Trans*Feminist Rendering Programme
In collaboration with Possible Bodies
The contemporary infrastructural complex of mining and measuring soil depends on software tools for geological data handling, interpretation and 3D-visualisation. Such tools power techno-colonial subsurface exploration through a combination of stratigraphy, diagenesis, paleoclimatology, structural geology, and sedimentology combined with computational techniques and paradigms for acquiring and rendering volumetric data.
Possible Bodies invites you to inject disobedient action-research tactics. Resistant vocabularies, misuses and/or f(r)ictions that could somehow affect the extractivist bias embedded in the computation of earth's depths and densities.
The trans*feminist Rendering Programme is a project motivated by the political urgency for experiments with geo-modelling, as an affirmative responsibility-taking for this turbocapitalist momentum. Collectively studying the imagery, architecture and language of free, libre and open source tools for geo-modelling, we will surface tensions between the probable and the possible while attending to the regimes of truth, aesthetics, politics and economics they operate with.
Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting and featuring Helen Pritchard ) is a collaborative research, interrogating the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of 3D-tracking, -modelling, -rendering and -scanning..
Ultrasonic dreams of aclinical renderings (Sci-Fi Paper)
When specific intra-active technologies of ultrasound and echography violently rendered real bodies, they wondered about the see-through space-times that were left in the dark. The crystals. They read, listened and gossiped with awkwardness, intensity and urgency. Lively and clumsily smoking cigarettes, they cried as coyotes: The crisis of presence that emerged with the computational turn was shaped by the technocolonialism of turbocapitalism! Through vibrations of feminist technoscience, through friends and lovers, they heard how sonographic images produced life and mattered “real bodies”. Convoked from the dark inner space-times of the earth, the flesh, and the cosmos, particular aclinical renderings evidence that “real bodies” do not exist before being separated, cut and isolated. Listen: there is a shaking surface, a cosmological inventory, hot breath in the ear. DIWO, recreational, abstract, referential and quantifying sonic practices are already profanating the image-life industrial continuum. Ultrasound is no longer (or never was) the exclusive realm of technocrats or medical experts.
These are your new devices, dim and glossy. In this partial imaginary, you’ll deep listen to their non-ocularity, following entanglements with images and imaginations; all the way into ultrasonic cosmo-dreaming, where poetic renderings and sonographies start to (re)generate (just) social imaginations. Let’s collectively resonate against technologies of ultrasound and echography and bet on practices that open up relational, semiotic-material, non-individualistic and non-anthropocentric notions of presence, that bring in transfeminist queer futures.
Possible Bodies feat. Helen Pritchard (2018). “Ultrasonic dreams of aclinical renderings.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 13. 10.5399/uo/ada.2018.13.7 | https://adanewmedia.org/2018/05/issue13-possiblebodies/
Ultrasonic dreams of aclinical renderings (zine)
16 page A6-Zine spinning the abstract for the Fembot Collective-Ada journal: Radical Feminist Storytelling and Speculative Fiction: Creating new worlds by re-imagining hacking. Printed and cut during a residency in Hangar, July 2017. Font: Reglo (OSP), tools: LibreOffice, Gimp
https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/assets/ultrasonic_dreams.pdf