SCRIPT 15/06/2019 -- Volumetric ecologies
Possible Bodies is a collaborative enquiry on the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of bodies produced by the ubiquitous volumetric technologies of 3D-tracking, modelling, rendering and scanning. The research collective iteratively observed that while volumetric technologies seem to be situated in specific domains and regimes, their corpuses of knowledge persistently affect and confirm each other. We have grown convinced that the mutual affections in parallel technical development contribute to the distributed crystallization of standard operations informed by hegemonic interests in efficiency, control, probability and optimization.
The contemporary infrastructural complex of mining and measuring soil depends on software tools for geological data handling, interpretation and 3D-visualisation. Such tools belong to what could be called the contemporary regime of volumetrics, that is the socio-technical politics that emerge with the measurement of volumes and generation of 3D objects. Geomodelling software contributes to techno-colonial subsurface exploration and extraction by enlisting, amongst others, 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 for example bio-medical imaging, entertainment industries and border policing.
Motivated by a political urgency for trans*feminist experiments with volumetric geo-computation techniques, the Underground Division of Possible Bodies decided to take a leap of both scale and time: from individual somatic corpo-realities (or zoologically recognized organisms) towards the so-called body of the earth.3 We made that jump collectively with a group of companions, that participated in Depths and Densities, a workshop that took place in Berlin in the context of transmediale festival 2019. We proposed the participants in the workshop to explore Gplates, a free software tool and web-portal for tectonic plate modelling that generates volumetric renderings.
Urgency, performative bugreport
[FS]
[the underground] is no longer (or never was) the exclusive realm of technocrats or geophysics experts
[FS]
item 090: Model Our Planet
item 114: Earth grabs back
[JR]
Layers are drawn onto the globe and map views in the order in which they are displayed in the Layers dialog.
Layers at the top are drawn on top of layers below them.
To change the visual ordering of a layer simply drag it onto another layer.
Either the unexpanded part of the layer (the part containing the layer name and type) or the coloured bar on the left (expanded or unexpanded) can be grabbed in this way.
You can still grab a layer when it is expanded - you just need to grab in those areas of the layer.
Typically the mouse cursor changes to a handgrab icon over areas that allow layer dragging, and grabbing.
[FS]
item 113: The eyes of the rock
item 082: Ultrasonic dreams of aclinical renderings
[HP]
The machine began to rotate slowly. She swallowed the paramagnetic contrast agent in one go, preparing her vessels to render themselves later. When the metallic taste faded, she could smell the ancient chestnut trees blossom nearby. Her crystal studded belt was stored with the pyrosome pendant in a strongbox outside the perimeter and the radio-pharmaceutical body-paint shimmered, still wet. Across from her, the others followed and struck an A-pose. Judging by the roar of the crowd that was barely audible from inside, tonight they would finally make a living.
Following their post-certification dreams, they ran their own techno-ecological show in excess of vision. The machine was rigged together from a salvaged General Electric Discovery MR750w and a Philips Ingenia 3.0T. For effect, several pieces from a scanner built in the seventies by the Electric and Musical Industries conglomerate had been added. This aclinical setup had cost virtually a million but when dismantled, the hardware fit on a standard trailer and the open sourced software did not take up more than two solid-state drives. The certificates doubled as a license for speculative imaging and now their only worry was how to pay for the astronomic electricity bills without starting a forest fire.
The math was breathtaking. Volumetric figures pulsated back and forth between two to three dimensions, transforming images into accidented surfaces and surfaces into ghosts. There were mountain areas divided by sharp ridges, and watersheds preventing the draining of enclosed reservoirs. Methane leaked out of the old wells below and caused tiny explosions each time an image hit the surface. Calculating the distance between the edges of those catchment basins, the exponential boundaries between objects computed on the fly. There were dazzling colors as the sinographs peaked and the cubes marched. Whirling polygonal meshes exploded into a cloud of voxels before resurfacing as new nauseating contours, trapped in the vapours of the display. The continuing presence of the leftover, remnant of the former plutonium plant included potentially anything that had escaped the nature refuge.
When the shadowgraphs appeared, the crowd howled as coyotes. Laminograms of differently densed matters rendered onto and through each other, projecting iteratively reconstructed insides onto the outer surface area. Collarbones entangled with vascular systems. Colons encircled spinal chords and a caudal fin, a pair of salivary glands vibrated with a purring larynx at a frequency of 25 to 150 Hertz.
[FS]
item 099: Grassroot rotation
item 005: Hyperbolic spaces
[JR]
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.
item 115: Fossil fuel renders to come
item 114: Earth grabs back
[JR]
We have always been geohackers
[HP]
Layers are drawn onto the globe and map views in the order in which they are displayed in the Layers dialog.
Layers at the top are drawn on top of layers below them.
To change the visual ordering of a layer simply drag it onto another layer.
Either the unexpanded part of the layer (the part containing the layer name and type) or the coloured baron the left (expanded or unexpanded) can be grabbed in this way.
You can still grab a layer when it is expanded - you just need to grab in those areas of the layer.
Typically the mouse cursor changes to a handgrab icon over areas that allow layer dragging, and grabbing.
[FS]
The front of a T-shirt says: we have always been grabbers. There is a focus on the semantic network on grabbing, these gestures somehow populating the vocabularies of geomodeling software. So there is a wondering about the agency of such grabbing – how is it distributed?
[JR]
The math is breathtaking
[HP]
The back of the T-shirt says: Earth is for those who work it, la tierra es para quien la trabaja. This brings in a second layer of observation on ownership and property that is also intensively populating the vocaulary of geophysics tools.
[FS]
Technology keeps referring to when you can grab the earth, and then later it continues: “you can still grab the earth”, this re-occurring.
[JR]
The math is breathtaking.
[HP]
quote it's a little bit like having Google Earth with a time slider for the whole history of the world
if all the semantic network of geomodelling software is based on handling and grabbing as a key gestures in relation to the body of earth, a loss of agency and extractivist assumption slip in too smoothly, and too fast. land grabbig - a dark, heavy, violent, arbitrary actions, forced loss of possession, illegal private landholding, violent exploitations, environmental damage. How might they introduce these geotraumas into geomodelling software?
So, as well as the static implications imposed to a stable earth that is available for grabbing, how about the earth grabs back?
[FS]
item 006: On a screen near you, the history of the world
item 007: Worldsettings for beginners
[JR]
quote:
If the point of origin changes, the world moves but the body doesn't'
end of quote.
[FS]
In the nauseating semiotic context of 3D modelling, the word 'world' starts to function in another, equally real but abstract space. Through the design of interfaces, the development of software, the writing of manuals and the production of instructional videos, this space is inhabited, used, named, projected and carefully built by its day-to-day users.
[JR]
quote:
'The origin does not have to be located in the centre of the geometry (e.g. mesh). This means that an object can have its origin located on one end of the mesh or even completely outside the mesh.'
end of quote
[FS]
In 3D-modelling software, there is never not just one world.
On the contrary, each object has its own point of origin, defining its own local coordinates. its own world. Multiple world-declarations are a way to handle local transforms on single objects within global coordinate system. It allows you to manipulate rotations and translations on a local level and then outsource the positioning to the software.
In computational reality, so-called 'bodies' and so-called 'objects' exist in their own regime of truth, which makes multi-perspectives a matter of calculation. Following the same processual logic, the concept of 'context' in Blender is a mathematical construct, calculated around the world's origin. Naturalised means of orientation such as verticality and gravity are effects, only applied at the moment of rendering.
[JR]
quote:
"This is a two-handed program. You need both hands to operate it. This is most obvious when navigating in the 3D View. When you navigate, you are changing your view of the world; you are not changing the world."
end of quote.
[FS]
So, why not change the world?
At the one hand, the transposition of the term 'world' into modellihrough its linkage to a vocabulary and practice of control, its world-view stays close to that of actual world domination.
3D modelling software operates with two modes of 'world'. One that is accepting the otherness of the computational object, somehow awkwardly interfaces with it, and onother that is about restoring order, back to the so-called 'real'. The first mode opens up to a widening of the possible, the second prefers to stick to the plausible.
[HP]
We have always been geohackers.
ng software functions as a way to imagine a radical interconnected multiplicity, and opens up the possibility of political fictions derived from habitual software practices such as scaling, displacing, de-centering and/or alternating. On the other, t
Response and Q& A
Ramon
—
Naunced approaches to the projects - implications of the act to the performance..
volumetric spatial termpoal phoneomna..
thinking through the volume.. £D space.. something be must filled.. with this volume.. performs the rollercoaster of the condition… what are the possibilities.. initial condition.. existing category of the pre-question of what can be colonised.. what type of bodies.. are possible with them .. space.. Maggie what type of body is possible in that space -what the terms of extraction are.. anatomical planes.. epidermilising.. digital. to reinforce the category.. fascinated… world making mapping.. world setting.. two questions.. if we are t assume the volume itself that can be colonised.. if our response to the condition i a non euclidean .. it another condition that must bring euclidean back to life…. maggie… grabbing back… .. disruption… maggie non human perception.. what possible bodies emerge.. emergence as type of anticipation — perceived divide.. not really problematising the tension between the two… what habit means.. the fantasy becomes the sensible of reality within the anticipation.. what consequence when the other than…. give this where does one act within this act of multimodal existence.. even if we attempt to act the how and where does someone act and what is the consequences.. what are the consequences of generating something which cannot —the GAN as the anxiety of which we must reply..
not just to be filled but to be filled in increasing optimising ways
-beyond animist.. different information.. layers of what constitutes the real all the time.. if we really inhabited a plastic universe of possibility and no hierarchy… ..
where to act … collective journey …
Volumes as something to be filled? …
missing vac… to speak about volumetric..
functioning as apolitical tool.
Isue with how agency is distributed on the volumetric regime - the enclosure - and some how there.. trying to name things differently… when there is an extra leyrs of appearing..
leaving space for something else… the possible might mundane..quite close to the volume relationalities..
optimisation villain out every single crack 0 different types of wiring - in amongst the sparks. different writing the bug report.. computational type of writing… .what does the intervention of the bug report .. what it does to opening up the volumetric pace..
Maggie - writing i another layer in creating and undoing the certainty and naming and perspective.. often having running alongside the visuals.. excessive experience.. do you see the neural networks as something that is writing.. Feel acutely aware of how hard it is to usefully imagine into these intelligence an consciousness.. information processing.. alongside the human is not - coasting on irrational..
haptic and pushing into a deep space.. for my brain to grasp.. baroque excess. irritating.. some friends - conceptually — castro .. animal becoming.. subject. world.. process…… flipping of a species.. ..o fixity..
Material specificity of the artwork - the relation - relations hip of the volume and the sufarnce.. techniques that the work facilitate .. grabbing, dragon, layering.. in terms of volume.. the body that is rendered in those works.. one of the things cit across both of the projects the ideas of possibility what happens when rendering in the bodies and what is not possible and not plausible..
— the surface and volume inseparable.. video degrading.. digital.. long time to intervene and degrade it…
unrecognisable and the light and movement is till the same.. ..
applying things wrongly.. After affects.. normal video image.. chroma chatter.. massively to do with the surface and the screen always a big black circle where the scanning circle .. where it can’t be see.. using that as
— building worlds - making worlds - using silicon valley - for the betterment of the earth - how can the generation of possible worlds, plural worlds - be perceived as a commitment to this world rather than a retreat. animation .. strange medium.. point towards the infinite realm of possibilities, ethics beyond finitude, bring into sensory awareness, computational information being used to map visualisation of a data scape forms of geospecal mapping that allows the earth to be hollowed out - two sides of affordance - map posisble worlds, speculative worlds, during so in a way that is directly attached and connected to the matierality of it.. hyper and deborah work point us in that direction.. working with architects think about speculative worlds.. end up in a dystopia - lawrence lek etc - dystopia. Enter into brooks salon. possible future speculative world that if not utpoic but not dystopia, the future we might want.. plausible platform towards that. not easy t o do but its the challenge to do.
— tracking the data,…
— habits being reconfigured..
https://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=12598
Volumetric Ecologies
Friday June 14
11.00am - 1.00pm
Demo open to public
1.00pm - 5.45pm
Workshop
Volumetric Demo (chaired by Rachel Falconer)
Demo and research workshop providing an opportunity to engage with current practice and research across the volumetric field. Including work by artists and practitioners Nishat Awan, Marta Di Francesco, Clareese Hill, Hyperbation, Hyphen-Labs, Maggie Roberts aka mer, Possible Bodies: The Underground Division (Jara Rocha, Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting), Jane Prophet and more tba.
With responses from Ramon Amaro, Maria Dada, Claudia Dutson, Rebecca Coleman, Federico Fasce, Jennifer Gabrys, Deborah Levitt, Joel McKim, Shela Sheikh, Kathryn Yusoff. Chaired by Rachel Falconer.
Workshop
1pm: Arrival and experience the work, informal introductions.
1.25pm: Introductions Rachel Falconer, Helen Pritchard, Joel McKim and Deborah Levitt.
1.50pm: Nishat Awan
2.05pm: Marta Di Francesco <-- VR, memories
2.20pm: Depths & Densities, Possible Bodies: The Underground Division, presented by Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting.
2.35pm: Q&A and roundtable discussion
3.35pm: Coffee and Demo [= break]
4pm: Maggie Roberts <-- deep dream, synthetic human-nonhuman ecologies
4.15pm: Rachel O’Reilly?? TBC
4:30pm: Pocket Penjing, Jane Prophet <-- augmented reality
4.45pm: Discussion and roundtable <-- respondents
5.45pm Wine
6.30pm - 8.30pm
Volumetric Ecologies: Keynotes PSH LG01
Introduced by Helen Pritchard and chaired by Rachel Falconer
Deborah Levitt, The New School in Conversation with Joel McKim, Birkbeck, University of London. Featuring presentations by Hyphen-Labs
8.30pm: dinner
Deborah Levitt, The New School
Living in the Pluriverse: Animation Philosophy, VR, and Experiments in Cosmotechnics
Understanding lives as media forms and media as life forms opens a way to address the most pressing of our contemporary challenges, in particular how to enable pluralism and promote ecological regeneration in the milieu of planetary computing. I counterpose “the world” as it served as a fundamental reference point for a tendency in film theory, often grounding claims of representational fidelity and ethical vocation, to the many worlds rendered in the pluriverse of animation. If for the former life functioned as an ontological problematic—what is life? what is death?—the latter compels us to think life in relation to world. Or, more precisely, lives in relation to worlds. In this view, life and world are co-emergent in each case, informed by the technical, material, and ethical procedures that constitute their milieux. The multiple ontologies of animated worlds enable us to imagine and experience vitality and liveliness as different types of qualities differently distributed across a world’s elements: figures, grounds, scales, rhythms, etc. Drawing on these animatic features, I describe how emerging media allow us to use world making to model various cosmotechnical life-worlds, and pose the question of how we might put these to work to imagine ecologically and socially diverse and sustainable futures.
8.30pm Dinner. Albert!!
--------
Importance of re-orienting the volumetric turn towards multiple disciplines and genders; documenting this moment of turning.
'Traces of the turnings'
Invite people early to see the work!!
- The turnts! / Twists
There are two things:
- Somatopologies demo (from 11h on, and during the break, and with wine). Make a cover/colophon for the occasion + Print English guides! https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/somatopologies/seoul/somatopologies_seoul.pdf
- 15min of "Possible Bodies: Underground Division"
Exciting a conversation.
The scale jump when using the industrial continuum when difrracting upon the - bodies, tomographies used towards the bodies of the earth .. the scale + situation leap - milestone geanology in the work and change of the scale of the body that is being attended to the volume of earth, of subsurface......
Sci-fi: show/read a few lines from the science fiction -- approach volumetrics through poet(h)ics
show some of the ways of working together - read aloud..
It's a little bit like having Google Earth with a time slider," said Dietmar Müller, Professor of Geophysics at the University of Sydney's School of Geosciences.
And
In another promising application, the software may be used to help locate oil, natural gas and mineral deposits far below the Earth's surface. GPlates will enable researchers to uncover associations of specific types of rocks and minerals with plate boundary configurations, mantle
https://wun.ac.uk/article/screen-near-you-history-world
+ Bug reporting article
share the collective research aspect: workshop, ongoingness,,,
*trans-feminist scanner school
hows:
- methodology: workshops, [calvinist] performances, fair, recording, not-taking on pads, inventorying...
- genres: si-fi, bugreport, software reading, academic writing, ..
- disobedient action-research <-> political urgency
the somatopologies performance kind of stuff is to bring different elements in time together from the materials that we have. Either to pick an element, already to explain the relationship between bug report, disobdeient research. Could perhaps be performative in a remix of different elements, things, to read, things to explain, elements that flow together. Script it in a more systematic way we can be sure to...
script it as a score
“[the underground] is no longer (or never was) the exclusive realm of technocrats or geophysics experts”:
3 voices interlacing/braided
texts, images
- somatopologies video https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/somatopologies/
- xyz filmstills https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/xyz/
- texts: bugreport, a-clinical, disorientation,
- fanziposter,
The underground is no longer or never was an exclusive realm of technocrats or geophyisics experts
5m intro --
15m performing: showing images + reading
[image] Item 090: Model our planet https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?090
Gplates video / capture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-i7jRhFaN0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_hKAc3y-3Q
[text] Item 114: Earth grabs back https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?114
JR / FS : Quotes from the transcription from Depths and Densities workshop: on grabbing / you can still grab the earth: at Gplates a stable static earth is available for grabbing
*[image] Item 113: On a screen near you, the history of the world https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?113
[text] Item 082: Ultrasonic dreams of aclinical renderings https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?082 [hardware/scanner]
HP
[image] Item 099: Grassroot rotation https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?099
[text] Item 087: The Crisis of Presence https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?087
JR repeats the slogan
[image] Item 006: The eyes of the rock https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?006
[text] Item 007: Worldsettings for beginners https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?007
FS
*[image] Item 115: Fossil fuel renders to come
*[text] Item 114: Earth Grabs Back
a fragment from the text (maybe on the grabbing?) + we have always been geohackers
HP + FS / [JR bonus track]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL7937E582F13B492F&time_continue=13&v=8VyMRrBKeaE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vN0UFtaJpk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYW2uklHZIM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLwNipPEU9A
Optimisation software - multiple variables and weighting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBE4YMBCTK8
https://www.maptek.com/video/manage-and-report-stockpile-volumes/
https://www.maptek.com/video/calculate-underground-stope-volume-in-i-site-studio-6/
https://www.maptek.com/video/product.html
https://sourceforge.net/software/compare/MinePoint-ERP-vs-Promine-vs-Vulcan/
Rockware
ToDo list:
Images/things for the items
https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?pico_edit
pw: possible
113: FS
114: JR
115: HP
Select texts before Thursday 14:00 UK time -- send to Femke
Quotes from the transcription or report, conversation on the grabbing of earth -- JR
+ Earth grabs back from the bug Reporting text -- JR
Worldsettings -- FS
Ultrasonic dreams -- HP send before midday - for femke to compile bring printed copies..
Render timeline video - FS, before Thursday afternoon, send
Render Fossil Fuel renders - HP before Thursday afternoon, send
Make script (put all the textfragments together)
Make textslides - FS, before Thursday afternoon
200 word description - HP will write and email around pad version for edits!
Send the directions for Femke and Jara.
Booklet somatopologies FS + JR (almost done) - HP will print on coloured paper of her choice ;)
---
Cajamarca mines: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mina_de_Yanacocha
CUT Worldsettings for beginners (3-4 mins)
If the point of origin changes, the world moves but the body doesn't' [1]
(...)
In the nauseating semiotic context of 3D modelling, the word 'world' starts to function in another, equally real but abstract space. Through the design of interfaces, the development of software, the writing of manuals and the production of instructional videos, this space is inhabited, used, named, projected and carefully built by its day-to-day users.
(...)
'The origin does not have to be located in the centre of the geometry (e.g. mesh). This means that an object can have its origin located on one end of the mesh or even completely outside the mesh.' [2] In software like Blender, there is not just one world. On the contrary, each object has its own point of origin, defining its own local coordinates. These multiple world-declarations are a practical solution for the problem of locally transforming single objects that are placed in a global coordinate system. It allows you to manipulate rotations and translations on a local level and then outsource the positioning to the software that will calculate them in relation to the global coordinates. The multi-perspectives in Blender are possible because in computational reality, 'bodies' and objects exist in their own regime of truth that is formulated according to a mathematical standard. Following the same processual logic, the concept of 'context' in Blender is a mathematical construct, calculated around the world's origin. Naturalised means of orientation such as verticality and gravity are effects, applied at the moment of rendering. "Blender is a two-handed program. You need both hands to operate it. This is most obvious when navigating in the 3D View. When you navigate, you are changing your view of the world; you are not changing the world." (Fisher, 2014)
(...)
Why not the world? At the one hand, the transposition of the word 'world' into Blender functions as a way to imagine a radical interconnected multiplicity, and opens up the possibility of political fictions derived from practices such as scaling, displacing, de-centering and/or alternating. On the other, through its linkage to (a vocabulary) of control, its world-view stays close to that of actual world domination. Blender operates with two modes of 'world'. One that is accepting the otherness of the computational object, somehow awkwardly interfaces with it, and onother that is about restoring order, back to 'real'. The first mode opens up to a widening of the possible, the second prefers to stick to the plausible.