see also:
The Industrial continuum of 3D: https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=The_Industrial_Continuum_of_3D
So-called plants: https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants
The Possible Bodies Inventory
--------------------------------------------------------------------
"Whether it is cultural heritage, archaeological 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.”
[Fragment and stills from: The rhino in the room: 3D scan brings near-extinct Sumatran species to virtual life; featuring Ann and Corey Jaskolski. Besides a National Geographic Fellow, Jaskolski is also founder of a company specialised in creating ‘virtual training data’ for Artificial Intelligence applications]
Applying photogrammetric techniques to capture a specimen of the near-extinct Sumatran rhinoceros as an act of conservation turns the 6th extinction into a spectacle. As a last-minute techno-fix, it renders “the ultimate application” that is available for everyone at home, while the chain of operations it participates in technically contributes to extinction itself. Capturing the rhinoceros depends on mineral extraction and the consumption of turbo-computing, and also continues to trust in the control over time via techno-solutionist means such as volumetric capture and the wicked dream of re-animation cloaked as digital preservation.
-
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. This text is an attempt to 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.
We have named this continuum industrial because its flows are driven by the rolling wheels of extractive patriarchocolonial capital. Think of the convenient merging of calculations for building and for logistics in 3D model-based architectural processes such as Building Information Modeling (BIM). Or think of the efficacy of scanning the underground for extractable resources with the help of technologies first developed for brain surgery. 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.
-
Apples are red,
leaves are green,
branches are brown,
sky is blue
and the ground is yellow.
Apples are red,
leaves are green,
branches are brown,
sky is blue
and the ground is yellow.
Mangoes are red,
leaves are blue,
branches are green,
sky is black
and the ground is yellow.
-
This diagram depicts the ecosystem of FOLDOUT, a five year collaboration between various research departments across Europe on border control in forest areas. FOLDOUT aims to “develop, test and demonstrate a solution to locate people and vehicles under foliage over large areas.” Dense vegetation at the outer borders of the EU is perceived as a “detection barrier” in need to be crossed by surveillance technology. The project received 8,199,387.75 € funding through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 scheme and its central approach is to integrate short- (ground based), medium- (drones), long- (airplane) and very long-range (satellite) sensor techniques to track “obscure targets” that are committing “foliage penetration”. FOLDOUT says to integrate information captured by Synthetic-Aperture Radar (SAR), Radio Detection and Ranging (RADAR), Laser imaging, Detection, and Ranging (LiDAR) with Low Earth Orbit satellites (LEO) into command, control and planning tools that would ensure an effective and efficient EU border management.
To detect “foliage penetration”, FOLDOUT relies among others on “foliage detection”, a technique now also widely used for crop optimization. In agricultural yield estimation or the precision application of pesticides for example, hyperspectral imaging, photogrammetry and machine learning techniques are combined to localize leaves and tell them apart from similar shapes such as green apples or grapes. Hyperspectral imaging scans for spectral signatures of specific materials, assuming that any given object should have a unique spectral signature in at least a few of the many bands that are scanned. It is an area of intense research as it is being used for the detection, tracking and telling apart of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes, forests and people.
FOLDOUT is a telling example of the way “fortress Europe” shifts humongous amounts of capital towards the entanglement of tech companies with scientific research, in order to develop the shared capacity to detect obscurity at its woody barriers. By sophisticating techniques for optimized exclusion, negation and expulsion, Europe invests in upgrading the racist colonial attitude of murderous nation states.
How to distinguish one obscureness from another seems a banal issue, seen from the perspective of contemporary computation, but it is deeply damaging in the way it allows for the implementation of remote sensing techniques such as photogrammetry at various distances, gradually depleting the world of all possibility for engagement, interporousness and lively potential. In the automation of separation (of flesh from trunk, of hair from leaves, of fugitive from a windshaken tree) we can detect a straightforward systematization of institutional violence.
--
Almonds are blue,
leaves are red,
branches are black,
sky is blue
and the ground is white.
Mangoes are black,
leaves are white,
branches are yellow,
sky is red
and the ground is white.
Fugitives are blue,
branches are red,
sky is yellow,
leaves are black
and the ground is white
--
By referring to 3D remote sensing 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 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 techniques such as photogrammetry go through continuously smooth, multi-dimensional but concentric and loopy flow of assembled 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. Our contribution to this day of reflection on bodies and forests 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.