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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
342 pages
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Outline:
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. This book 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
Contents:
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Blanca Pujals
Volumetric Regimes: Material cultures of quantified presence
x, y, z: Dimensional Axes of Power
Rigging Demons
Sina Seifee
Dis-orientation and its Aftermath
x, y, z (4 filmstills)
Invasive Imagination and its Agential Cuts
Parametric Unknowns: Hypercomputation between the probable and the possible
Panoramic Unknowns
Nicolas Malevé
The Fragility of Life
A conversation with Simone C Niquille
Rehearsal as the ‘Other’ to Hypercomputation
Maria Dada
We Hardly Encounter Anything That Didn’t Really Matter
A conversation with Phil Langley
Somatopologies: On the ongoing rendering of corpo-realities
Clumsy Volumetrics
Helen V. Pritchard
Somatopologies (materials for a movie in the making)
From Topology to Typography: A romance of 2.5D Spec
Circluding
Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies
MakeHuman
Information for Users
Signs of Clandestine Disorder: The continuous aftermath of 3D-computationalism
Endured Instances of Relation
An exchange with Romi Ron Morrison
The Industrial Continuum of 3D
Signs of Clandestine Disorder in the Uniformed and Coded Crowds
So-called Plants
Depths and Densities: Accidented and dissonant spacetimes
Open Boundary Conditions: A grid for intensive study
Kym Ward
Depths and Densities: A bugged report
Jara Rocha
We Have Always Been Geohackers
The Underground Division
LiDAR on the Rocks
The Underground Division
Ultrasonic Dreams of Aclinical Renderings
Possible Bodies
Appendix
The So-called Lookalike
Manetta Berends
Publication History
Biographies
Item Index
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."
– Olga Goriunova, Professor, 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
Volumetric Regimes is produced with support from London South Bank University and Liverpool John Moores University.