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VOLUMETRIC REGIMES: material cultures of quantified presence

Edited by Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting)
Published in 2022 by Open Humanities Press
ISBN (Print): 978-1-78542-116-7
ISBN (PDF) 978-1-78542-115-0
340 pages

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Outline:

3D computation has historically co-evolved with Modern technosciences, and aligned with the regimes of optimization, normalization 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.

This book brings together diverse materials from an ongoing trans✶feminist conversation between artists, software developers and theorists working with techniques and technologies for detecting, tracking, capturing, printing, modeling and rendering volumes.

Contributors: Manetta Berends, Sophie Boiron, Maria Dada, Pierre Huyghebaert, Phil Langley, Nicolas Malevé, Romi Ron Morrison, Simone C. Niquille, Helen V. Pritchard, Blanca Pujals, Jara Rocha, Sina Seifee, Femke Snelting, Spec, The Underground Division, Kym Ward.

Wiki version of the book: volumetricregimes.xyz

Endorsements:

"Bodies are concrete reality. Bodies are abstract. When bodies are modelled, scanned, generated in virtual realities, and presented back to us and others, are they real, ideal, neutral, skewed? When abstracted bodies speak for us and do things on our behalf, what politics do they enact? This radical multi-form collective investigation traces the cutting edge of how bodies and subjects are rendered technologically. It proposes multi-dimensional forms of intervention, and claims an experimental horizon of the possible, shattering the mantra of unavoidability."

– Professor Olga Goriunova, Royal Holloway University of London

"Volumetric Regimes makes an essential contribution to the ways in which we must rethink matter politically and ecologically. As the book unfolds, ontological questions of intensities, dimensions, and substance are denaturalised as mere properties of matter that can be measured, modified, and thus computed, which today are exemplified by 3D modelling and parametric design, but are shown to be part of processional life-worlds that relational and mutually informed and informing. Not the partitioning of bodies, particles, datapoints, and spaces as techno-capital and techno-science would have it but a material enmeshment that brings the volumetric into presence otherwise." 

– Susan Schuppli, author Material Witness, MIT Press, 2021

Wiki-to-print development and F/LOSS redesign by Manetta Berends
Source files: git.vvvvvvaria.org/mb/volumetric-regimes-book