I think it is? ok i am asking
have to go now!
but will be here on sunday!
here=project
yeah
super. we're almost there
thanks for today!!
:-*******
same here, such a pleasure to think with you always!!! it's mutual <3<3<3<3
bye bye! xxx


REVIEWER 1
I think this is an excellent edited collection that I personally would love to read. 
I don't have any suggestions for changes. I think the proposal itself is not very clear; it is only because I know the project that the book comes out of, and I was very interested in it and tried to gather material about it online, which proved very difficult, that I understand what it is about. If it goes beyond you, and you need to convince a board to publish this book, the editors would need to write a longer explanatory section engaging with the core concepts explored in the project. There is not much material submitted to assess style and readability.
The topic is timely and it fits the series exceptionally well. I especially like the speculative imaginative dimension explored through nonstandard forms of writing, which is both very trendy and hard to find good examples of. I think the topic as it addresses the computational production of material stuff acts as an exciting addition to all the popular debates about the immaterial data production. The ways in which it addresses the rendering of material bodies, humans and things, in mathematical, algorithmic, computational industries' terms are complex and make this book a reference point for theorists, artists and designers alike.

REVIEWER 2
I have looked through the proposal of the ‘Volumetric Regimes’ volume and must say I really do like it. I think it is very interesting and relevant work, and I also like the fact that it offers various modalities of writing, publishing and interlocuting which is vital given how multi-level and complex the issue of 3D computation and especially visualisation has become. I do very much like the outline of this work and the division into various areas like somatopologies, signs of clandestine disorder, x/y/x dimensionality, parametric unknowns and depths and densities. The variety of papers and approaches within those sections is really contributing well to the overall volume and reflects the complexity of the topic. There are perhaps 1-2 aspects of this that I find somewhat missing. 
Given that topics such as imaginaries and normalisations - mentioned in the proposal as key/central here - have been indeed very prevalent in the social science of late, perhaps it would indeed be good to also have a social-scientific foreword (preferred) or afterword which will discuss those concepts and how their understanding in the social science could - and should - be made relevant to the 3D computation and or mediated though the contributions presented here. I believe the volume would profit from such additional social-critical framing, not to mention it would also make it more relevant to the wider audience including in e.,g, critical and cultural sociology, or in more traditional media and cultural studies. Such a social-scientific framing/embedding could also tackle somewhat the qualitative/quantitative divide in the social science and would be able to show that 3D computation becomes a very efficient way of mediating that division by way of qualitative visualisation and interpretation of what is essentially quantitative or quantified data. This would be relevant and also constitute a very relevant response to e.g. the critique of big data and related approaches in the qualitative and critical social science. Essentially, what could be shown through his work is that 3D computation is not only a way to visualise and aestheticise results but also a way of creating new objects of knowledge which escape the traditional divides like the qualitative vs. quantitative one.





Ramon
- written reminder 5/
- no answer.

Prologue
- talk to Maria -> about Olga
- talk to Maria - 15/1 11:00?
- talk to Geoff 8/1 -> ask for prologue proposals; invite.
- prologue-er starts early february

Wendy Chun
Da Silva
Olga
Parisi https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_topic/control_societies/


Cecilia Lury https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/people/celia-lury
Alberto Corsín Jiménez 

Seda
sent
considering; write again 4/2

Nicolas
DONE

Kym
- sends first draft mid-jan, final end jan
- meeting  15 at 9h
- read, comment, add to wiki
- meet 4-5 feb, finishing

Helen
- demand 28th --> reminded again on 5/1
- read, comment, add to wiki
- remind her 29/1: we reallllly need it by Sunday

Spec
- demand something by 7 january, meet on 8 january
[reminder e-mail thursday morning]
put on wiki -- grrrreat
DONE

Maria
- Jara first round, then Femke, then rework - 15/1
- FS sent once added her comments -> 6/1 + round 2
- meet 4/2 10:30? finishing

Phil
- process/transcribe 
- Femke first round of transcription -- finishing

Romi
DONE

Manetta
- write her to start planning in January? - done, 6/1
- meet 19/2 at 11

Continuum
- Jara did first rounds, now together?
mornings of 28, 29, 30/12
- continue/finish along January
- finish this w/e, friend review

Intro
- we did first rounds, now ...

Sina
- Sent a reminder -- 8 at 10:00
first round discuss 4/2
finish 11/2 (we originally said end of jan)

-------------------


Hyperrealism, and its necessities
it takes 40 days to run the model, costly. 50 different models ... coastline, wind, ... each of them is massive. Imagination costs too much! Prediction as a best guess
Scales of truth

Romi -- references
Maria -- read
Nicolas --  reply!





*Depths and Densities: Accidented and dissonant spacetimes
interlocutors
- Abelardo G. F.?
- Kym Ward?
- Daphne Dragona?
- Shaka McGlotten
- Bureau d'Etudes
- Max
- Emile
- Dennis Pohl
- Seda
- Marie Lechner
- Ruth (Furtherfield)
- Jorge Marzo
- 

indirect interlocution
- Povinelli?
- McKittrick?
- D.F. Da Silva? https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/transformation-unfolding-the-future/
- Marina Otero
- 

(Possible) repetitions
- Kym
- Helen
- 


ROMI
23 October first response
29 Oct we write them back
Response from Romi before the 7th of November

NICOLAS
Conversation 22 October to check progress/ideas; end October
FS + JR send some notes 23/10
NM sends a structure/draft 28/10

PHIL
Conversation 16 October; needs transcription + editing

HELEN
'end of October' (need to check in once FS is in BCN)

MARIA
'end of October' (need to check in once FS is in BCN)

KATHRYN
'end of October'; reminder sent. Maybe meeting 22 or 23 October

RAMON
Probably end of December? Need to check with Geoff

PIERRE + SOPHIE
Listen to file 
http://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/files/R26_0042_1.WAV

FEMKE + JARA
- introduction
- edit existing: doubles, notes, ...
- continuum


FRESH BLURB sent to Geoff 08/10/2020

3D computation has historically co-evolved with Modern technosciences, and aligned with the regimes of optimisation, normalisation and hegemonic world order. The legacies and projections of industrial development leave traces of that imaginary and tell the stories of a lively tension between "the probable" and "the possible". Defined as the techniques for measuring volumes, volumetrics all too easily (re)produce and accentuate the probable, and this process is intensified within the technocratic realm of contemporary hyper-computation. The ubiquity of efficient operations is deeply damaging in the way it gradually depletes the world of all possibility for engagement, interporousness and lively potential. Volumetric Regimes: material cultures of quantified presence proposes an urgent intersectional inquiry into volumetrics to foreground procedural, theoretical and infrastructural practices that provide with a widening of the possible.

Volumetric Regimes brings together diverse materials from an ongoing conversation between artists, software developers and theorists working with techniques and technologies for detecting, tracking, printing, modelling and rendering volumes. The contents of this book-in-the-making can be accessed here: https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/book

Contributors: Ramon Amaro, Sophie Boiron, Maria Dada, Pierre Huyghebaert, Phil Langley, Nicolas Malevé, Romi Ron Morrison, Simone C. Niquille, Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, Kym Ward, Kathryn Yusoff.

example:
http://data-browser.net/db08.html

///////////////////////////////////////////////



TO-DO September 3/4
- Manetta
- Romi, https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.romimorrison
https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.mariadada
- Ramon, Kathryn, Helen, 
Phil -> https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.publication.phil-langley
JR goes to these injections and turn them into questions for the call
Conversation: Maria https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.publication.mariadada
Refreshed invitation: Nicolas, 
- Pick up plants text
- Continuum text next steps
- ask Helen about how she's 
- tell Geoff about Manetta<-yes!
- make a new meeting with Manetta in November

https://whospeaks.eu/glossary/

THIS TEXT NEEDS TO BE ROLLERCOASTER / the industrial rollercoaster of 3d
https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/book/images/7/74/Continuum_brighton.pdf

Volumetric techniques make up the volmetric, co-habit:
-- POV / Point cloud
-- Mesh
-- Rendering
-- Hallucination

What jumps are being made:
-- Attention jumps: Generalized-specific: public-private, detailed-low-res, objective-subjective, realism/plausibility
-- Size jumps: micro-macro [size]
-- Time jumps: slow-fast [speed=density in resonance, ecography etc]
-- Dimension jumps: data to 2D to 3D; flat to volume

What regimes/paradigms are activated - hegemony
-- Colonialism [white supremacy]
-- Patriarchy
-- Capitalism [sillicon valley]
-- Computationalism
-- Human exceptionalism? [democracy, anthropocene]

How are these jumps facilitated, what carriers/methods
-- Universalism: Standards, interoperability
-- Efficiency: Optimisation/agility but also austerity, neo-liberalism
-- Positivist science [euclidian, cartesian]
-- Tech solutionism

Through what, do this jump happen?
-- hardware
-- software
-- middleware
-- ...

Examples of the continuum
mining <-> biomedical [scale, dimensions, density, foregrounding] How: non-invasive imaging
law <-> porn ["the real", the truthful, hyperrealism] How: low-res high res; what is important
border-control-complex <-> agriculture [flow control, detection/recognition, segmentation] How: machine-learning meets detection


military
biomedical <-> architecture
biomedical <-> gaming

law <-> gaming

agriculture <-> 





- Daphne
- 


TO-DO June 15th, 2020
- prepare conversation with Romi: perhaps draft the questions that we would start the interview with, so they can see?
- planning for Summer writing: 
-- plants (next weeks, 'finish' 13 July, deadline 30 September)
-- continuum (JR starts until 31st August; FS takes on until 10 August. Finish in September)
-- Romi
- October: intro
- mail to Manetta?


- email Kathryn
- email Povinelli -> Thursday
- Nicolas
- Maria (read)
- Pierre & Sophie?
- finish editing wiki pages: signs of clandestine disorder workshop script, script for lidar workshop, 
- write Ramon? or later?


https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/somatopologies/files/guides/somatopologies_FR.pdf

10/05/2020

https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.publication.dimensionalaxisofpower

between now and 22nd May
- read materials Romi, come up with questions
- complete chapter wiki: prospectus
- send email to Romi on the 22nd with Questions
- write someone else from the list: Kathryn, Ramon, 


*Volumetric Regimes

- Introduction (Possible Bodies, Femke Snelting & Jara Rocha)
- somatopologies: On the ongoing rendering of corpo-realities
- Signs of Clandestine Disorder: The continuous after-math of 3D computationalism
- x, y, z: Dimensional axes of power https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.publication.dimensionalaxisofpower
- Parametric Unknowns: Hypercomputation between the probable and the possible
- Depths and Densities: Accidented and dissonant spacetimes
- Notes, references, index


Meeting FS, JR, 24/4/2020
 


ROMI? https://vimeo.com/showcase/5551892/video/306993793
ABELARDO?
 https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/algorithms.html / https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/stone.html / https://mediarxiv.org/wx98s/ / http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/50 /  McKITTRICK? 
 YUSOFF?