https://volumetricregimes.xyz/api.php?action=feedcontributions&user=127.0.0.1&feedformat=atomVolumetric Regimes - User contributions [en]2024-03-29T01:37:29ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.34.0https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Depths_and_Densities:_A_bugged_report&diff=2590Depths and Densities: A bugged report2021-11-24T07:02:25Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== Depths and Densities: A Bugged Report ==<br />
'''Jara Rocha'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Under the guise of a one-afternoon workshop at transmediale 2019, Possible Bodies proposed to collectively study open-source tools for geo-modelling while attending to the different regimes –of truth, of representation, of language or of political ideology– they operate within. It attempted to read those tools and a selection of texts in relation, with the plan of injecting some resistant vocabularies, misuses and/or f(r)ictions that could affect the extractivist bias embedded in the computation of earth’s depths and densities.<br />
<br />
The workshop ''Depths and Densities'' was populated by a mix of known companions and just-met participants (in total, a convergence of circa thirty voices), each bringing her own particular intensities regarding the tools, the theories, the vocabularies, and the urgencies placed upon the table. The discussions were recorded on the spot and transcribed later. This report cuts through a thick mass of written notes, transcriptions, and excerpted theoretical texts, sedimented along five vectorial provocations: ''on the standardisation of time'', ''on software vocabularies'', ''on the activation of geontologies'', ''on the computation of velocities'', and ''on the techniques of 3D visualizations''. Each vectorial provocation was taken up by a sub-group of participants, who assumed the task of opening up a piece of Gplates, a free software tool and web portal for tectonic plate modeling. By holding close a technical feature, a forum, a tutorial, an interface etc. for a few hours, and tensioning these with some text matter from a reader pre-cooked by Helen V. Pritchard, Femke Snelting, and myself, Gplates worked as a catalyst for our conversations. Its community of developers would eventually become the deferred interlocutors of a report.<ref name="ftn313">See for a continuation of these interlocutions, The Underground Division (Helen V. Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting), “We Have Always Been Geohackers,” in this book.</ref><br />
<br />
The following cut was made to share a sample of that afternoon’s eclectic dialogues in what could be transferred as a polyphonic bugged report. All text injections (in italics, on the right side) are quotes taken from the workshop’s reader. All pieces following one already quoted belong to the same author, until the next quote in italics appears. All voices on the left emerged along the workshop’s discussion, which was transcribed by Fanny Wendt Höjer.<ref>See also: “Item 114: Earth Grabs Back,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2019.</ref><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates1.gif]]<br />
<br />
<div class="no-indent"><br />
=== First vectorial provocation,<br> on standardized time ===<br />
<br />
if multiple timescales are sedimented in contemporary software environments used by geophysics, can fossil fuel extractivist practices be understood as time-travelling practices?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''in these troubling times, there is an urgency to trouble time,&nbsp; to shake it to its core, and to produce collective imaginaries that undo pervasive conceptions of temporality.'''''<ref name="ftn315">Karen Barad, “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: on the im/possibilities of living and dying in the void,” ''New Formations 92: Posthuman Temporalities'' (2018).</ref></div><br />
<br />
this urgency is both new and not new<br />
<br />
how is the end of time imagined, in a modelling sense?<br />
<br />
we see discretely plotted colors<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''time isn’t what it used to be'''''</div><br />
<br />
does the body of earth exist in the same timescale as you do?<br />
<br />
or try and witness the whens otherwise<br />
<br />
time tends to be limited to (and influenced by) the observer’s perception but what are the material and semiotic conditions for another kind of time perception?<br />
<br />
sedimented time and coexistence at ecologies of nothingness (aka voids)<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''voids are features that occur commonly in near-surface geophysical imaging. [...] However, voids are often misidentified. Some voids are missed, and other anomalous features are misinterpreted as voids, when in fact they are not. Compare them with real voids, and we determinate the differences based on incomplete data'''''<ref name="ftn316">David C. Nobes, “Pitfalls to Avoid in Void Interpretation from Ground Penetrating Radar Imaging,” ''Interpretation ''6 (June 2018): 1-31. 10.1190/int-2018-0049.1.</ref></div><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates2.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Second vectorial provocation,<br>on software vocabularies ===<br />
<br />
forging a differently fueled language of geology must provide a lexicon with which to attend the geotraumas<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the endurance of a stony patience that doesn’t forget love'''''<ref name="ftn317">Kathryn Yusoff, ''A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).</ref></div><br />
<br />
user engagement with the earth through a 3D visualization software is based on metaphors like handling or grabbing<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''in the lexicon of geology that takes possession of people and places, ''delimiting the organization of existence, the refusal of such captivity makes a commons in the measure and pitch of the world, not the exclusive universality of the humanist subject'''''</div><br />
<br />
you can still grab the earth: at Gplates a stable static earth is available for grabbing<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''a refusal to be delimited is found in the matter of the world and a home in its maroonage; “they wander as if they have no century, as if they can bound time… compasses whose directions tilt, skid off known maps”'''''</div><br />
<br />
also, the use of the verb “to grab” brings with it the history and practice of “land grabbing”, land abuse and arbitrary actions of ownership and appropriation with correlated both dispossession by the taking of land, and environmental damage<br />
<br />
but what if the earth grabs back?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''there is a kind of reason that we will no longer accept tilting the axis of engagement within a geological optic and intimacy, the inhuman can be claimed as a different kind of resource than in its propertied colonial form—a gravitational form so extravagant, it defies gravity'''''</div><br />
<br />
if all the semantic network of Gplates 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<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''forging a new language of geology must provide a lexicon with which to take apart the Anthropocene, a poetry to refashion a new epoch, a new geology that attends the the racialization of matter'''''</div><br />
<br />
most software platforms allow for no resistance, for no possible unavailability<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the praxis of that aesthetic locates an insurgent geology'''''</div><br />
<br />
middle click and drag ¡la tierra para quien la trabaja!<ref name="ftn318">Emiliano Zapata (c.1911).</ref><br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''reconstituted in terms of agency for the present, for the end of this world and the possibility of others, because the world is already turning'''''</div><br />
<br />
and what if the earth grabs back<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the ghosts of geology rise'''''</div><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates3.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Third vectorial provocation,<br>on the activation of geontologies ===<br />
<br />
we are all talking over each other like tectonic plates and strata<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''a time of the geos, of soullessness'''''<ref name="ftn319">Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ''Geontologies: A requiem to late liberalism'' (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).</ref></div><br />
<br />
looking at what geology is implies a reconsideration of assumptions of what life is<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the anthropos as just one element in the larger set of not merely animal life but all Life as opposed to the state of original and radical Nonlife'''''</div><br />
<br />
minerals rocks plates<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the vital in relation to the inert, the extinct in relation to the barren'''''</div><br />
<br />
cannot be separated from time<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''it is also clear that late liberal strategies for governing difference and markets also only work insofar as these distinctions are maintained'''''</div><br />
<br />
but where is the legend we could not read it<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''Life (Life{birth, growth, reproduction}v. Death) v. Nonlife'''''</div><br />
<br />
why this suspension subversion of the living<br />
<br />
why this suspension subversion of the living<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''it is hardly an uncontroversial concept'''''</div><br />
<br />
otherwise the future will keep being missing but wait, the past is also missing the line goes back to 172 million years but earth is 4,5 billion years<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the way data gets laid over particular shapes, how that comes to kind of operationalize particular makings and matterings of the world.'''''<ref name="ftn320">Excerpts from Helen V. Pritchard’s oral introduction to the workshop.</ref></div><br />
<br />
a color-coded chronology is that tone the year of emergence or is it duration of collapse of merging<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''so kind of thinking through the technical and political questions of what is depth and what is density, how they shift depending on the situation they’re operationalized within'''''</div><br />
<br />
a gradient of abstraction is being dangerously portrayed<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the differences perhaps of the densities in geophysics to the densities in something like biomedical scanning, even though both might have tomographic processes'''''</div><br />
<br />
what is the skin of a body its density how is it colored?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''density is not a fixed thing'''''</div><br />
<br />
but why?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''we’re interested in exploring these open questions; how these matter, and how they matter in relation to things like surfaces and their topologies, where there might be densities of power'''''</div><br />
<br />
a chroma chart would be appreciated<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''there’s a kind of thickness in imaginaries of depth: the kind of unknown or unreachable, the removed or the unremovable. But also the kind of dark and morally crooked in bodies, in earth and in desires'''''</div><br />
<br />
like absolute dating of rocks you’re alive, I’m alive/let’s go <br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''but other imaginations of depths in relation to both the earth or the so-called body, or the body of the earth. In particular, the thinking with the kind of writing from geo-philosophy and feminist technoscience, which might suggest that we might tilt the axis of engagement'''''</div><br />
<br />
peel earth’s skin the mantle<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''i think that’s at heart of the Possible Bodies project as well, this tilting of access to a different kind of optic'''''</div><br />
<br />
and peel it back where 4D is time and meets 5D uncertainty<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''to a different kind of intimacy'''''</div><br />
<br />
it does not peel back enough<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''think about the inhuman of earth surfaces, of tectonic plates, of geological strata; they might have another possibility than the proprietary colonial form, which often is the way it gets rendered within things like the modelling tools for say the extraction of fossil fuels or natural gas'''''</div><br />
<br />
''Geontologies'': the need of all bug reports<br />
<br />
[[File:4.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Fourth vectorial provocation,<br>on computing velocities ===<br />
<br />
that is too linear, this is too straight<br />
<br />
data has different densities and intensities and the effects and affects of the single timeline make themselves visible<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''when specific intra-active technologies violently rendered real bodies, they wondered about the see-through space-times that were left in the dark'''''<ref name="ftn321">Possible Bodies feat. Helen Pritchard, “Ultrasonic Dreams of Aclinical Renderings,” in this book.</ref></div><br />
<br />
leaving grey areas that show no data coverage<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the crisis of presence that emerged with the computational turn was shaped by the technocolonialism of turbocapitalism!'''''</div><br />
<br />
where is that information what is this superfiction<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''convoked from the dark inner space-times of the earth, the flesh and the cosmos, particular [amodern] renderings evidence that real bodies do not exist before being separated, cut and isolated.'''''</div><br />
<br />
whole parts of grey earth like you are making a cake you can put toppings on<br />
<br />
grey means there is nothing such as a body of earth it is almost a void<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''they read, listened and gossiped with awkwardness, intensity and urgency'''''</div><br />
<br />
earth used as a template for almost always fractured data<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''listen: there is a shaking surface, a cosmological inventory, hot breath in the ear'''''</div><br />
<br />
zoom in this shaking surface and always find some cracks<br />
<br />
the tool keeps wanting it to be presented as a whole the oneness of earthness as in the oneness of humanness<br />
<br />
there is a persistently imposing paradigm of wholeness and a pretension of full resolution but a body becomes any body only if the whole thing collapses<br />
<br />
but when<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''[the soil] is no longer (or never was) the exclusive realm of technocrats or geophysics experts'''''</div><br />
<br />
swipe it fast so much time in one swipe<br />
<br />
it is almost rude<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''these are your new devices, dim and glossy'''''</div><br />
<br />
take your time scroll scroll scroll deeper<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''where poetic renderings start to (re)generate (just) social imaginations'''''</div><br />
<br />
theres thens truths<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''let’s collectively resonate against technologies'''''</div><br />
<br />
counting backwards and year zero does not stay<br />
<br />
grab that time and<br />
<br />
perhaps if you upgrade the software you can get extra time<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''that bring in trans*feminist queer futures'''''</div><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates5.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Fifth vectorial provocation,<br>on the techniques of 3D volume visualization ===<br />
<br />
who is behind the proposers of the Mercator projection<ref name="ftn322">“Mercator Projection,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection.</ref><br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''postcolonial or hegemonic structures of development'''''<ref name="ftn323">Mark Carey, M. Jackson, Alessandro Antonello and Jaclyn Rushing, “Glaciers, Gender, and Science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research,” ''Progress in Human Geography 40, no. 6 (2016): 770-793.</ref></div><br />
<br />
who is behind one more eurocentric view of it<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''“the centrality of mathematical and technological science… structured by masculinist ideologies of domination and mastery”'''''</div><br />
<br />
from 2D to 3D<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''such institutional, cultural, and scientific practices also affect glaciological knowledge'''''</div><br />
<br />
you are the camera!<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''Questions of who produces glaciological knowledge, and how such knowledge is used or shared, take on real implications when considered through feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology lenses'''''</div><br />
<br />
At Gplates you can replace the pole location grab the pole and drag it<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''indigenous accounts do not portray the ice as passive, to be measured and mastered'''''</div><br />
<br />
while time happens along a linear highlight of cascading data<br />
<br />
'''''folk glaciologies diversify the field of glaciology and subvert the hegemony of natural sciences'''''<br />
<br />
Gplates applies deep familiar metaphors like child plates<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''Of the Earth, the present subject of our scenarios, we can presuppose a single thing: it doesn’t care about the questions we ask about it'''''<ref name="ftn324">Isabelle Stengers, ''The Invention of Modern Science'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).</ref></div><br />
<br />
slide the zoom in and out of a data set of magnetic information<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''to speak of a world which is “prior” and “independent” without implying that it is “single” and “determinate”: it encounters an earth which is very much “already composed” without it thereby being “already totalized”'''''<ref name="ftn325">Nigel Clark, “Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet,” ''Theory, Culture & Society'' (2011): 38-39.</ref></div><br />
<div class="page-break"></div><br />
now <br />
<br />
relocate<br />
<br />
the pole<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''having “a stable identity” in relation to scientific study does not imply stasis or stability per se'''''</div><br />
<br />
slide<br />
<br />
deeper down<br />
<br />
smoothly<br />
<br />
but how when where<br />
<br />
but who what why<br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates6.gif]]<br />
</div><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
=== Software Resources ===<br />
<br />
* [https://asourceforge.net/projects/gplates/files/gplates/2.1/gplates-ubuntu-xenial_2.1_1_amd64.deb/download Gplates Download]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/ Gplates Webportal]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=GSFML Magnesium Picks]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=Geology Geology]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=EMAG2_V2 EMAG2 Magnetic Anomaly Grid]<br />
* [https://www.gplates.org/gpml.html GPlates Markup Language (GPML)]<br />
* [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oZliPsP0zqKry0BV3xTXVQl7EuPoyQCHQ2p_GEuHu18/pub Gplates Tutorial 7.1: 3D Volume Visualisation Importing and Visualising 3D Scalar Fields]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=Geology EarthByte Gplates Portal Geology]<br />
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_hKAc3y-3Q G.plates on fictional planet]<br />
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLMpa0b4hls&list=PL0F9ejAtqLT8Vu0_uNjwkdgEoydBTcVze GPlates Tutorial 1.1: Loading and Saving Data]<br />
* [https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/ Enhanced Shuttle Land Elevation Data]<br />
<br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
| This text constitutes the report of a workshop of the same name that Femke Snelting, Helen Pritchard and Jara Rocha conducted during transmediale 2019 and was published on the issue #3 of the festival's journal: https://transmediale.de/content/depths-and-densities-a-bugged-report<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Depths_and_Densities:_A_bugged_report&diff=2589Depths and Densities: A bugged report2021-11-24T07:00:34Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== Depths and Densities: A Bugged Report ==<br />
'''Jara Rocha'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Under the guise of a one-afternoon workshop at transmediale 2019, Possible Bodies proposed to collectively study open-source tools for geo-modelling while attending to the different regimes –of truth, of representation, of language or of political ideology– they operate within. It attempted to read those tools and a selection of texts in relation, with the plan of injecting some resistant vocabularies, misuses and/or f(r)ictions that could affect the extractivist bias embedded in the computation of earth’s depths and densities.<br />
<br />
The workshop ''Depths and Densities'' was populated by a mix of known companions and just-met participants (in total, a convergence of circa thirty voices), each bringing her own particular intensities regarding the tools, the theories, the vocabularies, and the urgencies placed upon the table. The discussions were recorded on the spot and transcribed later. This report cuts through a thick mass of written notes, transcriptions, and excerpted theoretical texts, sedimented along five vectorial provocations: ''on the standardisation of time'', ''on software vocabularies'', ''on the activation of geontologies'', ''on the computation of velocities'', and ''on the techniques of 3D visualizations''. Each vectorial provocation was taken up by a sub-group of participants, who assumed the task of opening up a piece of Gplates, a free software tool and web portal for tectonic plate modeling. By holding close a technical feature, a forum, a tutorial, an interface etc. for a few hours, and tensioning these with some text matter from a reader pre-cooked by Helen V. Pritchard, Femke Snelting, and myself, Gplates worked as a catalyst for our conversations. Its community of developers would eventually become the deferred interlocutors of a report.<ref name="ftn313">See for a continuation of these interlocutions, The Underground Division (Helen V. Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting), “We Have Always Been Geohackers,” in this book.</ref><br />
<br />
The following cut was made to share a sample of that afternoon’s eclectic dialogues in what could be transferred as a polyphonic bugged report. All text injections (in italics, on the right side) are quotes taken from the workshop’s reader. All pieces following one already quoted belong to the same author, until the next quote in italics appears. All voices on the left emerged along the workshop’s discussion, which was transcribed by Fanny Wendt Höjer.<ref>See also: “Item 114: Earth Grabs Back,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2019.</ref><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates1.gif]]<br />
<br />
<div class="no-indent"><br />
=== First vectorial provocation,<br> on standardized time ===<br />
<br />
if multiple timescales are sedimented in contemporary software environments used by geophysics, can fossil fuel extractivist practices be understood as time-travelling practices?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''in these troubling times, there is an urgency to trouble time,&nbsp; to shake it to its core, and to produce collective imaginaries that undo pervasive conceptions of temporality.'''''<ref name="ftn315">Karen Barad, “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: on the im/possibilities of living and dying in the void,” ''New Formations 92: Posthuman Temporalities'' (2018).</ref></div><br />
<br />
this urgency is both new and not new<br />
<br />
how is the end of time imagined, in a modelling sense?<br />
<br />
we see discretely plotted colors<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''time isn’t what it used to be'''''</div><br />
<br />
does the body of earth exist in the same timescale as you do?<br />
<br />
or try and witness the whens otherwise<br />
<br />
time tends to be limited to (and influenced by) the observer’s perception but what are the material and semiotic conditions for another kind of time perception?<br />
<br />
sedimented time and coexistence at ecologies of nothingness (aka voids)<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''voids are features that occur commonly in near-surface geophysical imaging. [...] However, voids are often misidentified. Some voids are missed, and other anomalous features are misinterpreted as voids, when in fact they are not. Compare them with real voids, and we determinate the differences based on incomplete data'''''<ref name="ftn316">David C. Nobes, “Pitfalls to Avoid in Void Interpretation from Ground Penetrating Radar Imaging,” ''Interpretation ''6 (June 2018): 1-31. 10.1190/int-2018-0049.1.</ref></div><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates2.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Second vectorial provocation,<br>on software vocabularies ===<br />
<br />
forging a differently fueled language of geology must provide a lexicon with which to attend the geotraumas<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the endurance of a stony patience that doesn’t forget love'''''<ref name="ftn317">Kathryn Yusoff, ''A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).</ref></div><br />
<br />
user engagement with the earth through a 3D visualization software is based on metaphors like handling or grabbing<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''in the lexicon of geology that takes possession of people and places, ''delimiting the organization of existence, the refusal of such captivity makes a commons in the measure and pitch of the world, not the exclusive universality of the humanist subject'''''</div><br />
<br />
you can still grab the earth: at Gplates a stable static earth is available for grabbing<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''a refusal to be delimited is found in the matter of the world and a home in its maroonage; “they wander as if they have no century, as if they can bound time… compasses whose directions tilt, skid off known maps”'''''</div><br />
<br />
also, the use of the verb “to grab” brings with it the history and practice of “land grabbing”, land abuse and arbitrary actions of ownership and appropriation with correlated both dispossession by the taking of land, and environmental damage<br />
<br />
but what if the earth grabs back?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''there is a kind of reason that we will no longer accept tilting the axis of engagement within a geological optic and intimacy, the inhuman can be claimed as a different kind of resource than in its propertied colonial form—a gravitational form so extravagant, it defies gravity'''''</div><br />
<br />
if all the semantic network of Gplates 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<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''forging a new language of geology must provide a lexicon with which to take apart the Anthropocene, a poetry to refashion a new epoch, a new geology that attends the the racialization of matter'''''</div><br />
<br />
most software platforms allow for no resistance, for no possible unavailability<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the praxis of that aesthetic locates an insurgent geology'''''</div><br />
<br />
middle click and drag ¡la tierra para quien la trabaja!<ref name="ftn318">Emiliano Zapata (c.1911).</ref><br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''reconstituted in terms of agency for the present, for the end of this world and the possibility of others, because the world is already turning'''''</div><br />
<br />
and what if the earth grabs back<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the ghosts of geology rise'''''</div><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates3.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Third vectorial provocation,<br>on the activation of geontologies ===<br />
<br />
we are all talking over each other like tectonic plates and strata<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''a time of the geos, of soullessness'''''<ref name="ftn319">Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ''Geontologies: A requiem to late liberalism'' (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).</ref></div><br />
<br />
looking at what geology is implies a reconsideration of assumptions of what life is<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the anthropos as just one element in the larger set of not merely animal life but all Life as opposed to the state of original and radical Nonlife'''''</div><br />
<br />
minerals rocks plates<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the vital in relation to the inert, the extinct in relation to the barren'''''</div><br />
<br />
cannot be separated from time<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''it is also clear that late liberal strategies for governing difference and markets also only work insofar as these distinctions are maintained'''''</div><br />
<br />
but where is the legend we could not read it<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''Life (Life{birth, growth, reproduction}v. Death) v. Nonlife'''''</div><br />
<br />
why this suspension subversion of the living<br />
<br />
why this suspension subversion of the living<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''it is hardly an uncontroversial concept'''''</div><br />
<br />
otherwise the future will keep being missing but wait, the past is also missing the line goes back to 172 million years but earth is 4,5 billion years<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the way data gets laid over particular shapes, how that comes to kind of operationalize particular makings and matterings of the world.'''''<ref name="ftn320">Excerpts from Helen V. Pritchard’s oral introduction to the workshop.</ref></div><br />
<br />
a color-coded chronology is that tone the year of emergence or is it duration of collapse of merging<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''so kind of thinking through the technical and political questions of what is depth and what is density, how they shift depending on the situation they’re operationalized within'''''</div><br />
<br />
a gradient of abstraction is being dangerously portrayed<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the differences perhaps of the densities in geophysics to the densities in something like biomedical scanning, even though both might have tomographic processes'''''</div><br />
<br />
what is the skin of a body its density how is it colored?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''density is not a fixed thing'''''</div><br />
<br />
but why?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''we’re interested in exploring these open questions; how these matter, and how they matter in relation to things like surfaces and their topologies, where there might be densities of power'''''</div><br />
<br />
a chroma chart would be appreciated<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''there’s a kind of thickness in imaginaries of depth: the kind of unknown or unreachable, the removed or the unremovable. But also the kind of dark and morally crooked in bodies, in earth and in desires'''''</div><br />
<br />
like absolute dating of rocks you’re alive, I’m alive/let’s go <br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''but other imaginations of depths in relation to both the earth or the so-called body, or the body of the earth. In particular, the thinking with the kind of writing from geo-philosophy and feminist technoscience, which might suggest that we might tilt the axis of engagement'''''</div><br />
<br />
peel earth’s skin the mantle<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''i think that’s at heart of the Possible Bodies project as well, this tilting of access to a different kind of optic'''''</div><br />
<br />
and peel it back where 4D is time and meets 5D uncertainty<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''to a different kind of intimacy'''''</div><br />
<br />
it does not peel back enough<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''think about the inhuman of earth surfaces, of tectonic plates, of geological strata; they might have another possibility than the proprietary colonial form, which often is the way it gets rendered within things like the modelling tools for say the extraction of fossil fuels or natural gas'''''</div><br />
<br />
''Geontologies'': the need of all bug reports<br />
<br />
[[File:4.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Fourth vectorial provocation,<br>on computing velocities ===<br />
<br />
that is too linear, this is too straight<br />
<br />
data has different densities and intensities and the effects and affects of the single timeline make themselves visible<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''when specific intra-active technologies violently rendered real bodies, they wondered about the see-through space-times that were left in the dark'''''<ref name="ftn321">Possible Bodies feat. Helen Pritchard, “Ultrasonic Dreams of Aclinical Renderings,” in this book.</ref></div><br />
<br />
leaving grey areas that show no data coverage<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the crisis of presence that emerged with the computational turn was shaped by the technocolonialism of turbocapitalism!'''''</div><br />
<br />
where is that information what is this superfiction<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''convoked from the dark inner space-times of the earth, the flesh and the cosmos, particular [amodern] renderings evidence that real bodies do not exist before being separated, cut and isolated.'''''</div><br />
<br />
whole parts of grey earth like you are making a cake you can put toppings on<br />
<br />
grey means there is nothing such as a body of earth it is almost a void<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''they read, listened and gossiped with awkwardness, intensity and urgency'''''</div><br />
<br />
earth used as a template for almost always fractured data<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''listen: there is a shaking surface, a cosmological inventory, hot breath in the ear'''''</div><br />
<br />
zoom in this shaking surface and always find some cracks<br />
<br />
the tool keeps wanting it to be presented as a whole the oneness of earthness as in the oneness of humanness<br />
<br />
there is a persistently imposing paradigm of wholeness and a pretension of full resolution but a body becomes any body only if the whole thing collapses<br />
<br />
but when<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''[the soil] is no longer (or never was) the exclusive realm of technocrats or geophysics experts'''''</div><br />
<br />
swipe it fast so much time in one swipe<br />
<br />
it is almost rude<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''these are your new devices, dim and glossy'''''</div><br />
<br />
take your time scroll scroll scroll deeper<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''where poetic renderings start to (re)generate (just) social imaginations'''''</div><br />
<br />
theres thens truths<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''let’s collectively resonate against technologies'''''</div><br />
<br />
counting backwards and year zero does not stay<br />
<br />
grab that time and<br />
<br />
perhaps if you upgrade the software you can get extra time<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''that bring in trans*feminist queer futures'''''</div><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates5.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Fifth vectorial provocation,<br>on the techniques of 3D volume visualization ===<br />
<br />
who is behind the proposers of the Mercator projection<ref name="ftn322">“Mercator Projection,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection</ref><br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''postcolonial or hegemonic structures of development'''''<ref name="ftn323">Mark Carey, M Jackson, Alessandro Antonello and Jaclyn Rushing, “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research,” ''Progress in Human Geography,'' 40(6) (2016): 770-793</ref></div><br />
<br />
who is behind one more eurocentric view of it<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''“the centrality of mathematical and technological science… structured by masculinist ideologies of domination and mastery”'''''</div><br />
<br />
from 2D to 3D<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''such institutional, cultural, and scientific practices also affect glaciological knowledge'''''</div><br />
<br />
you are the camera!<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''Questions of who produces glaciological knowledge, and how such knowledge is used or shared, take on real implications when considered through feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology lenses'''''</div><br />
<br />
At Gplates you can replace the pole location grab the pole and drag it<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''indigenous accounts do not portray the ice as passive, to be measured and mastered'''''</div><br />
<br />
while time happens along a linear highlight of cascading data<br />
<br />
'''''folk glaciologies diversify the field of glaciology and subvert the hegemony of natural sciences'''''<br />
<br />
Gplates applies deep familiar metaphors like child plates<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''Of the Earth, the present subject of our scenarios, we can presuppose a single thing: it doesn’t care about the questions we ask about it'''''<ref name="ftn324">Isabelle Stengers, ''The Invention of Modern Science'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).</ref></div><br />
<br />
slide the zoom in and out of a data set of magnetic information<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''to speak of a world which is “prior” and “independent” without implying that it is “single” and “determinate”: it encounters an earth which is very much “already composed” without it thereby being “already totalized”'''''<ref name="ftn325">Nigel Clark, “Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet,” Theory, Culture & Society (2011): 38-39.</ref></div><br />
<div class="page-break"></div><br />
now <br />
<br />
relocate<br />
<br />
the pole<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''having “a stable identity” in relation to scientific study does not imply stasis or stability per se'''''</div><br />
<br />
slide<br />
<br />
deeper down<br />
<br />
smoothly<br />
<br />
but how when where<br />
<br />
but who what why<br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates6.gif]]<br />
</div><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
=== Software Resources ===<br />
<br />
* [https://asourceforge.net/projects/gplates/files/gplates/2.1/gplates-ubuntu-xenial_2.1_1_amd64.deb/download Gplates Download]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/ Gplates Webportal]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=GSFML Magnesium Picks]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=Geology Geology]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=EMAG2_V2 EMAG2 Magnetic Anomaly Grid]<br />
* [https://www.gplates.org/gpml.html GPlates Markup Language (GPML)]<br />
* [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oZliPsP0zqKry0BV3xTXVQl7EuPoyQCHQ2p_GEuHu18/pub Gplates Tutorial 7.1: 3D Volume Visualisation Importing and Visualising 3D Scalar Fields]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=Geology EarthByte Gplates Portal Geology]<br />
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_hKAc3y-3Q G.plates on fictional planet]<br />
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLMpa0b4hls&list=PL0F9ejAtqLT8Vu0_uNjwkdgEoydBTcVze GPlates Tutorial 1.1: Loading and Saving Data]<br />
* [https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/ Enhanced Shuttle Land Elevation Data]<br />
<br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
| This text constitutes the report of a workshop of the same name that Femke Snelting, Helen Pritchard and Jara Rocha conducted during transmediale 2019 and was published on the issue #3 of the festival's journal: https://transmediale.de/content/depths-and-densities-a-bugged-report<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Depths_and_Densities:_A_bugged_report&diff=2588Depths and Densities: A bugged report2021-11-24T06:56:15Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== Depths and Densities: A Bugged Report ==<br />
'''Jara Rocha'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Under the guise of a one-afternoon workshop at transmediale 2019, Possible Bodies proposed to collectively study open-source tools for geo-modelling while attending to the different regimes –of truth, of representation, of language or of political ideology– they operate within. It attempted to read those tools and a selection of texts in relation, with the plan of injecting some resistant vocabularies, misuses and/or f(r)ictions that could affect the extractivist bias embedded in the computation of earth’s depths and densities.<br />
<br />
The workshop ''Depths and Densities'' was populated by a mix of known companions and just-met participants (in total, a convergence of circa thirty voices), each bringing her own particular intensities regarding the tools, the theories, the vocabularies, and the urgencies placed upon the table. The discussions were recorded on the spot and transcribed later. This report cuts through a thick mass of written notes, transcriptions, and excerpted theoretical texts, sedimented along five vectorial provocations: ''on the standardisation of time'', ''on software vocabularies'', ''on the activation of geontologies'', ''on the computation of velocities'', and ''on the techniques of 3D visualizations''. Each vectorial provocation was taken up by a sub-group of participants, who assumed the task of opening up a piece of Gplates, a free software tool and web portal for tectonic plate modeling. By holding close a technical feature, a forum, a tutorial, an interface etc. for a few hours, and tensioning these with some text matter from a reader pre-cooked by Helen V. Pritchard, Femke Snelting, and myself, Gplates worked as a catalyst for our conversations. Its community of developers would eventually become the deferred interlocutors of a report.<ref name="ftn313">See for a continuation of these interlocutions, The Underground Division (Helen V. Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting), “We Have Always Been Geohackers,” in this book.</ref><br />
<br />
The following cut was made to share a sample of that afternoon’s eclectic dialogues in what could be transferred as a polyphonic bugged report. All text injections (in italics, on the right side) are quotes taken from the workshop’s reader. All pieces following one already quoted belong to the same author, until the next quote in italics appears. All voices on the left emerged along the workshop’s discussion, which was transcribed by Fanny Wendt Höjer.<ref>See also: “Item 114: Earth Grabs Back,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2019.</ref><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates1.gif]]<br />
<br />
<div class="no-indent"><br />
=== First vectorial provocation,<br> on standardized time ===<br />
<br />
if multiple timescales are sedimented in contemporary software environments used by geophysics, can fossil fuel extractivist practices be understood as time-travelling practices?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''in these troubling times, there is an urgency to trouble time,&nbsp; to shake it to its core, and to produce collective imaginaries that undo pervasive conceptions of temporality.'''''<ref name="ftn315">Karen Barad, “Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness: on the im/possibilities of living and dying in the void,” ''New Formations 92: Posthuman Temporalities'' (2018)</ref></div><br />
<br />
this urgency is both new and not new<br />
<br />
how is the end of time imagined, in a modelling sense?<br />
<br />
we see discretely plotted colors<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''time isn’t what it used to be'''''</div><br />
<br />
does the body of earth exist in the same timescale as you do?<br />
<br />
or try and witness the whens otherwise<br />
<br />
time tends to be limited to (and influenced by) the observer’s perception but what are the material and semiotic conditions for another kind of time perception?<br />
<br />
sedimented time and coexistence at ecologies of nothingness (aka voids)<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''voids are features that occur commonly in near-surface geophysical imaging. [...] However, voids are often misidentified. Some voids are missed, and other anomalous features are misinterpreted as voids, when in fact they are not. Compare them with real voids, and we determinate the differences based on incomplete data'''''<ref name="ftn316">David C. Nobes, “Pitfalls to Avoid in Void Interpretation from Ground Penetrating Radar Imaging,” ''Interpretation ''6. 1-31. (June 2018), 10.1190/int-2018-0049.1.</ref></div><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates2.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Second vectorial provocation,<br>on software vocabularies ===<br />
<br />
forging a differently fueled language of geology must provide a lexicon with which to attend the geotraumas<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the endurance of a stony patience that doesn’t forget love'''''<ref name="ftn317">Kathryn Yusoff, ''A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).</ref></div><br />
<br />
user engagement with the earth through a 3D visualization software is based on metaphors like handling or grabbing<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''in the lexicon of geology that takes possession of people and places, ''delimiting the organization of existence, the refusal of such captivity makes a commons in the measure and pitch of the world, not the exclusive universality of the humanist subject'''''</div><br />
<br />
you can still grab the earth: at Gplates a stable static earth is available for grabbing<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''a refusal to be delimited is found in the matter of the world and a home in its maroonage; “they wander as if they have no century, as if they can bound time… compasses whose directions tilt, skid off known maps”'''''</div><br />
<br />
also, the use of the verb “to grab” brings with it the history and practice of “land grabbing”, land abuse and arbitrary actions of ownership and appropriation with correlated both dispossession by the taking of land, and environmental damage<br />
<br />
but what if the earth grabs back?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''there is a kind of reason that we will no longer accept tilting the axis of engagement within a geological optic and intimacy, the inhuman can be claimed as a different kind of resource than in its propertied colonial form—a gravitational form so extravagant, it defies gravity'''''</div><br />
<br />
if all the semantic network of Gplates 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<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''forging a new language of geology must provide a lexicon with which to take apart the Anthropocene, a poetry to refashion a new epoch, a new geology that attends the the racialization of matter'''''</div><br />
<br />
most software platforms allow for no resistance, for no possible unavailability<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the praxis of that aesthetic locates an insurgent geology'''''</div><br />
<br />
middle click and drag ¡la tierra para quien la trabaja!<ref name="ftn318">Emiliano Zapata (c.1911).</ref><br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''reconstituted in terms of agency for the present, for the end of this world and the possibility of others, because the world is already turning'''''</div><br />
<br />
and what if the earth grabs back<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the ghosts of geology rise'''''</div><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates3.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Third vectorial provocation,<br>on the activation of geontologies ===<br />
<br />
we are all talking over each other like tectonic plates and strata<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''a time of the geos, of soullessness'''''<ref name="ftn319">Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ''Geontologies: A requiem to late liberalism'' (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).</ref></div><br />
<br />
looking at what geology is implies a reconsideration of assumptions of what life is<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the anthropos as just one element in the larger set of not merely animal life but all Life as opposed to the state of original and radical Nonlife'''''</div><br />
<br />
minerals rocks plates<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the vital in relation to the inert, the extinct in relation to the barren'''''</div><br />
<br />
cannot be separated from time<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''it is also clear that late liberal strategies for governing difference and markets also only work insofar as these distinctions are maintained'''''</div><br />
<br />
but where is the legend we could not read it<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''Life (Life{birth, growth, reproduction}v. Death) v. Nonlife'''''</div><br />
<br />
why this suspension subversion of the living<br />
<br />
why this suspension subversion of the living<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''it is hardly an uncontroversial concept'''''</div><br />
<br />
otherwise the future will keep being missing but wait, the past is also missing the line goes back to 172 million years but earth is 4,5 billion years<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the way data gets laid over particular shapes, how that comes to kind of operationalize particular makings and matterings of the world.'''''<ref name="ftn320">Excerpts from Helen V. Pritchard’s oral introduction to the workshop.</ref></div><br />
<br />
a color-coded chronology is that tone the year of emergence or is it duration of collapse of merging<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''so kind of thinking through the technical and political questions of what is depth and what is density, how they shift depending on the situation they’re operationalized within'''''</div><br />
<br />
a gradient of abstraction is being dangerously portrayed<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the differences perhaps of the densities in geophysics to the densities in something like biomedical scanning, even though both might have tomographic processes'''''</div><br />
<br />
what is the skin of a body its density how is it colored?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''density is not a fixed thing'''''</div><br />
<br />
but why?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''we’re interested in exploring these open questions; how these matter, and how they matter in relation to things like surfaces and their topologies, where there might be densities of power'''''</div><br />
<br />
a chroma chart would be appreciated<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''there’s a kind of thickness in imaginaries of depth: the kind of unknown or unreachable, the removed or the unremovable. But also the kind of dark and morally crooked in bodies, in earth and in desires'''''</div><br />
<br />
like absolute dating of rocks you’re alive, I’m alive/let’s go <br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''but other imaginations of depths in relation to both the earth or the so-called body, or the body of the earth. In particular, the thinking with the kind of writing from geo-philosophy and feminist technoscience, which might suggest that we might tilt the axis of engagement'''''</div><br />
<br />
peel earth’s skin the mantle<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''i think that’s at heart of the Possible Bodies project as well, this tilting of access to a different kind of optic'''''</div><br />
<br />
and peel it back where 4D is time and meets 5D uncertainty<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''to a different kind of intimacy'''''</div><br />
<br />
it does not peel back enough<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''think about the inhuman of earth surfaces, of tectonic plates, of geological strata; they might have another possibility than the proprietary colonial form, which often is the way it gets rendered within things like the modelling tools for say the extraction of fossil fuels or natural gas'''''</div><br />
<br />
''Geontologies'': the need of all bug reports<br />
<br />
[[File:4.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Fourth vectorial provocation,<br>on computing velocities ===<br />
<br />
that is too linear, this is too straight<br />
<br />
data has different densities and intensities and the effects and affects of the single timeline make themselves visible<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''when specific intra-active technologies violently rendered real bodies, they wondered about the see-through space-times that were left in the dark'''''<ref name="ftn321">Possible Bodies feat. Helen Pritchard, “Ultrasonic Dreams of Aclinical Renderings,” in this book.</ref></div><br />
<br />
leaving grey areas that show no data coverage<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the crisis of presence that emerged with the computational turn was shaped by the technocolonialism of turbocapitalism!'''''</div><br />
<br />
where is that information what is this superfiction<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''convoked from the dark inner space-times of the earth, the flesh and the cosmos, particular [amodern] renderings evidence that real bodies do not exist before being separated, cut and isolated.'''''</div><br />
<br />
whole parts of grey earth like you are making a cake you can put toppings on<br />
<br />
grey means there is nothing such as a body of earth it is almost a void<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''they read, listened and gossiped with awkwardness, intensity and urgency'''''</div><br />
<br />
earth used as a template for almost always fractured data<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''listen: there is a shaking surface, a cosmological inventory, hot breath in the ear'''''</div><br />
<br />
zoom in this shaking surface and always find some cracks<br />
<br />
the tool keeps wanting it to be presented as a whole the oneness of earthness as in the oneness of humanness<br />
<br />
there is a persistently imposing paradigm of wholeness and a pretension of full resolution but a body becomes any body only if the whole thing collapses<br />
<br />
but when<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''[the soil] is no longer (or never was) the exclusive realm of technocrats or geophysics experts'''''</div><br />
<br />
swipe it fast so much time in one swipe<br />
<br />
it is almost rude<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''these are your new devices, dim and glossy'''''</div><br />
<br />
take your time scroll scroll scroll deeper<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''where poetic renderings start to (re)generate (just) social imaginations'''''</div><br />
<br />
theres thens truths<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''let’s collectively resonate against technologies'''''</div><br />
<br />
counting backwards and year zero does not stay<br />
<br />
grab that time and<br />
<br />
perhaps if you upgrade the software you can get extra time<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''that bring in trans*feminist queer futures'''''</div><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates5.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Fifth vectorial provocation,<br>on the techniques of 3D volume visualization ===<br />
<br />
who is behind the proposers of the Mercator projection<ref name="ftn322">“Mercator Projection,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection</ref><br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''postcolonial or hegemonic structures of development'''''<ref name="ftn323">Mark Carey, M Jackson, Alessandro Antonello and Jaclyn Rushing, “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research,” ''Progress in Human Geography,'' 40(6) (2016): 770-793</ref></div><br />
<br />
who is behind one more eurocentric view of it<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''“the centrality of mathematical and technological science… structured by masculinist ideologies of domination and mastery”'''''</div><br />
<br />
from 2D to 3D<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''such institutional, cultural, and scientific practices also affect glaciological knowledge'''''</div><br />
<br />
you are the camera!<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''Questions of who produces glaciological knowledge, and how such knowledge is used or shared, take on real implications when considered through feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology lenses'''''</div><br />
<br />
At Gplates you can replace the pole location grab the pole and drag it<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''indigenous accounts do not portray the ice as passive, to be measured and mastered'''''</div><br />
<br />
while time happens along a linear highlight of cascading data<br />
<br />
'''''folk glaciologies diversify the field of glaciology and subvert the hegemony of natural sciences'''''<br />
<br />
Gplates applies deep familiar metaphors like child plates<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''Of the Earth, the present subject of our scenarios, we can presuppose a single thing: it doesn’t care about the questions we ask about it'''''<ref name="ftn324">Isabelle Stengers, ''The Invention of Modern Science'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).</ref></div><br />
<br />
slide the zoom in and out of a data set of magnetic information<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''to speak of a world which is “prior” and “independent” without implying that it is “single” and “determinate”: it encounters an earth which is very much “already composed” without it thereby being “already totalized”'''''<ref name="ftn325">Nigel Clark, “Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet,” Theory, Culture & Society (2011): 38-39.</ref></div><br />
<div class="page-break"></div><br />
now <br />
<br />
relocate<br />
<br />
the pole<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''having “a stable identity” in relation to scientific study does not imply stasis or stability per se'''''</div><br />
<br />
slide<br />
<br />
deeper down<br />
<br />
smoothly<br />
<br />
but how when where<br />
<br />
but who what why<br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates6.gif]]<br />
</div><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
=== Software Resources ===<br />
<br />
* [https://asourceforge.net/projects/gplates/files/gplates/2.1/gplates-ubuntu-xenial_2.1_1_amd64.deb/download Gplates Download]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/ Gplates Webportal]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=GSFML Magnesium Picks]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=Geology Geology]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=EMAG2_V2 EMAG2 Magnetic Anomaly Grid]<br />
* [https://www.gplates.org/gpml.html GPlates Markup Language (GPML)]<br />
* [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oZliPsP0zqKry0BV3xTXVQl7EuPoyQCHQ2p_GEuHu18/pub Gplates Tutorial 7.1: 3D Volume Visualisation Importing and Visualising 3D Scalar Fields]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=Geology EarthByte Gplates Portal Geology]<br />
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_hKAc3y-3Q G.plates on fictional planet]<br />
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLMpa0b4hls&list=PL0F9ejAtqLT8Vu0_uNjwkdgEoydBTcVze GPlates Tutorial 1.1: Loading and Saving Data]<br />
* [https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/ Enhanced Shuttle Land Elevation Data]<br />
<br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
| This text constitutes the report of a workshop of the same name that Femke Snelting, Helen Pritchard and Jara Rocha conducted during transmediale 2019 and was published on the issue #3 of the festival's journal: https://transmediale.de/content/depths-and-densities-a-bugged-report<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Depths_and_Densities:_A_bugged_report&diff=2587Depths and Densities: A bugged report2021-11-24T06:55:14Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== Depths and Densities: A Bugged Report ==<br />
'''Jara Rocha'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Under the guise of a one-afternoon workshop at transmediale 2019, Possible Bodies proposed to collectively study open-source tools for geo-modelling while attending to the different regimes –of truth, of representation, of language or of political ideology– they operate within. It attempted to read those tools and a selection of texts in relation, with the plan of injecting some resistant vocabularies, misuses and/or f(r)ictions that could affect the extractivist bias embedded in the computation of earth’s depths and densities.<br />
<br />
The workshop ''Depths and Densities'' was populated by a mix of known companions and just-met participants (in total, a convergence of circa thirty voices), each bringing her own particular intensities regarding the tools, the theories, the vocabularies, and the urgencies placed upon the table. The discussions were recorded on the spot and transcribed later. This report cuts through a thick mass of written notes, transcriptions, and excerpted theoretical texts, sedimented along five vectorial provocations: ''on the standardisation of time'', ''on software vocabularies'', ''on the activation of geontologies'', ''on the computation of velocities'', and ''on the techniques of 3D visualizations''. Each vectorial provocation was taken up by a sub-group of participants, who assumed the task of opening up a piece of Gplates, a free software tool and web portal for tectonic plate modeling. By holding close a technical feature, a forum, a tutorial, an interface etc. for a few hours, and tensioning these with some text matter from a reader pre-cooked by Helen V. Pritchard, Femke Snelting, and myself, Gplates worked as a catalyst for our conversations. Its community of developers would eventually become the deferred interlocutors of a report.<ref name="ftn313">See for a continuation of these interlocutions, The Underground Division (Helen V. Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting), “We Have Always Been Geohackers,” in this book.</ref><br />
<br />
The following cut was made to share a sample of that afternoon’s eclectic dialogues in what could be transferred as a polyphonic bugged report. All text injections (in italics, on the right side) are quotes taken from the workshop’s reader. All pieces following one already quoted belong to the same author, until the next quote in italics appears. All voices on the left emerged along the workshop’s discussion, which was transcribed by Fanny Wendt Höjer.<ref>See also: “Item 114: Earth Grabs Back,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2019.</ref><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates1.gif]]<br />
<br />
<div class="no-indent"><br />
=== First vectorial provocation,<br> on standardized time ===<br />
<br />
if multiple timescales are sedimented in contemporary software environments used by geophysics, can fossil fuel extractivist practices be understood as time-travelling practices?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''in these troubling times, there is an urgency to trouble time,&nbsp; to shake it to its core, and to produce collective imaginaries that undo pervasive conceptions of temporality.'''''<ref name="ftn315">Karen Barad, “Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness: on the im/possibilities of living and dying in the void,” ''New Formations 92: Posthuman Temporalities'' (2018)</ref></div><br />
<br />
this urgency is both new and not new<br />
<br />
how is the end of time imagined, in a modelling sense?<br />
<br />
we see discretely plotted colors<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''time isn’t what it used to be'''''</div><br />
<br />
does the body of earth exist in the same timescale as you do?<br />
<br />
or try and witness the whens otherwise<br />
<br />
time tends to be limited to (and influenced by) the observer’s perception but what are the material and semiotic conditions for another kind of time perception?<br />
<br />
sedimented time and coexistence at ecologies of nothingness (aka voids)<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''voids are features that occur commonly in near-surface geophysical imaging. [...] However, voids are often misidentified. Some voids are missed, and other anomalous features are misinterpreted as voids, when in fact they are not. Compare them with real voids, and we determinate the differences based on incomplete data'''''<ref name="ftn316">David C. Nobes, “Pitfalls to Avoid in Void Interpretation from Ground Penetrating Radar Imaging,” ''Interpretation ''6. 1-31. (June 2018), 10.1190/int-2018-0049.1.</ref></div><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates2.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Second vectorial provocation,<br>on software vocabularies ===<br />
<br />
forging a differently fueled language of geology must provide a lexicon with which to attend the geotraumas<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the endurance of a stony patience that doesn’t forget love'''''<ref name="ftn317">Kathryn Yusoff, ''A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).</ref></div><br />
<br />
user engagement with the earth through a 3D visualization software is based on metaphors like handling or grabbing<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''in the lexicon of geology that takes possession of people and places, ''delimiting the organization of existence, the refusal of such captivity makes a commons in the measure and pitch of the world, not the exclusive universality of the humanist subject'''''</div><br />
<br />
you can still grab the earth: at Gplates a stable static earth is available for grabbing<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''a refusal to be delimited is found in the matter of the world and a home in its maroonage; “they wander as if they have no century, as if they can bound time… compasses whose directions tilt, skid off known maps”'''''</div><br />
<br />
also, the use of the verb “to grab” brings with it the history and practice of “land grabbing”, land abuse and arbitrary actions of ownership and appropriation with correlated both dispossession by the taking of land, and environmental damage<br />
<br />
but what if the earth grabs back?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''there is a kind of reason that we will no longer accept tilting the axis of engagement within a geological optic and intimacy, the inhuman can be claimed as a different kind of resource than in its propertied colonial form—a gravitational form so extravagant, it defies gravity'''''</div><br />
<br />
if all the semantic network of Gplates 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<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''forging a new language of geology must provide a lexicon with which to take apart the Anthropocene, a poetry to refashion a new epoch, a new geology that attends the the racialization of matter'''''</div><br />
<br />
most software platforms allow for no resistance, for no possible unavailability<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the praxis of that aesthetic locates an insurgent geology'''''</div><br />
<br />
middle click and drag ¡la tierra para quien la trabaja!<ref name="ftn318">Emiliano Zapata (c.1911).</ref><br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''reconstituted in terms of agency for the present, for the end of this world and the possibility of others, because the world is already turning'''''</div><br />
<br />
and what if the earth grabs back<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the ghosts of geology rise'''''</div><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates3.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Third vectorial provocation,<br>on the activation of geontologies ===<br />
<br />
we are all talking over each other like tectonic plates and strata<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''a time of the geos, of soullessness'''''<ref name="ftn319">Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ''Geontologies: A requiem to late liberalism'' (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).</ref></div><br />
<br />
looking at what geology is implies a reconsideration of assumptions of what life is<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the anthropos as just one element in the larger set of not merely animal life but all Life as opposed to the state of original and radical Nonlife'''''</div><br />
<br />
minerals rocks plates<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the vital in relation to the inert, the extinct in relation to the barren'''''</div><br />
<br />
cannot be separated from time<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''it is also clear that late liberal strategies for governing difference and markets also only work insofar as these distinctions are maintained'''''</div><br />
<br />
but where is the legend we could not read it<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''Life (Life{birth, growth, reproduction}v. Death) v. Nonlife'''''</div><br />
<br />
why this suspension subversion of the living<br />
<br />
why this suspension subversion of the living<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''it is hardly an uncontroversial concept'''''</div><br />
<br />
otherwise the future will keep being missing but wait, the past is also missing the line goes back to 172 million years but earth is 4,5 billion years<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the way data gets laid over particular shapes, how that comes to kind of operationalize particular makings and matterings of the world.'''''<ref name="ftn320">Excerpts from Helen V. Pritchard’s oral introduction to the workshop.</ref></div><br />
<br />
a color-coded chronology is that tone the year of emergence or is it duration of collapse of merging<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''so kind of thinking through the technical and political questions of what is depth and what is density, how they shift depending on the situation they’re operationalized within'''''</div><br />
<br />
a gradient of abstraction is being dangerously portrayed<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the differences perhaps of the densities in geophysics to the densities in something like biomedical scanning, even though both might have tomographic processes'''''</div><br />
<br />
what is the skin of a body its density how is it colored?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''density is not a fixed thing'''''</div><br />
<br />
but why?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''we’re interested in exploring these open questions; how these matter, and how they matter in relation to things like surfaces and their topologies, where there might be densities of power'''''</div><br />
<br />
a chroma chart would be appreciated<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''there’s a kind of thickness in imaginaries of depth: the kind of unknown or unreachable, the removed or the unremovable. But also the kind of dark and morally crooked in bodies, in earth and in desires'''''</div><br />
<br />
like absolute dating of rocks you’re alive, I’m alive/let’s go <br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''but other imaginations of depths in relation to both the earth or the so-called body, or the body of the earth. In particular, the thinking with the kind of writing from geo-philosophy and feminist technoscience, which might suggest that we might tilt the axis of engagement'''''</div><br />
<br />
peel earth’s skin the mantle<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''i think that’s at heart of the Possible Bodies project as well, this tilting of access to a different kind of optic'''''</div><br />
<br />
and peel it back where 4D is time and meets 5D uncertainty<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''to a different kind of intimacy'''''</div><br />
<br />
it does not peel back enough<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''think about the inhuman of earth surfaces, of tectonic plates, of geological strata; they might have another possibility than the proprietary colonial form, which often is the way it gets rendered within things like the modelling tools for say the extraction of fossil fuels or natural gas'''''</div><br />
<br />
''Geontologies'': the need of all bug reports<br />
<br />
[[File:4.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Fourth vectorial provocation,<br>on computing velocities ===<br />
<br />
that is too linear this is too straight<br />
<br />
data has different densities and intensities and the effects and affects of the single timeline make themselves visible<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''when specific intra-active technologies violently rendered real bodies, they wondered about the see-through space-times that were left in the dark'''''<ref name="ftn321">Possible Bodies feat. Helen Pritchard, “Ultrasonic Dreams of Aclinical Renderings,” in this book.</ref></div><br />
<br />
leaving grey areas that show no data coverage<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the crisis of presence that emerged with the computational turn was shaped by the technocolonialism of turbocapitalism!'''''</div><br />
<br />
where is that information what is this superfiction<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''convoked from the dark inner space-times of the earth, the flesh and the cosmos, particular [amodern] renderings evidence that real bodies do not exist before being separated, cut and isolated.'''''</div><br />
<br />
whole parts of grey earth like you are making a cake you can put toppings on<br />
<br />
grey means there is nothing such as a body of earth it is almost a void<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''they read, listened and gossiped with awkwardness, intensity and urgency'''''</div><br />
<br />
earth used as a template for almost always fractured data<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''listen: there is a shaking surface, a cosmological inventory, hot breath in the ear'''''</div><br />
<br />
zoom in this shaking surface and always find some cracks<br />
<br />
the tool keeps wanting it to be presented as a whole the oneness of earthness as in the oneness of humanness<br />
<br />
there is a persistently imposing paradigm of wholeness and a pretension of full resolution but a body becomes any body only if the whole thing collapses<br />
<br />
but when<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''[the soil] is no longer (or never was) the exclusive realm of technocrats or geophysics experts'''''</div><br />
<br />
swipe it fast so much time in one swipe<br />
<br />
it is almost rude<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''these are your new devices, dim and glossy'''''</div><br />
<br />
take your time scroll scroll scroll deeper<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''where poetic renderings start to (re)generate (just) social imaginations'''''</div><br />
<br />
theres thens truths<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''let’s collectively resonate against technologies'''''</div><br />
<br />
counting backwards and year zero does not stay<br />
<br />
grab that time and<br />
<br />
perhaps if you upgrade the software you can get extra time<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''that bring in trans*feminist queer futures'''''</div><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates5.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Fifth vectorial provocation,<br>on the techniques of 3D volume visualization ===<br />
<br />
who is behind the proposers of the Mercator projection<ref name="ftn322">“Mercator Projection,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection</ref><br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''postcolonial or hegemonic structures of development'''''<ref name="ftn323">Mark Carey, M Jackson, Alessandro Antonello and Jaclyn Rushing, “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research,” ''Progress in Human Geography,'' 40(6) (2016): 770-793</ref></div><br />
<br />
who is behind one more eurocentric view of it<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''“the centrality of mathematical and technological science… structured by masculinist ideologies of domination and mastery”'''''</div><br />
<br />
from 2D to 3D<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''such institutional, cultural, and scientific practices also affect glaciological knowledge'''''</div><br />
<br />
you are the camera!<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''Questions of who produces glaciological knowledge, and how such knowledge is used or shared, take on real implications when considered through feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology lenses'''''</div><br />
<br />
At Gplates you can replace the pole location grab the pole and drag it<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''indigenous accounts do not portray the ice as passive, to be measured and mastered'''''</div><br />
<br />
while time happens along a linear highlight of cascading data<br />
<br />
'''''folk glaciologies diversify the field of glaciology and subvert the hegemony of natural sciences'''''<br />
<br />
Gplates applies deep familiar metaphors like child plates<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''Of the Earth, the present subject of our scenarios, we can presuppose a single thing: it doesn’t care about the questions we ask about it'''''<ref name="ftn324">Isabelle Stengers, ''The Invention of Modern Science'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).</ref></div><br />
<br />
slide the zoom in and out of a data set of magnetic information<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''to speak of a world which is “prior” and “independent” without implying that it is “single” and “determinate”: it encounters an earth which is very much “already composed” without it thereby being “already totalized”'''''<ref name="ftn325">Nigel Clark, “Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet,” Theory, Culture & Society (2011): 38-39.</ref></div><br />
<div class="page-break"></div><br />
now <br />
<br />
relocate<br />
<br />
the pole<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''having “a stable identity” in relation to scientific study does not imply stasis or stability per se'''''</div><br />
<br />
slide<br />
<br />
deeper down<br />
<br />
smoothly<br />
<br />
but how when where<br />
<br />
but who what why<br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates6.gif]]<br />
</div><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
=== Software Resources ===<br />
<br />
* [https://asourceforge.net/projects/gplates/files/gplates/2.1/gplates-ubuntu-xenial_2.1_1_amd64.deb/download Gplates Download]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/ Gplates Webportal]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=GSFML Magnesium Picks]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=Geology Geology]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=EMAG2_V2 EMAG2 Magnetic Anomaly Grid]<br />
* [https://www.gplates.org/gpml.html GPlates Markup Language (GPML)]<br />
* [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oZliPsP0zqKry0BV3xTXVQl7EuPoyQCHQ2p_GEuHu18/pub Gplates Tutorial 7.1: 3D Volume Visualisation Importing and Visualising 3D Scalar Fields]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=Geology EarthByte Gplates Portal Geology]<br />
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_hKAc3y-3Q G.plates on fictional planet]<br />
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLMpa0b4hls&list=PL0F9ejAtqLT8Vu0_uNjwkdgEoydBTcVze GPlates Tutorial 1.1: Loading and Saving Data]<br />
* [https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/ Enhanced Shuttle Land Elevation Data]<br />
<br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
| This text constitutes the report of a workshop of the same name that Femke Snelting, Helen Pritchard and Jara Rocha conducted during transmediale 2019 and was published on the issue #3 of the festival's journal: https://transmediale.de/content/depths-and-densities-a-bugged-report<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Depths_and_Densities:_A_bugged_report&diff=2586Depths and Densities: A bugged report2021-11-24T06:53:14Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== Depths and Densities: A Bugged Report ==<br />
'''Jara Rocha'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Under the guise of a one-afternoon workshop at transmediale 2019, Possible Bodies proposed to collectively study open-source tools for geo-modelling while attending to the different regimes –of truth, of representation, of language or of political ideology– they operate within. It attempted to read those tools and a selection of texts in relation, with the plan of injecting some resistant vocabularies, misuses and/or f(r)ictions that could affect the extractivist bias embedded in the computation of earth’s depths and densities.<br />
<br />
The workshop ''Depths and Densities'' was populated by a mix of known companions and just-met participants (in total, a convergence of circa thirty voices), each bringing her own particular intensities regarding the tools, the theories, the vocabularies, and the urgencies placed upon the table. The discussions were recorded on the spot and transcribed later. This report cuts through a thick mass of written notes, transcriptions, and excerpted theoretical texts, sedimented along five vectorial provocations: ''on the standardisation of time'', ''on software vocabularies'', ''on the activation of geontologies'', ''on the computation of velocities'', and ''on the techniques of 3D visualizations''. Each vectorial provocation was taken up by a sub-group of participants, who assumed the task of opening up a piece of Gplates, a free software tool and web portal for tectonic plate modeling. By holding close a technical feature, a forum, a tutorial, an interface etc. for a few hours, and tensioning these with some text matter from a reader pre-cooked by Helen V. Pritchard, Femke Snelting, and myself, Gplates worked as a catalyst for our conversations. Its community of developers would eventually become the deferred interlocutors of a report.<ref name="ftn313">See for a continuation of these interlocutions, The Underground Division (Helen V. Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting), “We Have Always Been Geohackers,” in this book.</ref><br />
<br />
The following cut was made to share a sample of that afternoon’s eclectic dialogues in what could be transferred as a polyphonic bugged report. All text injections (in italics, on the right side) are quotes taken from the workshop’s reader. All pieces following one already quoted belong to the same author, until the next quote in italics appears. All voices on the left emerged along the workshop’s discussion, which was transcribed by Fanny Wendt Höjer.<ref>See also: “Item 114: Earth Grabs Back,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2019.</ref><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates1.gif]]<br />
<br />
<div class="no-indent"><br />
=== First vectorial provocation,<br> on standardized time ===<br />
<br />
if multiple timescales are sedimented in contemporary software environments used by geophysics, can fossil fuel extractivist practices be understood as time-travelling practices?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''in these troubling times, there is an urgency to trouble time,&nbsp; to shake it to its core, and to produce collective imaginaries that undo pervasive conceptions of temporality.'''''<ref name="ftn315">Karen Barad, “Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness: on the im/possibilities of living and dying in the void,” ''New Formations 92: Posthuman Temporalities'' (2018)</ref></div><br />
<br />
this urgency is both new and not new<br />
<br />
how is the end of time imagined, in a modelling sense?<br />
<br />
we see discretely plotted colors<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''time isn’t what it used to be'''''</div><br />
<br />
does the body of earth exist in the same timescale as you do?<br />
<br />
or try and witness the whens otherwise<br />
<br />
time tends to be limited to (and influenced by) the observer’s perception but what are the material and semiotic conditions for another kind of time perception?<br />
<br />
sedimented time and coexistence at ecologies of nothingness (aka voids)<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''voids are features that occur commonly in near-surface geophysical imaging. (…) However, voids are often misidentified. Some voids are missed, and other anomalous features are misinterpreted as voids, when in fact they are not. Compare them with real voids, and we determinate the differences based on incomplete data'''''<ref name="ftn316">David C. Nobes, “Pitfalls to Avoid in Void Interpretation from Ground Penetrating Radar Imaging,” ''Interpretation ''6. 1-31. (June 2018), 10.1190/int-2018-0049.1.</ref></div><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates2.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Second vectorial provocation,<br>on software vocabularies ===<br />
<br />
forging a differently fueled language of geology must provide a lexicon with which to attend the geotraumas<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the endurance of a stony patience that doesn’t forget love'''''<ref name="ftn317">Kathryn Yusoff, ''A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).</ref></div><br />
<br />
user engagement with the earth through a 3D visualization software is based on metaphors like handling or grabbing<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''in the lexicon of geology that takes possession of people and places, ''delimiting the organization of existence, the refusal of such captivity makes a commons in the measure and pitch of the world, not the exclusive universality of the humanist subject'''''</div><br />
<br />
you can still grab the earth: at Gplates a stable static earth is available for grabbing<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''a refusal to be delimited is found in the matter of the world and a home in its maroonage; “they wander as if they have no century, as if they can bound time… compasses whose directions tilt, skid off known maps”'''''</div><br />
<br />
also, the use of the verb “to grab” brings with it the history and practice of “land grabbing”, land abuse and arbitrary actions of ownership and appropriation with correlated both dispossession by the taking of land, and environmental damage<br />
<br />
but what if the earth grabs back?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''there is a kind of reason that we will no longer accept tilting the axis of engagement within a geological optic and intimacy, the inhuman can be claimed as a different kind of resource than in its propertied colonial form—a gravitational form so extravagant, it defies gravity'''''</div><br />
<br />
if all the semantic network of Gplates 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<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''forging a new language of geology must provide a lexicon with which to take apart the Anthropocene, a poetry to refashion a new epoch, a new geology that attends the the racialization of matter'''''</div><br />
<br />
most software platforms allow for no resistance, for no possible unavailability<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the praxis of that aesthetic locates an insurgent geology'''''</div><br />
<br />
middle click and drag ¡la tierra para quien la trabaja!<ref name="ftn318">Emiliano Zapata (c.1911).</ref><br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''reconstituted in terms of agency for the present, for the end of this world and the possibility of others, because the world is already turning'''''</div><br />
<br />
and what if the earth grabs back<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the ghosts of geology rise'''''</div><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates3.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Third vectorial provocation,<br>on the activation of geontologies ===<br />
<br />
we are all talking over each other like tectonic plates and strata<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''a time of the geos, of soullessness'''''<ref name="ftn319">Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ''Geontologies: A requiem to late liberalism'' (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).</ref></div><br />
<br />
looking at what geology is implies a reconsideration of assumptions of what life is<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the anthropos as just one element in the larger set of not merely animal life but all Life as opposed to the state of original and radical Nonlife'''''</div><br />
<br />
minerals rocks plates<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the vital in relation to the inert, the extinct in relation to the barren'''''</div><br />
<br />
cannot be separated from time<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''it is also clear that late liberal strategies for governing difference and markets also only work insofar as these distinctions are maintained'''''</div><br />
<br />
but where is the legend we could not read it<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''Life (Life{birth, growth, reproduction}v. Death) v. Nonlife'''''</div><br />
<br />
why this suspension subversion of the living<br />
<br />
why this suspension subversion of the living<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''it is hardly an uncontroversial concept'''''</div><br />
<br />
otherwise the future will keep being missing but wait, the past is also missing the line goes back to 172 million years but earth is 4,5 billion years<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the way data gets laid over particular shapes, how that comes to kind of operationalize particular makings and matterings of the world.'''''<ref name="ftn320">Excerpts from Helen V. Pritchard’s oral introduction to the workshop.</ref></div><br />
<br />
a color-coded chronology is that tone the year of emergence or is it duration of collapse of merging<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''so kind of thinking through the technical and political questions of what is depth and what is density, how they shift depending on the situation they’re operationalized within'''''</div><br />
<br />
a gradient of abstraction is being dangerously portrayed<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the differences perhaps of the densities in geophysics to the densities in something like biomedical scanning, even though both might have tomographic processes'''''</div><br />
<br />
what is the skin of a body its density how is it colored?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''density is not a fixed thing'''''</div><br />
<br />
but why?<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''we’re interested in exploring these open questions; how these matter, and how they matter in relation to things like surfaces and their topologies, where there might be densities of power'''''</div><br />
<br />
a chroma chart would be appreciated<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''there’s a kind of thickness in imaginaries of depth: the kind of unknown or unreachable, the removed or the unremovable. But also the kind of dark and morally crooked in bodies, in earth and in desires'''''</div><br />
<br />
like absolute dating of rocks you’re alive, I’m alive/let’s go <br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''but other imaginations of depths in relation to both the earth or the so-called body, or the body of the earth. In particular, the thinking with the kind of writing from geo-philosophy and feminist technoscience, which might suggest that we might tilt the axis of engagement'''''</div><br />
<br />
peel earth’s skin the mantle<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''i think that’s at heart of the Possible Bodies project as well, this tilting of access to a different kind of optic'''''</div><br />
<br />
and peel it back where 4D is time and meets 5D uncertainty<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''to a different kind of intimacy'''''</div><br />
<br />
it does not peel back enough<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''think about the inhuman of earth surfaces, of tectonic plates, of geological strata; they might have another possibility than the proprietary colonial form, which often is the way it gets rendered within things like the modelling tools for say the extraction of fossil fuels or natural gas'''''</div><br />
<br />
''Geontologies'': the need of all bug reports<br />
<br />
[[File:4.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Fourth vectorial provocation,<br>on computing velocities ===<br />
<br />
that is too linear this is too straight<br />
<br />
data has different densities and intensities and the effects and affects of the single timeline make themselves visible<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''when specific intra-active technologies violently rendered real bodies, they wondered about the see-through space-times that were left in the dark'''''<ref name="ftn321">Possible Bodies feat. Helen Pritchard, “Ultrasonic Dreams of Aclinical Renderings,” in this book.</ref></div><br />
<br />
leaving grey areas that show no data coverage<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''the crisis of presence that emerged with the computational turn was shaped by the technocolonialism of turbocapitalism!'''''</div><br />
<br />
where is that information what is this superfiction<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''convoked from the dark inner space-times of the earth, the flesh and the cosmos, particular [amodern] renderings evidence that real bodies do not exist before being separated, cut and isolated.'''''</div><br />
<br />
whole parts of grey earth like you are making a cake you can put toppings on<br />
<br />
grey means there is nothing such as a body of earth it is almost a void<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''they read, listened and gossiped with awkwardness, intensity and urgency'''''</div><br />
<br />
earth used as a template for almost always fractured data<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''listen: there is a shaking surface, a cosmological inventory, hot breath in the ear'''''</div><br />
<br />
zoom in this shaking surface and always find some cracks<br />
<br />
the tool keeps wanting it to be presented as a whole the oneness of earthness as in the oneness of humanness<br />
<br />
there is a persistently imposing paradigm of wholeness and a pretension of full resolution but a body becomes any body only if the whole thing collapses<br />
<br />
but when<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''[the soil] is no longer (or never was) the exclusive realm of technocrats or geophysics experts'''''</div><br />
<br />
swipe it fast so much time in one swipe<br />
<br />
it is almost rude<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''these are your new devices, dim and glossy'''''</div><br />
<br />
take your time scroll scroll scroll deeper<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''where poetic renderings start to (re)generate (just) social imaginations'''''</div><br />
<br />
theres thens truths<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''let’s collectively resonate against technologies'''''</div><br />
<br />
counting backwards and year zero does not stay<br />
<br />
grab that time and<br />
<br />
perhaps if you upgrade the software you can get extra time<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''that bring in trans*feminist queer futures'''''</div><br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates5.gif]]<br />
<br />
=== Fifth vectorial provocation,<br>on the techniques of 3D volume visualization ===<br />
<br />
who is behind the proposers of the Mercator projection<ref name="ftn322">“Mercator Projection,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection</ref><br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''postcolonial or hegemonic structures of development'''''<ref name="ftn323">Mark Carey, M Jackson, Alessandro Antonello and Jaclyn Rushing, “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research,” ''Progress in Human Geography,'' 40(6) (2016): 770-793</ref></div><br />
<br />
who is behind one more eurocentric view of it<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''“the centrality of mathematical and technological science… structured by masculinist ideologies of domination and mastery”'''''</div><br />
<br />
from 2D to 3D<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''such institutional, cultural, and scientific practices also affect glaciological knowledge'''''</div><br />
<br />
you are the camera!<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''Questions of who produces glaciological knowledge, and how such knowledge is used or shared, take on real implications when considered through feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology lenses'''''</div><br />
<br />
At Gplates you can replace the pole location grab the pole and drag it<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''indigenous accounts do not portray the ice as passive, to be measured and mastered'''''</div><br />
<br />
while time happens along a linear highlight of cascading data<br />
<br />
'''''folk glaciologies diversify the field of glaciology and subvert the hegemony of natural sciences'''''<br />
<br />
Gplates applies deep familiar metaphors like child plates<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''Of the Earth, the present subject of our scenarios, we can presuppose a single thing: it doesn’t care about the questions we ask about it'''''<ref name="ftn324">Isabelle Stengers, ''The Invention of Modern Science'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).</ref></div><br />
<br />
slide the zoom in and out of a data set of magnetic information<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''to speak of a world which is “prior” and “independent” without implying that it is “single” and “determinate”: it encounters an earth which is very much “already composed” without it thereby being “already totalized”'''''<ref name="ftn325">Nigel Clark, “Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet,” Theory, Culture & Society (2011): 38-39.</ref></div><br />
<div class="page-break"></div><br />
now <br />
<br />
relocate<br />
<br />
the pole<br />
<br />
<div class="right-align">'''''having “a stable identity” in relation to scientific study does not imply stasis or stability per se'''''</div><br />
<br />
slide<br />
<br />
deeper down<br />
<br />
smoothly<br />
<br />
but how when where<br />
<br />
but who what why<br />
<br />
[[File:Gplates6.gif]]<br />
</div><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
=== Software Resources ===<br />
<br />
* [https://asourceforge.net/projects/gplates/files/gplates/2.1/gplates-ubuntu-xenial_2.1_1_amd64.deb/download Gplates Download]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/ Gplates Webportal]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=GSFML Magnesium Picks]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=Geology Geology]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=EMAG2_V2 EMAG2 Magnetic Anomaly Grid]<br />
* [https://www.gplates.org/gpml.html GPlates Markup Language (GPML)]<br />
* [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oZliPsP0zqKry0BV3xTXVQl7EuPoyQCHQ2p_GEuHu18/pub Gplates Tutorial 7.1: 3D Volume Visualisation Importing and Visualising 3D Scalar Fields]<br />
* [http://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=Geology EarthByte Gplates Portal Geology]<br />
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_hKAc3y-3Q G.plates on fictional planet]<br />
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLMpa0b4hls&list=PL0F9ejAtqLT8Vu0_uNjwkdgEoydBTcVze GPlates Tutorial 1.1: Loading and Saving Data]<br />
* [https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/ Enhanced Shuttle Land Elevation Data]<br />
<br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
| This text constitutes the report of a workshop of the same name that Femke Snelting, Helen Pritchard and Jara Rocha conducted during transmediale 2019 and was published on the issue #3 of the festival's journal: https://transmediale.de/content/depths-and-densities-a-bugged-report<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Open_Boundary_Conditions:_A_grid_for_intensive_study&diff=2585Open Boundary Conditions: A grid for intensive study2021-11-24T06:49:23Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== Open Boundary Conditions: A grid for intensive study ==<br />
<br />
'''Kym Ward'''<br />
<br />
<br />
{| style="border-spacing:0;margin:auto 1pt;width:100%;"<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:0.05pt solid #000000;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | <br />
| style="border-top:0.05pt solid #000000;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | '''Watery Columns'''<br />
| style="border-top:0.05pt solid #000000;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | '''Spongy Model Edges'''<br />
| style="border:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | '''Squints & True Colours'''<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | <br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | CTD<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | FVCOM<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | MATLAB<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | ''Expanded old-school''<br />
<br />
FSTS<br />
<br />
Patronage / gender<br />
<br />
Social constructivist<br />
<br />
Who & where<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Challenger & colonialism<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Accuracy & patronage<br />
<br />
‘good enough’ measurements<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | ‘Color carries the responsibility of honesty’<br />
<br />
moral relativism<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | ''Measurements that matter''<br />
<br />
New Materialisms<br />
<br />
agential cut<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Sammler<br />
<br />
Datum<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Isometric net<br />
<br />
Cuts that divide problematics in data science – atmosphere model and scales of comparison <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | semiotics of color<br />
<br />
rainbow deception<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | ''Gestationality''<br />
<br />
- speculative<br />
<br />
life/non/life (problematizing distinction)<br />
<br />
phenomenological Relates to Scientific Prediction<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Wax<br />
<br />
non-life collection<br />
<br />
Neimanis<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Biological model and life integration<br />
<br />
Cosmos as a technological <br />
<br />
system<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | Intuition for meaning of color map is natureculture<br />
<br />
data-vis as warnings not celebrations, exhaustion<br />
|-<br />
|}<br />
<br />
'''“I think that perhaps there is importance in starting various forms of intensive learning and intensive study”, Kym Ward explains when we ask about the grid that she devised to research Open Boundary Conditions. Kym works at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre in Liverpool, a place that has historically been occupied by different research-led organizations – up to now, predominantly in the Natural Earth Sciences. Originally built to measure time, latitude and the declination of the stars, in later iterations employees worked with meteorological, tidal and other marine data. Following this lineage from astronomical observation, to maritime scoping and charting, she became interested in the techno-political history of tidal prediction and started to study together with researchers from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC). In the following transcript, Kym explains us what is at stake in this work, and how it is structured.'''<br />
<br />
=== An area of interest that needs focus ===<br />
<br />
In the models that are used to run massive data sets, to do predictions for earth sciences or for meteorology or oceanography, there is an area of interest that needs to be focused on, because you can’t collect and process all data. For example, if you’re trying to figure out what waves will occur in a seascape, you need some edges to the object that you’re looking at.<br />
<br />
The issue with creating edges is that they just stop, that they make something finite, and things are often not finite. Waves have no edges and they don’t just end. So, if you’re trying to figure out different conditions for one area, a year in advance, you are going to have to figure out what comes in and what goes out of this imaginary realm. This is why you need what are called “open boundary conditions”: the mathematics that are applied to hundreds of sets of variables that create the ''outside'' of that model in order for it to run.<br />
<br />
There are a lot of different ways to create outside boundary conditions, and there are various kinds of equations that, in all honesty, are above my head. There are differential equations depending on what your object is, and if you're looking at waves, then you will use elliptic and hyperbolic equations.<br />
<br />
The issue comes when you need to run two different kinds of data sets. You need to understand what wind is going to do to waves, for example. And if you need to know that, you are going to involve both the ocean model and the atmosphere model, which are on some level incompatible. The atmosphere model has many more data points than the ocean, something like at a ratio of 1000 to 1. What that means is that it is so much more fine grained than the ocean model, so they cannot simply be run together, for every time that there is one step of the ocean model, there is a thousand steps for the atmosphere model to run through. The open boundary conditions need to provide the sets of conditions that will allow for these models to be integrated at massively different scales. That is one example.<br />
<br />
This term, “open boundary conditions”, makes sense to me, because of the gathering and gleaning that I have been doing across different disciplines, knowing that the vocabularies and discipline-specific words I am using will be warped, and perhaps not have the same equations applied to them. But coming from critical media theory, or philosophy of technology, and then moving to applied sciences is going to produce some interesting differences in timescales and steps. The reason I’m talking about this at all, is that I landed at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre, and this was formerly a place for astronomical observation. From astronomical observation it moved to tidal research and then prediction and charting. The history of the observatory as a part of the artistic research centre, which it is now, leads you to the kinds of data visualizations that are produced by modeling and data collection, and the discipline of oceanography as a whole.<br />
<br />
=== Modelling Waves and Swerves ===<br />
<br />
''Modelling Waves and Swerves'' started off as a dusty scrabble around the basements. I was excited to find original IBM 1130 data punch cards, which had been used in tidal prediction. But this soon turned into scratching my head over the harmonic calculations of tidal prediction machines, and I needed more help to understand these. And so, with collaborators, we set up ''Modelling Waves and Swerves'' – an ongoing series of weekend work sessions. In our initial call-out, we beckoned to “marine data modellers, tired oceanographers, software critics and people concerned with the politics of predictive visualizations”. The tiredness was not a typo – it was intended as a mode of approach, of care, for the limits of a discipline; and to navigate between the steps of data collection, prediction and dispersal of climate change data. Repetitive conclusions of ocean warming and sea level rising are regularly released, and when these meet the reception from wider publics, which can sometimes at best be described as indifferent, surely scientists must be a little weary?<br />
<br />
So these work sessions take place in the observatory, which was formerly occupied by the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), and sits just outside of Liverpool, in the UK. The group looks at current and historical processes of data collection, assimilation and computational modelling of oceanographic data sets, on the way to their visual outputs – and these chronologically range from ink blotted wavy lines on a drum of paper, to hyper-real 3D renderings.<br />
<br />
The types of data visualizations we find now, are 3D ocean current models, or colour variated global warming indices. If we are asking about the looseness of attachment between data visualization and energetic response, and why there is so little real response to those snippish heat stripes, then in an appeal to ethics and behavioural change, it might be useful to reexamine some methodologies of data science for their onto-epistemological grounds. This is the focus of “open boundary conditions”.<br />
<br />
One of the initial questions that the oceanographers asked us in these workshops, was why the visualizations they have been doing aren’t being received in a way which creates real change, why there is a deadening of effects when they produce their outputs even though they come in beautiful color stripes. They come in swirling movements across the globe, something that quite clearly shows the warming, why you can see sea level rise on their cross-section maps. These are obviously worrying, and if we take them seriously, they pose existential threat.<br />
<br />
I think there are a lot of artists and designers who would happily produce “better” visualizations, but you have to wonder what are the parameters of “better” in this case? More affective? Seemingly more “real”? In fact, what we’re interested in is the steps to get to the visualizations in the first place. So, the collections of data, the running of models, and then the output.<br />
<br />
=== A grid but not a monument ===<br />
<br />
The first thing to note is the impossibility of conducting this kind of research alone: if it were important, it would be important to more people than me. So I’m not very precious about the grid that I have proposed. It's not a monument. I think that perhaps there is importance in starting various forms of intensive learning, intensive study, which I see there is also a desire for.<br />
<br />
I haven’t seen the desire for exploring and explaining the technological back-end but I do see the desire for trying to get to grips with understanding oceanality and the ocean in an ecological sense. So I can see that there would be amazing possibilities for working with other people, in which you would hope that it wouldn’t all be struggling with text. That it could find some visual form, that it could find some practical form, that it could find some performance form, working in combination with the histories of science as they are, but also recombining to make other forms of knowledge. I would never have done this without the oceanographers and the data scientists. There is no possibility that I could have understood harmonic constants without a little bit of input.<br />
<br />
Yes, it comes form a concern that by working with a critique of technological processes of oceanography, towards data visualisation, I’m only deconstructing the different inheritances of Modernity. For example, in looking at biopower through affect theory, looking at the way that color affects the regulation of the body and its response. Or looking at it through a criticism and awareness of colonial history, and how that’s built the technologies in both extractivist and utilitarian ways. There’s a legitimacy in doing that, but it doesn’t create any kind of constructive conversation with anyone that I’ve been working with- with oceanographers, with data scientists. It does create productive conversations with philosophers but that might not reach any conclusion.<br />
<br />
My suspicion was that certain discourses that are happening in feminist science studies, in new materialisms and in feminist phenomenology could add to an understanding that in the end, a color stripe might not make that much difference, or create inaction. To do that, rather than to just open some books and read some pages, I thought that it would be more invested and involved, and careful and considerate and honest, and also confused, to take some objects and try to talk these through discourses and questions via those objects. So, I picked three.<br />
<br />
=== Watery columns: the CTD monitor ===<br />
<br />
The first example I picked was a CTD Monitor. CTD Monitor is a metal instrument which gets dropped down from an amazing buoy. There will be 10 or 12 CTDs which are arranged in a ring, and they get dropped, and sink to the bottom of the ocean. And then at some point, on a timer, they are released, and they will rise. And as they rise, their little metal mouths will open up and grab a gulp of sea water at a particular level. The mouths will close and they will proceed to the top and at some point they will be collected and this happens over a certain time period. Its testing for salinity, its testing for temperature, its testing for depth. Salinity is measured by conductivity and hydrostatic pressure I think.<br />
<br />
This logic follows long history of the way that the seascape is carved up, which the CTD instruments will rise through. Originally, it would have been a hemp rope, weighted with lead, which would be dropped from the side of a ship, As it drops, it runs through the hands of the sailors. There are knots on the rope, and each knot represents a fathom, and the fathoms are called out, and someone marks them with a quill pen.<br />
<br />
Through the architecture of Modernity, oceanography has the way of imagining the sea as a column. The sea is a very unstriated space that is imagined as an unchanging space. Even until today, this is how information is collected. Even the more unusual forms of data collection, such as the mini CTDs that are glued onto the heads of seals (a lot of the arctic data is from different seals who swim around). There is a GPS attached to it, and it still logged even though the seal is still swimming happily with that thing glued to its head. The sea is still divided up into a grid, at a certain depth, what is the salinity, temperature and conductivity, for example.<br />
<br />
So, even when sea mammals are put to work doing scientific investigation, and this investigation is then recalibrated into what is fundamentally a giant technological system formed on axes, really. It really brings home the quite strict ontological ground for sea exploration, and the types of relationality that happen in a vast expanse of many different types of sea lives, and many different kinds of waters. Under sea vents, tectonic plates, underwater volcanoes, ecologies which are then being programmed into fundamentally the same model. The data are being used not to explore something different, but to expand Western knowledges along an axis.<br />
<br />
=== Spongy model edges: FVCOM ===<br />
<br />
Another way that the seascape is absurdly chopped or divided from its messiness and never-ending movement is the construction of maritime boundaries, which are basically virtual objects in the sea, which are carved up by what is a nation state, by what is landmass. They are geopolitical artifacts.<br />
<br />
For example, since the late 1700s, at one of the points in the Americas, at Saint Martha’s Bay, the sea is recorded all the way down that coast, over the period of a year, and the mean sea-level is found. It’s a mean sea-level, because tides go up and down, there are semi-diurnal tides, there are diurnal tides, there are mixed tides. There’s waves! There are still sea movements that are foxing oceanographers. But in any event, the sea was averaged, there was highest point, the lowest point and the mean sea level was used to construct a zero, a datum. And from this point you start to measure mountains, upwards. How many kilometers above the sea is, how can you measure the sea? You measure it from the average of the sea. It's absurd, but it's also the globally agreed protocol.<br />
<br />
So what happens when you introduce climate change into this phenomenon is that mountains start shrinking because sea levels are rising. It has sociological, geological, urban planning, planning applications, which are in end effects political. What is classified as a disappearing island, or a non-disappearing island becomes ratified.<br />
<br />
FVCom is one of many multiple models that are used as a coordinate system. The example I gave earlier is just one example of data that is collected: salinity, temperature, depth, and obviously there are billions of data points that are also collected along rivers, along the coastline, and within the sea. One of the interesting things about how data is collected is that the nodes of data collection are very tightly packed around the coastlines, near rivers, and they are done on an isomorphic net, so it’s a triangular grid system that can be scaled. It can be expanded or contracted depending how close you want to zoom into that particular part of ocean, or coastline. And as you move out to sea, the grid gets a lot bigger. So the point at which the data is collected is averaged so that the data can run. And way out it into the middle of the ocean, you might have a two kilometer or three mile point between each of those corners of the triangle of this net which, anywhere between this node, gets averaged. Whereas at the coastline, you’ll have much tighter data, and the net will be in centimeters, or meters, not in miles.<br />
<br />
So FVCom is one of the many models, called “the ocean model” that we’ve been looking into. All of these models begin in the late ’60s, early ’70s and onward, they’ve been developed along the way in the intervening years and they take on more data points. What was initially not understood as being part of the ocean will then form one of the later models, for example, the biological model which is made of tiny life forms, phytoplankton and zooplankton - that came later. I already talked a little bit about how the models overlap and sync with each other.<br />
<br />
Sponginess is a term used to describe the boundary conditions where one massive model meets another massive model. The data which was collected to put into the model, if I describe it historically, one of the ways in which the process of modeling happens, is - someone takes measurements over the course of the coastline over a year, and the data is sent in. And the sheets of data that are sent in would be really grubby– they would perhaps be water sodden; but they were basic tabulations about the tide heights, the moon, the distances between waves. Different data like that. Before the advent of computers as we know them now, this information would be sent, in this way to Bidston Observatory, so that’s my access point into this history. And then that data would be fundamentally programmed so that the height of the tides or the wavelength, or the effect of the moon, would be run through different differential equations, and then it would be assigned a value. The value would be put into a tidal prediction machine. This machine was made of metal, with 42 brass discs. A band ran in-between these discs, each of the discs had a different name – for example, ''m2'' was the moon. And these discs would move up and down on arms. What was produced at the end of this computation- placed onto a roll of paper that was also onto a spinning drum by an arm, attached on one end with an ink pot, and the pen at the other which would draw out the harmonics – a wave. This wave was a prediction for next years tides.<br />
<br />
The tidal prediction machines around the time of the Second World War could do one year’s worth of predictions in one day. Different places around the world would send in their tidal calculations and they would receive back the predictions for the year, saying at what time what tide what height. The different harmonic constants, as they were called, that were run through the tidal prediction machines, they find themselves still in the predictions nowadays. They’ve been massively updated, and there are obviously so many more data points- but you can still find them in how FVCom works.<br />
<br />
One of the interesting things that happen in-between data collection, human error, different calculations and output, is that sometimes you get an output that does not resemble a harmonic – it doesn’t resemble a wave form. It needs to be smoothed. At that time, in order to correct it, it was simply rubbed out and drawn on with a pencil. The computers in the 1930s (the women who operated the machines were called computers), had partners – the “smoother”, whose task it was to correct the prediction blip. I see that there is a connection between the isomorphic grid with the averages in the middle of the sea, and the job of the “smoother”. They are both attempts to speak to what is legitimate accuracy.<br />
<br />
One of the strands of research that I’ve been doing was helped a lot by a feminist science and technology scholar, Anna Carlsson-Hyslop, and she wrote a paper on Doodson, one of the previous directors of the observatory. He was doing a lot of work on tidal prediction. She traces a line from his conscientious objection in the First World War to his subsequent work on aircraft ballistics. So while he doesn’t want to go to war, he doesn’t want to fight, he won’t go, he is conscripted to do mathematical scientific research because he is good at math, to do calculations on the trajectory of bombs, instead of going to war. As a part of this work that he did, he developed a way of looking at the arc of a missile using differential equations.<br />
<br />
Carlsson-Hyslop writes about the interaction between patronage and what is an accurate calculation. In order for these calculations to be done, somebody’s got to pay for them. Doodson is receiving a wage, but he also knows that there are “good enough” calculations for this set of conditions. When we think of the lineage of modeling, the impetus is to become more and more accurate. But its super helpful to keep in mind that there is a difference between ''accuracy'' and ''legitimacy''. The necessity for accuracy supposedly makes it more legitimate, however, it doesn’t correlate from a feminist science point of view.<br />
<br />
I’m just trying to figure out why I thought that the depths were denser. Obviously they are because there is more life there. The amassed points of interest are not the same as organic life. The surface of the water is more recordable, visible, datafiable. The depths are unknown. I think I was trying to make a link to what superficial means… like does it mean whether there’s something productive in a literary sense. Superficial is able to be captured a lot easier.<br />
<br />
=== Squints & True Colours: CM Ocean ===<br />
<br />
The third object of study is called CM Ocean. It's a programming software that is running MATLAB, in order to output the data which has then been run in the model. It is a visualization that would run alongside, and produce varying different scales of data via color. So there’s a lot of different programs which can turn ocean data into color, like heat stripes, water warming, sea warming, water level rise, salinity… lots of different kinds of data.<br />
<br />
We started off this journey speaking about why visualization don’t produce effect when they have to do with existential questions like Climate Change. So it makes sense to talk about CM Ocean.<br />
<br />
The data that is transformed into these visualizations are numerical, it’s quantity. And then they are translated into a scale that is absolutely not numerical, and are very subjective in terms of its reception. The aim of CM Ocean is to desubjectify and to make colour scientific. It is quite a task, which is surprising that a group would take it on. But CM Ocean is funded by BP, a multinational oil and gas company, and funded by George Bush. Its not that necessarily this has a one-on-one effect. But it's obvious, and worth noting that an oil company and the Texas Government would like to have a regulated way of understanding the contents of the ocean.<br />
<br />
The second thing is that the subjectivity of color is aimed for regulation, which bypasses things like taste. It bypasses any kind of physiological reception. I was thinking that perhaps the expectation that color can be reproducible, that it can be accurate, that it can correctly represent numerical data, that it can’t be divorced from numericizing color in the first place, the attributions of CMYK and RGB. If color is printed, it is different to if it’s on a screen. There are so many unworkables to this method, if you think about it. But the belief is that its good color usage carries the responsibility of honesty. So, to use colors in an honest way is the responsibility of the scientist. But what is honesty in color representation of data points? Its previous iteration, called JETS, is supposedly not so accurate, not so precise because it has the movements through the color scale with arbitrary weights. So, this has you thinking that there’s a density of whatever it is you’re looking for in the ocean because this particular part of the color scale is more dense to you, to the reception of the eye. Dark purple rather than light yellow might misrepresent the density of the object in question, but you would never know that, because this perceived symbolism is skewed. The gradient of the color has to accelerate and decelerate but it might not do that at the scale of the numerical values have on the back-end. It might be that it looks like it's getting warmer quickly, but it depending on how this color scale is being applied, it could completely skew the numerical results that you’ve run your model for.<br />
<br />
It’s also worth saying, that these models are hugely energy expensive, and take around forty days to run. The step from programming to output, massive amounts of electricity are used and the possibility for it to go wrong are quite large. If so, you would have to start again and try to recalculate. As I mentioned at the start of this conversation, if we look at these instances in the process of data collection to output, solely in a critical mode, then we fail in a remarkable way: the ocean, its inhabitants, what is life and what sustains us on this planet, is still and always our object of study. We need to propose other methods of working together, of offering feedback, which differently separate our object, or work with separability itself. The grid-not-monument we’re working with here, is a try towards this.<br />
<br />
[[File:Datum.jpg|thumb|none|600px|Datum point installed in the basement of Bidston Observatory, Kym Ward, 2021]]<br />
<br />
=== Frame: Expanded old school ===<br />
<br />
I want to try to think through these three cases in an expanded, old-school, social-constructivist feminist way where you would think about where that object is being produced, who produced it, how does it have an effect on and are there any, what are the linguistic and semiotic exchanges that take place because this technology has been built in this, and has been used by these people on these people. On these bodies, by bodies I mean the ocean, the body of water.<br />
<br />
It is about naming where and when something has been produced, in order to properly understand the limitations of its production, about making clear the ramifications of who and not resorting to default “I” or displaced I of objectivity.<br />
<br />
=== Frame: Measurements that matter ===<br />
<br />
The second frame is to use some of the work that has been done over the last 10 to 20 years on New Materialism, to try to think about how for the fact that all of these objects measure in different ways, they produce matter in the way that they measure. So the CTD Monitor measures only X, it makes an apparatus which combines and makes the world in a certain way. Which is then, only just a tiny little data point which then is put into FV Com. It's difficult to talk about FV Com through New Materialism, because it is such an object, but it can be done in a kind of reflective mode.<br />
<br />
We tried quite hard in ''Modeling Waves and Swerves'', to work this frame. It is possible, but it's much easier to look at one instrument than it is to look at a combination of instruments that form a massive instrument.<br />
<br />
And also in the impossibility of retreat from a massive models that separate ocean life and atmosphere, for example. You need one of those models in order to have input on the data, but because they have already been divided in a certain way, you have to run with the implications of that. It is a lot easier when you go all the way out, but not when you are looking at FV Com and your looking at the back-end in order to understand as an oceanographer or a data scientist, thinking, “OK, what would the agential cut be?”.<br />
<br />
=== Frame: Gestationality ===<br />
<br />
And the third strand, I call it “the feminist phenomenological”, but it really comes from reading the work the of Astrida Neimanis, who wrote ''Bodies of Water''. In the book, she speaks to ontologic and onto-logics, on the ontological of amniotics, and she is calling ontologic- not ontology which would deal with what “is” – but rather a who what when where how of commons of whatever it is we call more then human interlocutors. So, she speaks about amniotic in permeable open boundary membrane kind of ways. She is not only speaking about life that forms in the way of what she calls amniotes, life which forms in an amniotic sack, but she’s also using it as a metaphor, as a fictional philosophical tool which is useful.<br />
<br />
The reason that I had centered on this is why would feminist phenomenology have something to do with different modes of technical production of the ocean? She speaks to the water, different bodies of water that were along an evolutionary process, but also she speaks to them as a mode of reception and understanding and oneness with what is happening in the ocean. So it's a mode of understanding climate change, of potentially understanding sea warming. It has a lived bodily reality that we can connect to.<br />
<br />
The second reason that I thought it would be worthwhile to walk down this path a little bit was because if your thinking about the onto-logics of amniotics, you’re also thinking about gestationality, and gestationality also makes sense when you’re talking about predictions, ocean predictions. Because what, in the end, what this movement between data collection and running the models and producing the visualizations defines what is seen to be the ocean, and what is not seen to be the ocean, the contents of the ocean, the conditions of the ocean, the life of the ocean, what is not life in the ocean. And the kind of predictions that are accredited and valued by science are highly technologized predictions.<br />
<br />
The idea of what gestationality does is that it posits that life could come, the possibility for life is there, but we don’t know what kind of life will come and what it will look like. We don’t have a clue of it, its on the move and its emergent but there is no form to it yet. And this is something that I find, compared to prediction and its vast technologies that I tried to describe, I find gestationality useful and very exciting.<br />
<br />
=== References ===<br />
<br />
* “Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre (BOARC),” accessed October 20, 2021, http://www.bidstonobservatory.org<br />
* Carlsson-Hyslop, Anna. ''An Anatomy of storm surge science at Liverpool Tidal Institute 1919-1959: Forecasting, practices of calculation and patronage.'' Thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Life Sciences, 2010<br />
* Neimanis, Astrida. ''Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology'' (Edingburgh University Press, 2017)<br />
* Open call for “Modeling Swerves and Waves,” accessed October 20, 2021, [http://www.bidstonobservatory.org/?modelling_waves_swerves http://www.bidstonobservatory.org/?modelling_waves_swerves]</div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Open_Boundary_Conditions:_A_grid_for_intensive_study&diff=2584Open Boundary Conditions: A grid for intensive study2021-11-24T06:46:48Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
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<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== Open Boundary Conditions: A grid for intensive study ==<br />
<br />
'''Kym Ward'''<br />
<br />
<br />
{| style="border-spacing:0;margin:auto 1pt;width:100%;"<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:0.05pt solid #000000;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | <br />
| style="border-top:0.05pt solid #000000;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | '''Watery Columns'''<br />
| style="border-top:0.05pt solid #000000;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | '''Spongy Model Edges'''<br />
| style="border:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | '''Squints & True Colours'''<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | <br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | CTD<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | FVCOM<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | MATLAB<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | ''Expanded old-school''<br />
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FSTS<br />
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Patronage / gender<br />
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Social constructivist<br />
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Who & where<br />
<br />
<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Challenger & colonialism<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Accuracy & patronage<br />
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‘good enough’ measurements<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | ‘Color carries the responsibility of honesty’<br />
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moral relativism<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | ''Measurements that matter''<br />
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New Materialisms<br />
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agential cut<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Sammler<br />
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Datum<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Isometric net<br />
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Cuts that divide problematics in data science – atmosphere model and scales of comparison <br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | semiotics of color<br />
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rainbow deception<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | ''Gestationality''<br />
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- speculative<br />
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life/non/life (problematizing distinction)<br />
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phenomenological Relates to Scientific Prediction<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Wax<br />
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non-life collection<br />
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Neimanis<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Biological model and life integration<br />
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Cosmos as a technological <br />
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system<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | Intuition for meaning of color map is natureculture<br />
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data-vis as warnings not celebrations, exhaustion<br />
|-<br />
|}<br />
<br />
'''“I think that perhaps there is importance in starting various forms of intensive learning and intensive study”, Kym Ward explains when we ask about the grid that she devised to research Open Boundary Conditions. Kym works at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre in Liverpool, a place that has historically been occupied by different research-led organizations – up to now, predominantly in the Natural Earth Sciences. Originally built to measure time, latitude and the declination of the stars, in later iterations employees worked with meteorological, tidal and other marine data. Following this lineage from astronomical observation, to maritime scoping and charting, she became interested in the techno-political history of tidal prediction and started to study together with researchers from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC). In the following transcript, Kym explains us what is at stake in this work, and how it is structured.'''<br />
<br />
=== An area of interest that needs focus ===<br />
<br />
In the models that are used to run massive data sets, to do predictions for earth sciences or for meteorology or oceanography, there is an area of interest that needs to be focused on, because you can’t collect and process all data. For example, if you’re trying to figure out what waves will occur in a seascape, you need some edges to the object that you’re looking at.<br />
<br />
The issue with creating edges is that they just stop, that they make something finite, and things are often not finite. Waves have no edges and they don’t just end. So, if you’re trying to figure out different conditions for one area, a year in advance, you are going to have to figure out what comes in and what goes out of this imaginary realm. This is why you need what are called “open boundary conditions”: the mathematics that are applied to hundreds of sets of variables that create the ''outside'' of that model in order for it to run.<br />
<br />
There are a lot of different ways to create outside boundary conditions, and there are various kinds of equations that, in all honesty, are above my head. There are differential equations depending on what your object is, and if you're looking at waves, then you will use elliptic and hyperbolic equations.<br />
<br />
The issue comes when you need to run two different kinds of data sets. You need to understand what wind is going to do to waves, for example. And if you need to know that, you are going to involve both the ocean model and the atmosphere model, which are on some level incompatible. The atmosphere model has many more data points than the ocean, something like at a ratio of 1000 to 1. What that means is that it is so much more fine grained than the ocean model, so they cannot simply be run together, for every time that there is one step of the ocean model, there is a thousand steps for the atmosphere model to run through. The open boundary conditions need to provide the sets of conditions that will allow for these models to be integrated at massively different scales. That is one example.<br />
<br />
This term, “open boundary conditions”, makes sense to me, because of the gathering and gleaning that I have been doing across different disciplines, knowing that the vocabularies and discipline-specific words I am using will be warped, and perhaps not have the same equations applied to them. But coming from critical media theory, or philosophy of technology, and then moving to applied sciences is going to produce some interesting differences in timescales and steps. The reason I’m talking about this at all, is that I landed at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre, and this was formerly a place for astronomical observation. From astronomical observation it moved to tidal research and then prediction and charting. The history of the observatory as a part of the artistic research centre, which it is now, leads you to the kinds of data visualizations that are produced by modeling and data collection, and the discipline of oceanography as a whole.<br />
<br />
=== Modelling Waves and Swerves ===<br />
<br />
''Modelling Waves and Swerves'' started off as a dusty scrabble around the basements. I was excited to find original IBM 1130 data punch cards, which had been used in tidal prediction. But this soon turned into scratching my head over the harmonic calculations of tidal prediction machines, and I needed more help to understand these. And so, with collaborators, we set up ''Modelling Waves and Swerves'' – an ongoing series of weekend work sessions. In our initial call-out, we beckoned to “marine data modellers, tired oceanographers, software critics and people concerned with the politics of predictive visualizations”. The tiredness was not a typo – it was intended as a mode of approach, of care, for the limits of a discipline; and to navigate between the steps of data collection, prediction and dispersal of climate change data. Repetitive conclusions of ocean warming and sea level rising are regularly released, and when these meet the reception from wider publics, which can sometimes at best be described as indifferent, surely scientists must be a little weary?<br />
<br />
So these work sessions take place in the observatory, which was formerly occupied by the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), and sits just outside of Liverpool, in the UK. The group looks at current and historical processes of data collection, assimilation and computational modelling of oceanographic data sets, on the way to their visual outputs – and these chronologically range from ink blotted wavy lines on a drum of paper, to hyper-real 3D renderings.<br />
<br />
The types of data visualizations we find now, are 3D ocean current models, or colour variated global warming indices. If we are asking about the looseness of attachment between data visualization and energetic response, and why there is so little real response to those snippish heat stripes, then in an appeal to ethics and behavioural change, it might be useful to reexamine some methodologies of data science for their onto-epistemological grounds. This is the focus of “open boundary conditions”.<br />
<br />
One of the initial questions that the oceanographers asked us in these workshops, was why the visualizations they have been doing aren’t being received in a way which creates real change, why there is a deadening of effects when they produce their outputs even though they come in beautiful color stripes. They come in swirling movements across the globe, something that quite clearly shows the warming, why you can see sea level rise on their cross-section maps. These are obviously worrying, and if we take them seriously, they pose existential threat.<br />
<br />
I think there are a lot of artists and designers who would happily produce “better” visualizations, but you have to wonder what are the parameters of “better” in this case? More affective? Seemingly more “real”? In fact, what we’re interested in is the steps to get to the visualizations in the first place. So, the collections of data, the running of models, and then the output.<br />
<br />
=== A grid but not a monument ===<br />
<br />
The first thing to note is the impossibility of conducting this kind of research alone: if it were important, it would be important to more people than me. So I’m not very precious about the grid that I have proposed. It's not a monument. I think that perhaps there is importance in starting various forms of intensive learning, intensive study, which I see there is also a desire for.<br />
<br />
I haven’t seen the desire for exploring and explaining the technological back-end but I do see the desire for trying to get to grips with understanding oceanality and the ocean in an ecological sense. So I can see that there would be amazing possibilities for working with other people, in which you would hope that it wouldn’t all be struggling with text. That it could find some visual form, that it could find some practical form, that it could find some performance form, working in combination with the histories of science as they are, but also recombining to make other forms of knowledge. I would never have done this without the oceanographers and the data scientists. There is no possibility that I could have understood harmonic constants without a little bit of input.<br />
<br />
Yes, it comes form a concern that by working with a critique of technological processes of oceanography, towards data visualisation, I’m only deconstructing the different inheritances of Modernity. For example, in looking at biopower through affect theory, looking at the way that color affects the regulation of the body and its response. Or looking at it through a criticism and awareness of colonial history, and how that’s built the technologies in both extractivist and utilitarian ways. There’s a legitimacy in doing that, but it doesn’t create any kind of constructive conversation with anyone that I’ve been working with- with oceanographers, with data scientists. It does create productive conversations with philosophers but that might not reach any conclusion.<br />
<br />
My suspicion was that certain discourses that are happening in feminist science studies, in new materialisms and in feminist phenomenology could add to an understanding that in the end, a color stripe might not make that much difference, or create inaction. To do that, rather than to just open some books and read some pages, I thought that it would be more invested and involved, and careful and considerate and honest, and also confused, to take some objects and try to talk these through discourses and questions via those objects. So, I picked three.<br />
<br />
=== Watery columns: the CTD monitor ===<br />
<br />
The first example I picked was a CTD Monitor. CTD Monitor is a metal instrument which gets dropped down from an amazing buoy. There will be 10 or 12 CTDs which are arranged in a ring, and they get dropped, and sink to the bottom of the ocean. And then at some point, on a timer, they are released, and they will rise. And as they rise, their little metal mouths will open up and grab a gulp of sea water at a particular level. The mouths will close and they will proceed to the top and at some point they will be collected and this happens over a certain time period. Its testing for salinity, its testing for temperature, its testing for depth. Salinity is measured by conductivity and hydrostatic pressure I think.<br />
<br />
This logic follows long history of the way that the seascape is carved up, which the CTD instruments will rise through. Originally, it would have been a hemp rope, weighted with lead, which would be dropped from the side of a ship, As it drops, it runs through the hands of the sailors. There are knots on the rope, and each knot represents a fathom, and the fathoms are called out, and someone marks them with a quill pen.<br />
<br />
Through the architecture of Modernity, oceanography has the way of imagining the sea as a column. The sea is a very unstriated space that is imagined as an unchanging space. Even until today, this is how information is collected. Even the more unusual forms of data collection, such as the mini CTDs that are glued onto the heads of seals (a lot of the arctic data is from different seals who swim around). There is a GPS attached to it, and it still logged even though the seal is still swimming happily with that thing glued to its head. The sea is still divided up into a grid, at a certain depth, what is the salinity, temperature and conductivity, for example.<br />
<br />
So, even when sea mammals are put to work doing scientific investigation, and this investigation is then recalibrated into what is fundamentally a giant technological system formed on axes, really. It really brings home the quite strict ontological ground for sea exploration, and the types of relationality that happen in a vast expanse of many different types of sea lives, and many different kinds of waters. Under sea vents, tectonic plates, underwater volcanoes, ecologies which are then being programmed into fundamentally the same model. The data are being used not to explore something different, but to expand Western knowledges along an axis.<br />
<br />
=== Spongy model edges: FVCOM ===<br />
<br />
Another way that the seascape is absurdly chopped or divided from its messiness and never-ending movement is the construction of maritime boundaries, which are basically virtual objects in the sea, which are carved up by what is a nation state, by what is landmass. They are geopolitical artifacts.<br />
<br />
For example, since the late 1700s, at one of the points in the Americas, at Saint Martha’s Bay, the sea is recorded all the way down that coast, over the period of a year, and the mean sea-level is found. It’s a mean sea-level, because tides go up and down, there are semi-diurnal tides, there are diurnal tides, there are mixed tides. There’s waves! There are still sea movements that are foxing oceanographers. But in any event, the sea was averaged, there was highest point, the lowest point and the mean sea level was used to construct a zero, a datum. And from this point you start to measure mountains, upwards. How many kilometers above the sea is, how can you measure the sea? You measure it from the average of the sea. It's absurd, but it's also the globally agreed protocol.<br />
<br />
So what happens when you introduce climate change into this phenomenon is that mountains start shrinking because sea levels are rising. It has sociological, geological, urban planning, planning applications, which are in end effects political. What is classified as a disappearing island, or a non-disappearing island becomes ratified.<br />
<br />
FVCom is one of many multiple models that are used as a coordinate system. The example I gave earlier is just one example of data that is collected: salinity, temperature, depth, and obviously there are billions of data points that are also collected along rivers, along the coastline, and within the sea. One of the interesting things about how data is collected is that the nodes of data collection are very tightly packed around the coastlines, near rivers, and they are done on an isomorphic net, so it’s a triangular grid system that can be scaled. It can be expanded or contracted depending how close you want to zoom into that particular part of ocean, or coastline. And as you move out to sea, the grid gets a lot bigger. So the point at which the data is collected is averaged so that the data can run. And way out it into the middle of the ocean, you might have a two kilometer or three mile point between each of those corners of the triangle of this net which, anywhere between this node, gets averaged. Whereas at the coastline, you’ll have much tighter data, and the net will be in centimeters, or meters, not in miles.<br />
<br />
So FVCom is one of the many models, called “the ocean model” that we’ve been looking into. All of these models begin in the late ’60s, early ’70s and onward, they’ve been developed along the way in the intervening years and they take on more data points. What was initially not understood as being part of the ocean will then form one of the later models, for example, the biological model which is made of tiny life forms, phytoplankton and zooplankton - that came later. I already talked a little bit about how the models overlap and sync with each other.<br />
<br />
Sponginess is a term used to describe the boundary conditions where one massive model meets another massive model. The data which was collected to put into the model, if I describe it historically, one of the ways in which the process of modeling happens, is - someone takes measurements over the course of the coastline over a year, and the data is sent in. And the sheets of data that are sent in would be really grubby– they would perhaps be water sodden; but they were basic tabulations about the tide heights, the moon, the distances between waves. Different data like that. Before the advent of computers as we know them now, this information would be sent, in this way to Bidston Observatory, so that’s my access point into this history. And then that data would be fundamentally programmed so that the height of the tides or the wavelength, or the effect of the moon, would be run through different differential equations, and then it would be assigned a value. The value would be put into a tidal prediction machine. This machine was made of metal, with 42 brass discs. A band ran in-between these discs, each of the discs had a different name – for example, ''m2'' was the moon. And these discs would move up and down on arms. What was produced at the end of this computation- placed onto a roll of paper that was also onto a spinning drum by an arm, attached on one end with an ink pot, and the pen at the other which would draw out the harmonics – a wave. This wave was a prediction for next years tides.<br />
<br />
The tidal prediction machines around the time of the Second World War could do one year’s worth of predictions in one day. Different places around the world would send in their tidal calculations and they would receive back the predictions for the year, saying at what time what tide what height. The different harmonic constants, as they were called, that were run through the tidal prediction machines, they find themselves still in the predictions nowadays. They’ve been massively updated, and there are obviously so many more data points- but you can still find them in how FVCom works.<br />
<br />
One of the interesting things that happen in-between data collection, human error, different calculations and output, is that sometimes you get an output that does not resemble a harmonic – it doesn’t resemble a wave form. It needs to be smoothed. At that time, in order to correct it, it was simply rubbed out and drawn on with a pencil. The computers in the 1930s (the women who operated the machines were called computers), had partners – the “smoother”, whose task it was to correct the prediction blip. I see that there is a connection between the isomorphic grid with the averages in the middle of the sea, and the job of the “smoother”. They are both attempts to speak to what is legitimate accuracy.<br />
<br />
One of the strands of research that I’ve been doing was helped a lot by a feminist science and technology scholar, Anna Carlsson-Hyslop, and she wrote a paper on Doodson, one of the previous directors of the observatory. He was doing a lot of work on tidal prediction. She traces a line from his conscientious objection in the First World War to his subsequent work on aircraft ballistics. So while he doesn’t want to go to war, he doesn’t want to fight, he won’t go, he is conscripted to do mathematical scientific research because he is good at math, to do calculations on the trajectory of bombs, instead of going to war. As a part of this work that he did, he developed a way of looking at the arc of a missile using differential equations.<br />
<br />
Carlsson-Hyslop writes about the interaction between patronage and what is an accurate calculation. In order for these calculations to be done, somebody’s got to pay for them. Doodson is receiving a wage, but he also knows that there are “good enough” calculations for this set of conditions. When we think of the lineage of modeling, the impetus is to become more and more accurate. But its super helpful to keep in mind that there is a difference between ''accuracy'' and ''legitimacy''. The necessity for accuracy supposedly makes it more legitimate, however, it doesn’t correlate from a feminist science point of view.<br />
<br />
I’m just trying to figure out why I thought that the depths were denser. Obviously they are because there is more life there. The amassed points of interest are not the same as organic life. The surface of the water is more recordable, visible, datafiable. The depths are unknown. I think I was trying to make a link to what superficial means… like does it mean whether there’s something productive in a literary sense. Superficial is able to be captured a lot easier.<br />
<br />
=== Squints & True Colours: CM Ocean ===<br />
<br />
The third object of study is called CM Ocean. It's a programming software that is running MATLAB, in order to output the data which has then been run in the model. It is a visualization that would run alongside, and produce varying different scales of data via color. So there’s a lot of different programs which can turn ocean data into color, like heat stripes, water warming, sea warming, water level rise, salinity… lots of different kinds of data.<br />
<br />
We started off this journey speaking about why visualization don’t produce effect when they have to do with existential questions like Climate Change. So it makes sense to talk about CM Ocean.<br />
<br />
The data that is transformed into these visualizations are numerical, it’s quantity. And then they are translated into a scale that is absolutely not numerical, and are very subjective in terms of its reception. The aim of CM Ocean is to desubjectify and to make colour scientific. It is quite a task, which is surprising that a group would take it on. But CM Ocean is funded by BP, a multinational oil and gas company, and funded by George Bush. Its not that necessarily this has a one-on-one effect. But it's obvious, and worth noting that an oil company and the Texas Government would like to have a regulated way of understanding the contents of the ocean.<br />
<br />
The second thing is that the subjectivity of color is aimed for regulation, which bypasses things like taste. It bypasses any kind of physiological reception. I was thinking that perhaps the expectation that color can be reproducible, that it can be accurate, that it can correctly represent numerical data, that it can’t be divorced from numericizing color in the first place, the attributions of CMYK and RGB. If color is printed, it is different to if it’s on a screen. There are so many unworkables to this method, if you think about it. But the belief is that its good color usage carries the responsibility of honesty. So, to use colors in an honest way is the responsibility of the scientist. But what is honesty in color representation of data points? Its previous iteration, called JETS, is supposedly not so accurate, not so precise because it has the movements through the color scale with arbitrary weights. So, this has you thinking that there’s a density of whatever it is you’re looking for in the ocean because this particular part of the color scale is more dense to you, to the reception of the eye. Dark purple rather than light yellow might misrepresent the density of the object in question, but you would never know that, because this perceived symbolism is skewed. The gradient of the color has to accelerate and decelerate but it might not do that at the scale of the numerical values have on the back-end. It might be that it looks like it's getting warmer quickly, but it depending on how this color scale is being applied, it could completely skew the numerical results that you’ve run your model for.<br />
<br />
It’s also worth saying, that these models are hugely energy expensive, and take around forty days to run. The step from programming to output, massive amounts of electricity are used and the possibility for it to go wrong are quite large. If so, you would have to start again and try to recalculate. As I mentioned at the start of this conversation, if we look at these instances in the process of data collection to output, solely in a critical mode, then we fail in a remarkable way: the ocean, its inhabitants, what is life and what sustains us on this planet, is still and always our object of study. We need to propose other methods of working together, of offering feedback, which differently separate our object, or work with separability itself. The grid-not-monument we’re working with here, is a try towards this.<br />
<br />
[[File:Datum.jpg|thumb|none|600px|Datum point installed in the basement of Bidston Observatory, Kym Ward, 2021]]<br />
<br />
=== Frame: Expanded old school ===<br />
<br />
I want to try to think through these three cases in an expanded, old-school, social-constructivist feminist way where you would think about where that object is being produced, who produced it, how does it have an effect on and are there any, what are the linguistic and semiotic exchanges that take place because this technology has been built in this, and has been used by these people on these people. On these bodies, by bodies I mean the ocean, the body of water.<br />
<br />
It is about naming where and when something has been produced, in order to properly understand the limitations of its production, about making clear the ramifications of who and not resorting to default “I” or displaced I of objectivity.<br />
<br />
=== Frame: Measurements that matter ===<br />
<br />
The second frame is to use some of the work that has been done over the last 10 to 20 years on New Materialism, to try to think about how for the fact that all of these objects measure in different ways, they produce matter in the way that they measure. So the CTD Monitor measures only X, it makes an apparatus which combines and makes the world in a certain way. Which is then, only just a tiny little data point which then is put into FV Com. It's difficult to talk about FV Com through New Materialism, because it is such an object, but it can be done in a kind of reflective mode.<br />
<br />
We tried quite hard in ''Modeling Waves and Swerves'', to work this frame. It is possible, but it's much easier to look at one instrument than it is to look at a combination of instruments that form a massive instrument.<br />
<br />
And also in the impossibility of retreat from a massive models that separate ocean life and atmosphere, for example. You need one of those models in order to have input on the data, but because they have already been divided in a certain way, you have to run with the implications of that. It is a lot easier when you go all the way out, but not when you are looking at FV Com and your looking at the back-end in order to understand as an oceanographer or a data scientist, thinking, “OK, what would the agential cut be?”.<br />
<br />
=== Frame: Gestationality ===<br />
<br />
And the third strand, I call it “the feminist phenomenological”, but it really comes from reading the work the of Astrida Neimanis, who wrote ''Bodies of Water''. In the book, she speaks to ontologic and onto-logics, on the ontological of amniotics, and she is calling ontologic- not ontology which would deal with what ‘is’ – but rather a who what when where how of commons of whatever it is we call more then human interlocutors. So, she speaks about amniotic in permeable open boundary membrane kind of ways. She is not only speaking about life that forms in the way of what she calls amniotes, life which forms in an amniotic sack, but she’s also using it as a metaphor, as a fictional philosophical tool which is useful.<br />
<br />
The reason that I had centered on this is why would feminist phenomenology have something to do with different modes of technical production of the ocean? She speaks to the water, different bodies of water that were along an evolutionary process, but also she speaks to them as a mode of reception and understanding and oneness with what is happening in the ocean. So it's a mode of understanding climate change, of potentially understanding sea warming. It has a lived bodily reality that we can connect to.<br />
<br />
The second reason that I thought it would be worthwhile to walk down this path a little bit was because if your thinking about the onto-logics of amniotics, you’re also thinking about gestationality, and gestationality also makes sense when you’re talking about predictions, ocean predictions. Because what, in the end, what this movement between data collection and running the models and producing the visualizations defines what is seen to be the ocean, and what is not seen to be the ocean, the contents of the ocean, the conditions of the ocean, the life of the ocean, what is not life in the ocean. And the kind of predictions that are accredited and valued by science are highly technologized predictions.<br />
<br />
The idea of what gestationality does is that it posits that life could come, the possibility for life is there, but we don’t know what kind of life will come and what it will look like. We don’t have a clue of it, its on the move and its emergent but there is no form to it yet. And this is something that I find, compared to prediction and its vast technologies that I tried to describe, I find gestationality useful and very exciting.<br />
<br />
=== References ===<br />
<br />
* “Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre (BOARC),” accessed October 20, 2021, http://www.bidstonobservatory.org<br />
* Carlsson-Hyslop, Anna. ''An Anatomy of storm surge science at Liverpool Tidal Institute 1919-1959: Forecasting, practices of calculation and patronage.'' Thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Life Sciences, 2010<br />
* Neimanis, Astrida. ''Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology'' (Edingburgh University Press, 2017)<br />
* Open call for “Modeling Swerves and Waves,” accessed October 20, 2021, [http://www.bidstonobservatory.org/?modelling_waves_swerves http://www.bidstonobservatory.org/?modelling_waves_swerves]</div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Open_Boundary_Conditions:_A_grid_for_intensive_study&diff=2583Open Boundary Conditions: A grid for intensive study2021-11-24T06:45:29Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
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<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== Open Boundary Conditions: A grid for intensive study ==<br />
<br />
'''Kym Ward'''<br />
<br />
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{| style="border-spacing:0;margin:auto 1pt;width:100%;"<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:0.05pt solid #000000;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | <br />
| style="border-top:0.05pt solid #000000;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | '''Watery Columns'''<br />
| style="border-top:0.05pt solid #000000;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | '''Spongy Model Edges'''<br />
| style="border:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | '''Squints & True Colours'''<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | <br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | CTD<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | FVCOM<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | MATLAB<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | ''Expanded old-school''<br />
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FSTS<br />
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Patronage / gender<br />
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Social constructivist<br />
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Who & where<br />
<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Challenger & colonialism<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Accuracy & patronage<br />
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‘good enough’ measurements<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | ‘Color carries the responsibility of honesty’<br />
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moral relativism<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | ''Measurements that matter''<br />
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New Materialisms<br />
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agential cut<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Sammler<br />
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Datum<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Isometric net<br />
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Cuts that divide problematics in data science – atmosphere model and scales of comparison <br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | semiotics of color<br />
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rainbow deception<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | ''Gestationality''<br />
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- speculative<br />
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life/non/life (problematizing distinction)<br />
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phenomenological Relates to Scientific Prediction<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Wax<br />
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non-life collection<br />
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Neimanis<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Biological model and life integration<br />
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Cosmos as a technological <br />
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system<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | Intuition for meaning of color map is natureculture<br />
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data-vis as warnings not celebrations, exhaustion<br />
|-<br />
|}<br />
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'''“I think that perhaps there is importance in starting various forms of intensive learning and intensive study”, Kym Ward explains when we ask about the grid that she devised to research Open Boundary Conditions. Kym works at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre in Liverpool, a place that has historically been occupied by different research-led organizations – up to now, predominantly in the Natural Earth Sciences. Originally built to measure time, latitude and the declination of the stars, in later iterations employees worked with meteorological, tidal and other marine data. Following this lineage from astronomical observation, to maritime scoping and charting, she became interested in the techno-political history of tidal prediction and started to study together with researchers from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC). In the following transcript, Kym explains us what is at stake in this work, and how it is structured.'''<br />
<br />
=== An area of interest that needs focus ===<br />
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In the models that are used to run massive data sets, to do predictions for earth sciences or for meteorology or oceanography, there is an area of interest that needs to be focused on, because you can’t collect and process all data. For example, if you’re trying to figure out what waves will occur in a seascape, you need some edges to the object that you’re looking at.<br />
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The issue with creating edges is that they just stop, that they make something finite, and things are often not finite. Waves have no edges and they don’t just end. So, if you’re trying to figure out different conditions for one area, a year in advance, you are going to have to figure out what comes in and what goes out of this imaginary realm. This is why you need what are called “open boundary conditions”: the mathematics that are applied to hundreds of sets of variables that create the ''outside'' of that model in order for it to run.<br />
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There are a lot of different ways to create outside boundary conditions, and there are various kinds of equations that, in all honesty, are above my head. There are differential equations depending on what your object is, and if you're looking at waves, then you will use elliptic and hyperbolic equations.<br />
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The issue comes when you need to run two different kinds of data sets. You need to understand what wind is going to do to waves, for example. And if you need to know that, you are going to involve both the ocean model and the atmosphere model, which are on some level incompatible. The atmosphere model has many more data points than the ocean, something like at a ratio of 1000 to 1. What that means is that it is so much more fine grained than the ocean model, so they cannot simply be run together, for every time that there is one step of the ocean model, there is a thousand steps for the atmosphere model to run through. The open boundary conditions need to provide the sets of conditions that will allow for these models to be integrated at massively different scales. That is one example.<br />
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This term, “open boundary conditions”, makes sense to me, because of the gathering and gleaning that I have been doing across different disciplines, knowing that the vocabularies and discipline-specific words I am using will be warped, and perhaps not have the same equations applied to them. But coming from critical media theory, or philosophy of technology, and then moving to applied sciences is going to produce some interesting differences in timescales and steps. The reason I’m talking about this at all, is that I landed at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre, and this was formerly a place for astronomical observation. From astronomical observation it moved to tidal research and then prediction and charting. The history of the observatory as a part of the artistic research centre, which it is now, leads you to the kinds of data visualizations that are produced by modeling and data collection, and the discipline of oceanography as a whole.<br />
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=== Modelling Waves and Swerves ===<br />
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''Modelling Waves and Swerves'' started off as a dusty scrabble around the basements. I was excited to find original IBM 1130 data punch cards, which had been used in tidal prediction. But this soon turned into scratching my head over the harmonic calculations of tidal prediction machines, and I needed more help to understand these. And so, with collaborators, we set up ''Modelling Waves and Swerves'' – an ongoing series of weekend work sessions. In our initial call-out, we beckoned to “marine data modellers, tired oceanographers, software critics and people concerned with the politics of predictive visualizations”. The tiredness was not a typo – it was intended as a mode of approach, of care, for the limits of a discipline; and to navigate between the steps of data collection, prediction and dispersal of climate change data. Repetitive conclusions of ocean warming and sea level rising are regularly released, and when these meet the reception from wider publics, which can sometimes at best be described as indifferent, surely scientists must be a little weary?<br />
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So these work sessions take place in the observatory, which was formerly occupied by the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), and sits just outside of Liverpool, in the UK. The group looks at current and historical processes of data collection, assimilation and computational modelling of oceanographic data sets, on the way to their visual outputs – and these chronologically range from ink blotted wavy lines on a drum of paper, to hyper-real 3D renderings.<br />
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The types of data visualizations we find now, are 3D ocean current models, or colour variated global warming indices. If we are asking about the looseness of attachment between data visualization and energetic response, and why there is so little real response to those snippish heat stripes, then in an appeal to ethics and behavioural change, it might be useful to reexamine some methodologies of data science for their onto-epistemological grounds. This is the focus of “open boundary conditions”.<br />
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One of the initial questions that the oceanographers asked us in these workshops, was why the visualizations they have been doing aren’t being received in a way which creates real change, why there is a deadening of effects when they produce their outputs even though they come in beautiful color stripes. They come in swirling movements across the globe, something that quite clearly shows the warming, why you can see sea level rise on their cross-section maps. These are obviously worrying, and if we take them seriously, they pose existential threat.<br />
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I think there are a lot of artists and designers who would happily produce “better” visualizations, but you have to wonder what are the parameters of “better” in this case? More affective? Seemingly more “real”? In fact, what we’re interested in is the steps to get to the visualizations in the first place. So, the collections of data, the running of models, and then the output.<br />
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=== A grid but not a monument ===<br />
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The first thing to note is the impossibility of conducting this kind of research alone: if it were important, it would be important to more people than me. So I’m not very precious about the grid that I have proposed. It's not a monument. I think that perhaps there is importance in starting various forms of intensive learning, intensive study, which I see there is also a desire for.<br />
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I haven’t seen the desire for exploring and explaining the technological back-end but I do see the desire for trying to get to grips with understanding oceanality and the ocean in an ecological sense. So I can see that there would be amazing possibilities for working with other people, in which you would hope that it wouldn’t all be struggling with text. That it could find some visual form, that it could find some practical form, that it could find some performance form, working in combination with the histories of science as they are, but also recombining to make other forms of knowledge. I would never have done this without the oceanographers and the data scientists. There is no possibility that I could have understood harmonic constants without a little bit of input.<br />
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Yes, it comes form a concern that by working with a critique of technological processes of oceanography, towards data visualisation, I’m only deconstructing the different inheritances of Modernity. For example, in looking at biopower through affect theory, looking at the way that color affects the regulation of the body and its response. Or looking at it through a criticism and awareness of colonial history, and how that’s built the technologies in both extractivist and utilitarian ways. There’s a legitimacy in doing that, but it doesn’t create any kind of constructive conversation with anyone that I’ve been working with- with oceanographers, with data scientists. It does create productive conversations with philosophers but that might not reach any conclusion.<br />
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My suspicion was that certain discourses that are happening in feminist science studies, in new materialisms and in feminist phenomenology could add to an understanding that in the end, a color stripe might not make that much difference, or create inaction. To do that, rather than to just open some books and read some pages, I thought that it would be more invested and involved, and careful and considerate and honest, and also confused, to take some objects and try to talk these through discourses and questions via those objects. So, I picked three.<br />
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=== Watery columns: the CTD monitor ===<br />
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The first example I picked was a CTD Monitor. CTD Monitor is a metal instrument which gets dropped down from an amazing buoy. There will be 10 or 12 CTDs which are arranged in a ring, and they get dropped, and sink to the bottom of the ocean. And then at some point, on a timer, they are released, and they will rise. And as they rise, their little metal mouths will open up and grab a gulp of sea water at a particular level. The mouths will close and they will proceed to the top and at some point they will be collected and this happens over a certain time period. Its testing for salinity, its testing for temperature, its testing for depth. Salinity is measured by conductivity and hydrostatic pressure I think.<br />
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This logic follows long history of the way that the seascape is carved up, which the CTD instruments will rise through. Originally, it would have been a hemp rope, weighted with lead, which would be dropped from the side of a ship, As it drops, it runs through the hands of the sailors. There are knots on the rope, and each knot represents a fathom, and the fathoms are called out, and someone marks them with a quill pen.<br />
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Through the architecture of Modernity, oceanography has the way of imagining the sea as a column. The sea is a very unstriated space that is imagined as an unchanging space. Even until today, this is how information is collected. Even the more unusual forms of data collection, such as the mini CTDs that are glued onto the heads of seals (a lot of the arctic data is from different seals who swim around). There is a GPS attached to it, and it still logged even though the seal is still swimming happily with that thing glued to its head. The sea is still divided up into a grid, at a certain depth, what is the salinity, temperature and conductivity, for example.<br />
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So, even when sea mammals are put to work doing scientific investigation, and this investigation is then recalibrated into what is fundamentally a giant technological system formed on axes, really. It really brings home the quite strict ontological ground for sea exploration, and the types of relationality that happen in a vast expanse of many different types of sea lives, and many different kinds of waters. Under sea vents, tectonic plates, underwater volcanoes, ecologies which are then being programmed into fundamentally the same model. The data are being used not to explore something different, but to expand Western knowledges along an axis.<br />
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=== Spongy model edges: FVCOM ===<br />
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Another way that the seascape is absurdly chopped or divided from its messiness and never-ending movement is the construction of maritime boundaries, which are basically virtual objects in the sea, which are carved up by what is a nation state, by what is landmass. They are geopolitical artifacts.<br />
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For example, since the late 1700s, at one of the points in the Americas, at Saint Martha’s Bay, the sea is recorded all the way down that coast, over the period of a year, and the mean sea-level is found. It’s a mean sea-level, because tides go up and down, there are semi-diurnal tides, there are diurnal tides, there are mixed tides. There’s waves! There are still sea movements that are foxing oceanographers. But in any event, the sea was averaged, there was highest point, the lowest point and the mean sea level was used to construct a zero, a datum. And from this point you start to measure mountains, upwards. How many kilometers above the sea is, how can you measure the sea? You measure it from the average of the sea. It's absurd, but it's also the globally agreed protocol.<br />
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So what happens when you introduce climate change into this phenomenon is that mountains start shrinking because sea levels are rising. It has sociological, geological, urban planning, planning applications, which are in end effects political. What is classified as a disappearing island, or a non-disappearing island becomes ratified.<br />
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FVCom is one of many multiple models that are used as a coordinate system. The example I gave earlier is just one example of data that is collected: salinity, temperature, depth, and obviously there are billions of data points that are also collected along rivers, along the coastline, and within the sea. One of the interesting things about how data is collected is that the nodes of data collection are very tightly packed around the coastlines, near rivers, and they are done on an isomorphic net, so it’s a triangular grid system that can be scaled. It can be expanded or contracted depending how close you want to zoom into that particular part of ocean, or coastline. And as you move out to sea, the grid gets a lot bigger. So the point at which the data is collected is averaged so that the data can run. And way out it into the middle of the ocean, you might have a two kilometer or three mile point between each of those corners of the triangle of this net which, anywhere between this node, gets averaged. Whereas at the coastline, you’ll have much tighter data, and the net will be in centimeters, or meters, not in miles.<br />
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So FVCom is one of the many models, called “the ocean model” that we’ve been looking into. All of these models begin in the late ’60s, early ’70s and onward, they’ve been developed along the way in the intervening years and they take on more data points. What was initially not understood as being part of the ocean will then form one of the later models, for example, the biological model which is made of tiny life forms, phytoplankton and zooplankton - that came later. I already talked a little bit about how the models overlap and sync with each other.<br />
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Sponginess is a term used to describe the boundary conditions where one massive model meets another massive model. The data which was collected to put into the model, if I describe it historically, one of the ways in which the process of modeling happens, is - someone takes measurements over the course of the coastline over a year, and the data is sent in. And the sheets of data that are sent in would be really grubby– they would perhaps be water sodden; but they were basic tabulations about the tide heights, the moon, the distances between waves. Different data like that. Before the advent of computers as we know them now, this information would be sent, in this way to Bidston Observatory, so that’s my access point into this history. And then that data would be fundamentally programmed so that the height of the tides or the wavelength, or the effect of the moon, would be run through different differential equations, and then it would be assigned a value. The value would be put into a tidal prediction machine. This machine was made of metal, with 42 brass discs. A band ran in-between these discs, each of the discs had a different name – for example, ''m2'' was the moon. And these discs would move up and down on arms. What was produced at the end of this computation- placed onto a roll of paper that was also onto a spinning drum by an arm, attached on one end with an ink pot, and the pen at the other which would draw out the harmonics – a wave. This wave was a prediction for next years tides.<br />
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The tidal prediction machines around the time of the Second World War could do one year’s worth of predictions in one day. Different places around the world would send in their tidal calculations and they would receive back the predictions for the year, saying at what time what tide what height. The different harmonic constants, as they were called, that were run through the tidal prediction machines, they find themselves still in the predictions nowadays. They’ve been massively updated, and there are obviously so many more data points- but you can still find them in how FVCom works.<br />
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One of the interesting things that happen in-between data collection, human error, different calculations and output, is that sometimes you get an output that does not resemble a harmonic – it doesn’t resemble a wave form. It needs to be smoothed. At that time, in order to correct it, it was simply rubbed out and drawn on with a pencil. The computers in the 1930s (the women who operated the machines were called computers), had partners – the “smoother”, whose task it was to correct the prediction blip. I see that there is a connection between the isomorphic grid with the averages in the middle of the sea, and the job of the “smoother”. They are both attempts to speak to what is legitimate accuracy.<br />
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One of the strands of research that I’ve been doing was helped a lot by a feminist science and technology scholar, Anna Carlsson-Hyslop, and she wrote a paper on Doodson, one of the previous directors of the observatory. He was doing a lot of work on tidal prediction. She traces a line from his conscientious objection in the First World War to his subsequent work on aircraft ballistics. So while he doesn’t want to go to war, he doesn’t want to fight, he won’t go, he is conscripted to do mathematical scientific research because he is good at math, to do calculations on the trajectory of bombs, instead of going to war. As a part of this work that he did, he developed a way of looking at the arc of a missile using differential equations.<br />
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Carlsson-Hyslop writes about the interaction between patronage and what is an accurate calculation. In order for these calculations to be done, somebody’s got to pay for them. Doodson is receiving a wage, but he also knows that there are “good enough” calculations for this set of conditions. When we think of the lineage of modeling, the impetus is to become more and more accurate. But its super helpful to keep in mind that there is a difference between ''accuracy'' and ''legitimacy''. The necessity for accuracy supposedly makes it more legitimate, however, it doesn’t correlate from a feminist science point of view.<br />
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I’m just trying to figure out why I thought that the depths were denser. Obviously they are because there is more life there. The amassed points of interest are not the same as organic life. The surface of the water is more recordable, visible, datafiable. The depths are unknown. I think I was trying to make a link to what superficial means… like does it mean whether there’s something productive in a literary sense. Superficial is able to be captured a lot easier.<br />
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=== Squints & True Colours: CM Ocean ===<br />
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The third object of study is called CM Ocean. It's a programming software that is running MATLAB, in order to output the data which has then been run in the model. It is a visualization that would run alongside, and produce varying different scales of data via color. So there’s a lot of different programs which can turn ocean data into color, like heat stripes, water warming, sea warming, water level rise, salinity… lots of different kinds of data.<br />
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We started off this journey speaking about why visualization don’t produce effect when they have to do with existential questions like Climate Change. So it makes sense to talk about CM Ocean.<br />
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The data that is transformed into these visualizations are numerical, it’s quantity. And then they are translated into a scale that is absolutely not numerical, and are very subjective in terms of its reception. The aim of CM Ocean is to desubjectify and to make colour scientific. It is quite a task, which is surprising that a group would take it on. But CM Ocean is funded by BP, a multinational oil and gas company, and funded by George Bush. Its not that necessarily this has a one-on-one effect. But it's obvious, and worth noting that an oil company and the Texas Government would like to have a regulated way of understanding the contents of the ocean.<br />
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The second thing is that the subjectivity of color is aimed for regulation, which bypasses things like taste. It bypasses any kind of physiological reception. I was thinking that perhaps the expectation that color can be reproducible, that it can be accurate, that it can correctly represent numerical data, that it can’t be divorced from numericizing color in the first place, the attributions of CMYK and RGB. If color is printed, it is different to if it’s on a screen. There are so many unworkables to this method, if you think about it. But the belief is that its good color usage carries the responsibility of honesty. So, to use colors in an honest way is the responsibility of the scientist. But what is honesty in color representation of data points? Its previous iteration, called JETS, is supposedly not so accurate, not so precise because it has the movements through the color scale with arbitrary weights. So, this has you thinking that there’s a density of whatever it is you’re looking for in the ocean because this particular part of the color scale is more dense to you, to the reception of the eye. Dark purple rather than light yellow might misrepresent the density of the object in question, but you would never know that, because this perceived symbolism is skewed. The gradient of the color has to accelerate and decelerate but it might not do that at the scale of the numerical values have on the back-end. It might be that it looks like it's getting warmer quickly, but it depending on how this color scale is being applied, it could completely skew the numerical results that you’ve run your model for.<br />
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It’s also worth saying, that these models are hugely energy expensive, and take around fourty days to run. The step from programming to output, massive amounts of electricity are used and the possibility for it to go wrong are quite large. If so, you would have to start again and try to recalculate. As I mentioned at the start of this conversation, if we look at these instances in the process of data collection to output, solely in a critical mode, then we fail in a remarkable way: the ocean, its inhabitants, what is life and what sustains us on this planet, is still and always our object of study. We need to propose other methods of working together, of offering feedback, which differently separate our object, or work with separability itself. The grid-not-monument we’re working with here, is a try towards this.<br />
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[[File:Datum.jpg|thumb|none|600px|Datum point installed in the basement of Bidston Observatory, Kym Ward, 2021]]<br />
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=== Frame: Expanded old school ===<br />
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I want to try to think through these three cases in an expanded, old-school, social-constructivist feminist way where you would think about where that object is being produced, who produced it, how does it have an effect on and are there any, what are the linguistic and semiotic exchanges that take place because this technology has been built in this, and has been used by these people on these people. On these bodies, by bodies I mean the ocean, the body of water.<br />
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It is about naming where and when something has been produced, in order to properly understand the limitations of its production, about making clear the ramifications of who and not resorting to default ‘I’ or displaced I of objectivity.<br />
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=== Frame: Measurements that matter ===<br />
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The second frame is to use some of the work that has been done over the last 10 to 20 years on New Materialism, to try to think about how for the fact that all of these objects measure in different ways, they produce matter in the way that they measure. So the CTD Monitor measures only X, it makes an apparatus which combines and makes the world in a certain way. Which is then, only just a tiny little data point which then is put into FV Com. It's difficult to talk about FV Com through New Materialism, because it is such an object, but it can be done in a kind of reflective mode.<br />
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We tried quite hard in ''Modeling Waves and Swerves'', to work this frame. It is possible, but it's much easier to look at one instrument than it is to look at a combination of instruments that form a massive instrument.<br />
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And also in the impossibility of retreat from a massive models that separate ocean life and atmosphere, for example. You need one of those models in order to have input on the data, but because they have already been divided in a certain way, you have to run with the implications of that. It is a lot easier when you go all the way out, but not when you are looking at FV Com and your looking at the back-end in order to understand as an oceanographer or a data scientist, thinking, “OK, what would the agential cut be?”.<br />
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=== Frame: Gestationality ===<br />
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And the third strand, I call it “the feminist phenomenological”, but it really comes from reading the work the of Astrida Neimanis, who wrote ''Bodies of Water''. In the book, she speaks to ontologic and onto-logics, on the ontological of amniotics, and she is calling ontologic- not ontology which would deal with what ‘is’ – but rather a who what when where how of commons of whatever it is we call more then human interlocutors. So, she speaks about amniotic in permeable open boundary membrane kind of ways. She is not only speaking about life that forms in the way of what she calls amniotes, life which forms in an amniotic sack, but she’s also using it as a metaphor, as a fictional philosophical tool which is useful.<br />
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The reason that I had centered on this is why would feminist phenomenology have something to do with different modes of technical production of the ocean? She speaks to the water, different bodies of water that were along an evolutionary process, but also she speaks to them as a mode of reception and understanding and oneness with what is happening in the ocean. So it's a mode of understanding climate change, of potentially understanding sea warming. It has a lived bodily reality that we can connect to.<br />
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The second reason that I thought it would be worthwhile to walk down this path a little bit was because if your thinking about the onto-logics of amniotics, you’re also thinking about gestationality, and gestationality also makes sense when you’re talking about predictions, ocean predictions. Because what, in the end, what this movement between data collection and running the models and producing the visualizations defines what is seen to be the ocean, and what is not seen to be the ocean, the contents of the ocean, the conditions of the ocean, the life of the ocean, what is not life in the ocean. And the kind of predictions that are accredited and valued by science are highly technologized predictions.<br />
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The idea of what gestationality does is that it posits that life could come, the possibility for life is there, but we don’t know what kind of life will come and what it will look like. We don’t have a clue of it, its on the move and its emergent but there is no form to it yet. And this is something that I find, compared to prediction and its vast technologies that I tried to describe, I find gestationality useful and very exciting.<br />
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=== References ===<br />
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* “Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre (BOARC),” accessed October 20, 2021, http://www.bidstonobservatory.org<br />
* Carlsson-Hyslop, Anna. ''An Anatomy of storm surge science at Liverpool Tidal Institute 1919-1959: Forecasting, practices of calculation and patronage.'' Thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Life Sciences, 2010<br />
* Neimanis, Astrida. ''Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology'' (Edingburgh University Press, 2017)<br />
* Open call for “Modeling Swerves and Waves,” accessed October 20, 2021, [http://www.bidstonobservatory.org/?modelling_waves_swerves http://www.bidstonobservatory.org/?modelling_waves_swerves]</div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Open_Boundary_Conditions:_A_grid_for_intensive_study&diff=2582Open Boundary Conditions: A grid for intensive study2021-11-24T06:44:08Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
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<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== Open Boundary Conditions: A grid for intensive study ==<br />
<br />
'''Kym Ward'''<br />
<br />
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{| style="border-spacing:0;margin:auto 1pt;width:100%;"<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:0.05pt solid #000000;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | <br />
| style="border-top:0.05pt solid #000000;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | '''Watery Columns'''<br />
| style="border-top:0.05pt solid #000000;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | '''Spongy Model Edges'''<br />
| style="border:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | '''Squints & True Colours'''<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | <br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | CTD<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | FVCOM<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | MATLAB<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | ''Expanded old-school''<br />
<br />
FSTS<br />
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Patronage / gender<br />
<br />
Social constructivist<br />
<br />
Who & where<br />
<br />
<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Challenger & colonialism<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Accuracy & patronage<br />
<br />
‘good enough’ measurements<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | ‘Color carries the responsibility of honesty’<br />
<br />
moral relativism<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | ''Measurements that matter''<br />
<br />
New Materialisms<br />
<br />
agential cut<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Sammler<br />
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Datum<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Isometric net<br />
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Cuts that divide problematics in data science – atmosphere model and scales of comparison <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | semiotics of color<br />
<br />
rainbow deception<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | ''Gestationality''<br />
<br />
- speculative<br />
<br />
life/non/life (problematizing distinction)<br />
<br />
phenomenological Relates to Scientific Prediction<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Wax<br />
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non-life collection<br />
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Neimanis<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Biological model and life integration<br />
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Cosmos as a technological <br />
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system<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | Intuition for meaning of color map is natureculture<br />
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data-vis as warnings not celebrations, exhaustion<br />
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'''“I think that perhaps there is importance in starting various forms of intensive learning and intensive study”, Kym Ward explains when we ask about the grid that she devised to research Open Boundary Conditions. Kym works at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre in Liverpool, a place that has historically been occupied by different research-led organizations – up to now, predominantly in the Natural Earth Sciences. Originally built to measure time, latitude and the declination of the stars, in later iterations employees worked with meteorological, tidal and other marine data. Following this lineage from astronomical observation, to maritime scoping and charting, she became interested in the techno-political history of tidal prediction and started to study together with researchers from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC). In the following transcript, Kym explains us what is at stake in this work, and how it is structured.'''<br />
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=== An area of interest that needs focus ===<br />
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In the models that are used to run massive data sets, to do predictions for earth sciences or for meteorology or oceanography, there is an area of interest that needs to be focused on, because you can’t collect and process all data. For example, if you’re trying to figure out what waves will occur in a seascape, you need some edges to the object that you’re looking at.<br />
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The issue with creating edges is that they just stop, that they make something finite, and things are often not finite. Waves have no edges and they don’t just end. So, if you’re trying to figure out different conditions for one area, a year in advance, you are going to have to figure out what comes in and what goes out of this imaginary realm. This is why you need what are called “open boundary conditions”: the mathematics that are applied to hundreds of sets of variables that create the ''outside'' of that model in order for it to run.<br />
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There are a lot of different ways to create outside boundary conditions, and there are various kinds of equations that, in all honesty, are above my head. There are differential equations depending on what your object is, and if you're looking at waves, then you will use elliptic and hyperbolic equations.<br />
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The issue comes when you need to run two different kinds of data sets. You need to understand what wind is going to do to waves, for example. And if you need to know that, you are going to involve both the ocean model and the atmosphere model, which are on some level incompatible. The atmosphere model has many more data points than the ocean, something like at a ratio of 1000 to 1. What that means is that it is so much more fine grained than the ocean model, so they cannot simply be run together, for every time that there is one step of the ocean model, there is a thousand steps for the atmosphere model to run through. The open boundary conditions need to provide the sets of conditions that will allow for these models to be integrated at massively different scales. That is one example.<br />
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This term, “open boundary conditions”, makes sense to me, because of the gathering and gleaning that I have been doing across different disciplines, knowing that the vocabularies and discipline-specific words I am using will be warped, and perhaps not have the same equations applied to them. But coming from critical media theory, or philosophy of technology, and then moving to applied sciences is going to produce some interesting differences in timescales and steps. The reason I’m talking about this at all, is that I landed at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre, and this was formerly a place for astronomical observation. From astronomical observation it moved to tidal research and then prediction and charting. The history of the observatory as a part of the artistic research centre, which it is now, leads you to the kinds of data visualizations that are produced by modeling and data collection, and the discipline of oceanography as a whole.<br />
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=== Modelling Waves and Swerves ===<br />
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''Modelling Waves and Swerves'' started off as a dusty scrabble around the basements. I was excited to find original IBM 1130 data punch cards, which had been used in tidal prediction. But this soon turned into scratching my head over the harmonic calculations of tidal prediction machines, and I needed more help to understand these. And so, with collaborators, we set up ''Modelling Waves and Swerves'' – an ongoing series of weekend work sessions. In our initial call-out, we beckoned to “marine data modellers, tired oceanographers, software critics and people concerned with the politics of predictive visualizations”. The tiredness was not a typo – it was intended as a mode of approach, of care, for the limits of a discipline; and to navigate between the steps of data collection, prediction and dispersal of climate change data. Repetitive conclusions of ocean warming and sea level rising are regularly released, and when these meet the reception from wider publics, which can sometimes at best be described as indifferent, surely scientists must be a little weary?<br />
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So these work sessions take place in the observatory, which was formerly occupied by the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), and sits just outside of Liverpool, in the UK. The group looks at current and historical processes of data collection, assimilation and computational modelling of oceanographic data sets, on the way to their visual outputs – and these chronologically range from ink blotted wavy lines on a drum of paper, to hyper-real 3D renderings.<br />
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The types of data visualizations we find now, are 3D ocean current models, or colour variated global warming indices. If we are asking about the looseness of attachment between data visualization and energetic response, and why there is so little real response to those snippish heat stripes, then in an appeal to ethics and behavioural change, it might be useful to reexamine some methodologies of data science for their onto-epistemological grounds. This is the focus of “open boundary conditions”.<br />
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One of the initial questions that the oceanographers asked us in these workshops, was why the visualizations they have been doing aren’t being received in a way which creates real change, why there is a deadening of effects when they produce their outputs even though they come in beautiful color stripes. They come in swirling movements across the globe, something that quite clearly shows the warming, why you can see sea level rise on their cross-section maps. These are obviously worrying, and if we take them seriously, they pose existential threat.<br />
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I think there are a lot of artists and designers who would happily produce “better” visualizations, but you have to wonder what are the parameters of “better” in this case? More affective? Seemingly more “real”? In fact, what we’re interested in is the steps to get to the visualizations in the first place. So, the collections of data, the running of models, and then the output.<br />
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=== A grid but not a monument ===<br />
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The first thing to note is the impossibility of conducting this kind of research alone: if it were important, it would be important to more people than me. So I’m not very precious about the grid that I have proposed. It's not a monument. I think that perhaps there is importance in starting various forms of intensive learning, intensive study, which I see there is also a desire for.<br />
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I haven’t seen the desire for exploring and explaining the technological back-end but I do see the desire for trying to get to grips with understanding oceanality and the ocean in an ecological sense. So I can see that there would be amazing possibilities for working with other people, in which you would hope that it wouldn’t all be struggling with text. That it could find some visual form, that it could find some practical form, that it could find some performance form, working in combination with the histories of science as they are, but also recombining to make other forms of knowledge. I would never have done this without the oceanographers and the data scientists. There is no possibility that I could have understood harmonic constants without a little bit of input.<br />
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Yes, it comes form a concern that by working with a critique of technological processes of oceanography, towards data visualisation, I’m only deconstructing the different inheritances of Modernity. For example, in looking at biopower through affect theory, looking at the way that color affects the regulation of the body and its response. Or looking at it through a criticism and awareness of colonial history, and how that’s built the technologies in both extractivist and utilitarian ways. There’s a legitimacy in doing that, but it doesn’t create any kind of constructive conversation with anyone that I’ve been working with- with oceanographers, with data scientists. It does create productive conversations with philosophers but that might not reach any conclusion.<br />
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My suspicion was that certain discourses that are happening in feminist science studies, in new materialisms and in feminist phenomenology could add to an understanding that in the end, a color stripe might not make that much difference, or create inaction. To do that, rather than to just open some books and read some pages, I thought that it would be more invested and involved, and careful and considerate and honest, and also confused, to take some objects and try to talk these through discourses and questions via those objects. So, I picked three.<br />
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=== Watery columns: the CTD monitor ===<br />
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The first example I picked was a CTD Monitor. CTD Monitor is a metal instrument which gets dropped down from an amazing buoy. There will be 10 or 12 CTDs which are arranged in a ring, and they get dropped, and sink to the bottom of the ocean. And then at some point, on a timer, they are released, and they will rise. And as they rise, their little metal mouths will open up and grab a gulp of sea water at a particular level. The mouths will close and they will proceed to the top and at some point they will be collected and this happens over a certain time period. Its testing for salinity, its testing for temperature, its testing for depth. Salinity is measured by conductivity and hydrostatic pressure I think.<br />
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This logic follows long history of the way that the seascape is carved up, which the CTD instruments will rise through. Originally, it would have been a hemp rope, weighted with lead, which would be dropped from the side of a ship, As it drops, it runs through the hands of the sailors. There are knots on the rope, and each knot represents a fathom, and the fathoms are called out, and someone marks them with a quill pen.<br />
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Through the architecture of Modernity, oceanography has the way of imagining the sea as a column. The sea is a very unstriated space that is imagined as an unchanging space. Even until today, this is how information is collected. Even the more unusual forms of data collection, such as the mini CTDs that are glued onto the heads of seals (a lot of the arctic data is from different seals who swim around). There is a GPS attached to it, and it still logged even though the seal is still swimming happily with that thing glued to its head. The sea is still divided up into a grid, at a certain depth, what is the salinity, temperature and conductivity, for example.<br />
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So, even when sea mammals are put to work doing scientific investigation, and this investigation is then recalibrated into what is fundamentally a giant technological system formed on axes, really. It really brings home the quite strict ontological ground for sea exploration, and the types of relationality that happen in a vast expanse of many different types of sea lives, and many different kinds of waters. Under sea vents, tectonic plates, underwater volcanoes, ecologies which are then being programmed into fundamentally the same model. The data are being used not to explore something different, but to expand Western knowledges along an axis.<br />
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=== Spongy model edges: FVCOM ===<br />
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Another way that the seascape is absurdly chopped or divided from its messiness and never-ending movement is the construction of maritime boundaries, which are basically virtual objects in the sea, which are carved up by what is a nation state, by what is landmass. They are geopolitical artifacts.<br />
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For example, since the late 1700s, at one of the points in the Americas, at Saint Martha’s Bay, the sea is recorded all the way down that coast, over the period of a year, and the mean sea-level is found. It’s a mean sea-level, because tides go up and down, there are semi-diurnal tides, there are diurnal tides, there are mixed tides. There’s waves! There are still sea movements that are foxing oceanographers. But in any event, the sea was averaged, there was highest point, the lowest point and the mean sea level was used to construct a zero, a datum. And from this point you start to measure mountains, upwards. How many kilometers above the sea is, how can you measure the sea? You measure it from the average of the sea. It's absurd, but it's also the globally agreed protocol.<br />
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So what happens when you introduce climate change into this phenomenon is that mountains start shrinking because sea levels are rising. It has sociological, geological, urban planning, planning applications, which are in end effects political. What is classified as a disappearing island, or a non-disappearing island becomes ratified.<br />
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FVCom is one of many multiple models that are used as a coordinate system. The example I gave earlier is just one example of data that is collected: salinity, temperature, depth, and obviously there are billions of data points that are also collected along rivers, along the coastline, and within the sea. One of the interesting things about how data is collected is that the nodes of data collection are very tightly packed around the coastlines, near rivers, and they are done on an isomorphic net, so it’s a triangular grid system that can be scaled. It can be expanded or contracted depending how close you want to zoom into that particular part of ocean, or coastline. And as you move out to sea, the grid gets a lot bigger. So the point at which the data is collected is averaged so that the data can run. And way out it into the middle of the ocean, you might have a two kilometer or three mile point between each of those corners of the triangle of this net which, anywhere between this node, gets averaged. Whereas at the coastline, you’ll have much tighter data, and the net will be in centimeters, or meters, not in miles.<br />
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So FVCom is one of the many models, called “the ocean model” that we’ve been looking into. All of these models begin in the late ’60s, early ’70s and onward, they’ve been developed along the way in the intervening years and they take on more data points. What was initially not understood as being part of the ocean will then form one of the later models, for example, the biological model which is made of tiny life forms, phytoplankton and zooplankton - that came later. I already talked a little bit about how the models overlap and sync with each other.<br />
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Sponginess is a term used to describe the boundary conditions where one massive model meets another massive model. The data which was collected to put into the model, if I describe it historically, one of the ways in which the process of modeling happens, is - someone takes measurements over the course of the coastline over a year, and the data is sent in. And the sheets of data that are sent in would be really grubby– they would perhaps be water sodden; but they were basic tabulations about the tide heights, the moon, the distances between waves. Different data like that. Before the advent of computers as we know them now, this information would be sent, in this way to Bidston Observatory, so that’s my access point into this history. And then that data would be fundamentally programmed so that the height of the tides or the wavelength, or the effect of the moon, would be run through different differential equations, and then it would be assigned a value. The value would be put into a tidal prediction machine. This machine was made of metal, with 42 brass discs. A band ran in-between these discs, each of the discs had a different name – for example, ''m2'' was the moon. And these discs would move up and down on arms. What was produced at the end of this computation- placed onto a roll of paper that was also onto a spinning drum by an arm, attached on one end with an ink pot, and the pen at the other which would draw out the harmonics – a wave. This wave was a prediction for next years tides.<br />
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The tidal prediction machines around the time of the Second World War could do one year’s worth of predictions in one day. Different places around the world would send in their tidal calculations and they would receive back the predictions for the year, saying at what time what tide what height. The different harmonic constants, as they were called, that were run through the tidal prediction machines, they find themselves still in the predictions nowadays. They’ve been massively updated, and there are obviously so many more data points- but you can still find them in how FVCom works.<br />
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One of the interesting things that happen in-between data collection, human error, different calculations and output, is that sometimes you get an output that does not resemble a harmonic – it doesn’t resemble a wave form. It needs to be smoothed. At that time, in order to correct it, it was simply rubbed out and drawn on with a pencil. The computers in the 1930s (the women who operated the machines were called computers), had partners – the “smoother”, whose task it was to correct the prediction blip. I see that there is a connection between the isomorphic grid with the averages in the middle of the sea, and the job of the “smoother”. They are both attempts to speak to what is legitimate accuracy.<br />
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One of the strands of research that I’ve been doing was helped a lot by a feminist science and technology scholar, Anna Carlsson-Hyslop, and she wrote a paper on Doodson, one of the previous directors of the observatory. He was doing a lot of work on tidal prediction. She traces a line from his conscientious objection in the First World War to his subsequent work on aircraft ballistics. So while he doesn’t want to go to war, he doesn’t want to fight, he won’t go, he is conscripted to do mathematical scientific research because he is good at math, to do calculations on the trajectory of bombs, instead of going to war. As a part of this work that he did, he developed a way of looking at the arc of a missile using differential equations.<br />
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Carlsson-Hyslop writes about the interaction between patronage and what is an accurate calculation. In order for these calculations to be done, somebody’s got to pay for them. Doodson is receiving a wage, but he also knows that there are “good enough” calculations for this set of conditions. When we think of the lineage of modeling, the impetus is to become more and more accurate. But its super helpful to keep in mind that there is a difference between ''accuracy'' and ''legitimacy''. The necessity for accuracy supposedly makes it more legitimate, however, it doesn’t correlate from a feminist science point of view.<br />
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I’m just trying to figure out why I thought that the depths were denser. Obviously they are because there is more life there. The amassed points of interest are not the same as organic life. The surface of the water is more recordable, visible, datafiable. The depths are unknown. I think I was trying to make a link to what superficial means… like does it mean whether there’s something productive in a literary sense. Superficial is able to be captured a lot easier.<br />
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=== Squints & True Colours: CM Ocean ===<br />
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The third object of study is called CM Ocean. It's a programming software that is running MATLAB, in order to output the data which has then been run in the model. It is a visualization that would run alongside, and produce varying different scales of data via color. So there’s a lot of different programs which can turn ocean data into color, like heat stripes, water warming, sea warming, water level rise, salinity… lots of different kinds of data.<br />
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We started off this journey speaking about why visualization don’t produce effect when they have to do with existential questions like Climate Change. So it makes sense to talk about CM Ocean.<br />
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The data that is transformed into these visualizations are numerical, it’s quantity. And then they are translated into a scale that is absolutely not numerical, and are very subjective in terms of its reception. The aim of CM Ocean is to desubjectify and to make colour scientific. It is quite a task, which is surprising that a group would take it on. But CM Ocean is funded by BP, a multinational oil and gas company, and funded by George Bush. Its not that necessarily this has a 1 on 1 effect. But it's obvious, and worth noting that an oil company and the Texas Government would like to have a regulated way of understanding the contents of the ocean.<br />
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The second thing is that the subjectivity of color is aimed for regulation, which bypasses things like taste. It bypasses any kind of physiological reception. I was thinking that perhaps the expectation that color can be reproducible, that it can be accurate, that it can correctly represent numerical data, that it can’t be divorced from numericizing color in the first place, the attributions of CMYK and RGB. If color is printed, it is different to if it’s on a screen. There are so many unworkables to this method, if you think about it. But the belief is that its good color usage carries the responsibility of honesty. So, to use colors in an honest way is the responsibility of the scientist. But what is honesty in color representation of data points? Its previous iteration, called JETS, is supposedly not so accurate, not so precise because it has the movements through the color scale with arbitrary weights. So, this has you thinking that there’s a density of whatever it is you’re looking for in the ocean because this particular part of the color scale is more dense to you, to the reception of the eye. Dark purple rather than light yellow might misrepresent the density of the object in question, but you would never know that, because this perceived symbolism is skewed. The gradient of the color has to accelerate and decelerate but it might not do that at the scale of the numerical values have on the back-end. It might be that it looks like it's getting warmer quickly, but it depending on how this color scale is being applied, it could completely skew the numerical results that you’ve run your model for.<br />
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it’s also worth saying, that these models are hugely energy expensive, and take around 40 days to run. The step from programming to output, massive amounts of electricity are used and the possibility for it to go wrong are quite large. If so, you would have to start again and try to recalculate. As I mentioned at the start of this conversation, if we look at these instances in the process of data collection to output, solely in a critical mode, then we fail in a remarkable way: the ocean, its inhabitants, what is life and what sustains us on this planet, is still and always our object of study. We need to propose other methods of working together, of offering feedback, which differently separate our object, or work with separability itself. The grid-not-monument we’re working with here, is a try towards this.<br />
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[[File:Datum.jpg|thumb|none|600px|Datum point installed in the basement of Bidston Observatory, Kym Ward, 2021]]<br />
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=== Frame: Expanded old school ===<br />
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I want to try to think through these three cases in an expanded, old-school, social-constructivist feminist way where you would think about where that object is being produced, who produced it, how does it have an effect on and are there any, what are the linguistic and semiotic exchanges that take place because this technology has been built in this, and has been used by these people on these people. On these bodies, by bodies I mean the ocean, the body of water.<br />
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It is about naming where and when something has been produced, in order to properly understand the limitations of its production, about making clear the ramifications of who and not resorting to default ‘I’ or displaced I of objectivity.<br />
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=== Frame: Measurements that matter ===<br />
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The second frame is to use some of the work that has been done over the last 10 to 20 years on New Materialism, to try to think about how for the fact that all of these objects measure in different ways, they produce matter in the way that they measure. So the CTD Monitor measures only X, it makes an apparatus which combines and makes the world in a certain way. Which is then, only just a tiny little data point which then is put into FV Com. It's difficult to talk about FV Com through New Materialism, because it is such an object, but it can be done in a kind of reflective mode.<br />
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We tried quite hard in ''Modeling Waves and Swerves'', to work this frame. It is possible, but it's much easier to look at one instrument than it is to look at a combination of instruments that form a massive instrument.<br />
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And also in the impossibility of retreat from a massive models that separate ocean life and atmosphere, for example. You need one of those models in order to have input on the data, but because they have already been divided in a certain way, you have to run with the implications of that. It is a lot easier when you go all the way out, but not when you are looking at FV Com and your looking at the back-end in order to understand as an oceanographer or a data scientist, thinking, “OK, what would the agential cut be?”.<br />
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=== Frame: Gestationality ===<br />
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And the third strand, I call it “the feminist phenomenological”, but it really comes from reading the work the of Astrida Neimanis, who wrote ''Bodies of Water''. In the book, she speaks to ontologic and onto-logics, on the ontological of amniotics, and she is calling ontologic- not ontology which would deal with what ‘is’ – but rather a who what when where how of commons of whatever it is we call more then human interlocutors. So, she speaks about amniotic in permeable open boundary membrane kind of ways. She is not only speaking about life that forms in the way of what she calls amniotes, life which forms in an amniotic sack, but she’s also using it as a metaphor, as a fictional philosophical tool which is useful.<br />
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The reason that I had centered on this is why would feminist phenomenology have something to do with different modes of technical production of the ocean? She speaks to the water, different bodies of water that were along an evolutionary process, but also she speaks to them as a mode of reception and understanding and oneness with what is happening in the ocean. So it's a mode of understanding climate change, of potentially understanding sea warming. It has a lived bodily reality that we can connect to.<br />
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The second reason that I thought it would be worthwhile to walk down this path a little bit was because if your thinking about the onto-logics of amniotics, you’re also thinking about gestationality, and gestationality also makes sense when you’re talking about predictions, ocean predictions. Because what, in the end, what this movement between data collection and running the models and producing the visualizations defines what is seen to be the ocean, and what is not seen to be the ocean, the contents of the ocean, the conditions of the ocean, the life of the ocean, what is not life in the ocean. And the kind of predictions that are accredited and valued by science are highly technologized predictions.<br />
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The idea of what gestationality does is that it posits that life could come, the possibility for life is there, but we don’t know what kind of life will come and what it will look like. We don’t have a clue of it, its on the move and its emergent but there is no form to it yet. And this is something that I find, compared to prediction and its vast technologies that I tried to describe, I find gestationality useful and very exciting.<br />
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=== References ===<br />
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* “Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre (BOARC),” accessed October 20, 2021, http://www.bidstonobservatory.org<br />
* Carlsson-Hyslop, Anna. ''An Anatomy of storm surge science at Liverpool Tidal Institute 1919-1959: Forecasting, practices of calculation and patronage.'' Thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Life Sciences, 2010<br />
* Neimanis, Astrida. ''Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology'' (Edingburgh University Press, 2017)<br />
* Open call for “Modeling Swerves and Waves,” accessed October 20, 2021, [http://www.bidstonobservatory.org/?modelling_waves_swerves http://www.bidstonobservatory.org/?modelling_waves_swerves]</div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Open_Boundary_Conditions:_A_grid_for_intensive_study&diff=2581Open Boundary Conditions: A grid for intensive study2021-11-24T06:39:48Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
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<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== Open Boundary Conditions: A grid for intensive study ==<br />
<br />
'''Kym Ward'''<br />
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{| style="border-spacing:0;margin:auto 1pt;width:100%;"<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:0.05pt solid #000000;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | <br />
| style="border-top:0.05pt solid #000000;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | '''Watery Columns'''<br />
| style="border-top:0.05pt solid #000000;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | '''Spongy Model Edges'''<br />
| style="border:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | '''Squints & True Colours'''<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | <br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | CTD<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | FVCOM<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | MATLAB<br />
|-<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | ''Expanded old-school''<br />
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FSTS<br />
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Patronage / gender<br />
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Social constructivist<br />
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Who & where<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Challenger & colonialism<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Accuracy & patronage<br />
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‘good enough’ measurements<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | ‘Color carries the responsibility of honesty’<br />
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moral relativism<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | ''Measurements that matter''<br />
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New Materialisms<br />
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agential cut<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Sammler<br />
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Datum<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Isometric net<br />
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Cuts that divide problematics in data science – atmosphere model and scales of comparison <br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | semiotics of color<br />
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rainbow deception<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | ''Gestationality''<br />
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- speculative<br />
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life/non/life (problematizing distinction)<br />
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phenomenological Relates to Scientific Prediction<br />
| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Wax<br />
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non-life collection<br />
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Neimanis<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:none;padding:0.0201in;" | Biological model and life integration<br />
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Cosmos as a technological <br />
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system<br />
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| style="border-top:none;border-bottom:0.05pt solid #000000;border-left:0.05pt solid #000000;border-right:0.05pt solid #000000;padding:0.0201in;" | Intuition for meaning of color map is natureculture<br />
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data-vis as warnings not celebrations, exhaustion<br />
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'''“I think that perhaps there is importance in starting various forms of intensive learning and intensive study”, Kym Ward explains when we ask about the grid that she devised to research Open Boundary Conditions. Kym works at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre in Liverpool, a place that has historically been occupied by different research-led organizations – up to now, predominantly in the Natural Earth Sciences. Originally built to measure time, latitude and the declination of the stars, in later iterations employees worked with meteorological, tidal and other marine data. Following this lineage from astronomical observation, to maritime scoping and charting, she became interested in the techno-political history of tidal prediction and started to study together with researchers from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC). In the following transcript, Kym explains us what is at stake in this work, and how it is structured.'''<br />
<br />
=== An area of interest that needs focus ===<br />
<br />
In the models that are used to run massive data sets, to do predictions for earth sciences or for meteorology or oceanography, there is an area of interest that needs to be focused on, because you can’t collect and process all data. For example, if you’re trying to figure out what waves will occur in a seascape, you need some edges to the object that you’re looking at.<br />
<br />
The issue with creating edges is that they just stop, that they make something finite, and things are often not finite. Waves have no edges and they don’t just end. So, if you’re trying to figure out different conditions for one area, a year in advance, you are going to have to figure out what comes in and what goes out of this imaginary realm. This is why you need what are called “open boundary conditions”: the mathematics that are applied to hundreds of sets of variables that create the ''outside'' of that model in order for it to run.<br />
<br />
There are a lot of different ways to create outside boundary conditions, and there are various kinds of equations that, in all honesty, are above my head. There are differential equations depending on what your object is, and if you're looking at waves, then you will use elliptic and hyperbolic equations.<br />
<br />
The issue comes when you need to run two different kinds of data sets. You need to understand what wind is going to do to waves, for example. And if you need to know that, you are going to involve both the ocean model and the atmosphere model, which are on some level incompatible. The atmosphere model has many more data points than the ocean, something like at a ratio of 1000 to 1. What that means is that it is so much more fine grained than the ocean model, so they cannot simply be run together, for every time that there is one step of the ocean model, there is a thousand steps for the atmosphere model to run through. The open boundary conditions need to provide the sets of conditions that will allow for these models to be integrated at massively different scales. That is one example.<br />
<br />
This term, “open boundary conditions”, makes sense to me, because of the gathering and gleaning that I have been doing across different disciplines, knowing that the vocabularies and discipline-specific words I am using will be warped, and perhaps not have the same equations applied to them. But coming from critical media theory, or philosophy of technology, and then moving to applied sciences is going to produce some interesting differences in timescales and steps. The reason I’m talking about this at all, is that I landed at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre, and this was formerly a place for astronomical observation. From astronomical observation it moved to tidal research and then prediction and charting. The history of the observatory as a part of the artistic research centre, which it is now, leads you to the kinds of data visualizations that are produced by modeling and data collection, and the discipline of oceanography as a whole.<br />
<br />
=== Modelling Waves and Swerves ===<br />
<br />
''Modelling Waves and Swerves'' started off as a dusty scrabble around the basements. I was excited to find original IBM 1130 data punch cards, which had been used in tidal prediction. But this soon turned into scratching my head over the harmonic calculations of tidal prediction machines, and I needed more help to understand these. And so, with collaborators, we set up ''Modelling Waves and Swerves'' – an ongoing series of weekend work sessions. In our initial call-out, we beckoned to “marine data modellers, tired oceanographers, software critics and people concerned with the politics of predictive visualizations”. The tiredness was not a typo – it was intended as a mode of approach, of care, for the limits of a discipline; and to navigate between the steps of data collection, prediction and dispersal of climate change data. Repetitive conclusions of ocean warming and sea level rising are regularly released, and when these meet the reception from wider publics, which can sometimes at best be described as indifferent, surely scientists must be a little weary?<br />
<br />
So these work sessions take place in the observatory, which was formerly occupied by the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), and sits just outside of Liverpool, in the UK. The group looks at current and historical processes of data collection, assimilation and computational modelling of oceanographic data sets, on the way to their visual outputs – and these chronologically range from ink blotted wavy lines on a drum of paper, to hyper-real 3D renderings.<br />
<br />
The types of data visualizations we find now, are 3D ocean current models, or colour variated global warming indices. If we are asking about the looseness of attachment between data visualization and energetic response, and why there is so little real response to those snippish heat stripes, then in an appeal to ethics and behavioural change, it might be useful to reexamine some methodologies of data science for their onto-epistemological grounds. This is the focus of “open boundary conditions”.<br />
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One of the initial questions that the oceanographers asked us in these workshops, was why the visualizations they have been doing aren’t being received in a way which creates real change, why there is a deadening of effects when they produce their outputs even though they come in beautiful color stripes. They come in swirling movements across the globe, something that quite clearly shows the warming, why you can see sea level rise on their cross-section maps. These are obviously worrying, and if we take them seriously, they pose existential threat.<br />
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I think there are a lot of artists and designers who would happily produce “better” visualizations, but you have to wonder what are the parameters of “better” in this case? More affective? Seemingly more “real”? In fact, what we’re interested in is the steps to get to the visualizations in the first place. So, the collections of data, the running of models, and then the output.<br />
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=== A grid but not a monument ===<br />
<br />
The first thing to note is the impossibility of conducting this kind of research alone: if it were important, it would be important to more people than me. So I’m not very precious about the grid that I have proposed. It's not a monument. I think that perhaps there is importance in starting various forms of intensive learning, intensive study, which I see there is also a desire for.<br />
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I haven’t seen the desire for exploring and explaining the technological back-end but I do see the desire for trying to get to grips with understanding oceanality and the ocean in an ecological sense. So I can see that there would be amazing possibilities for working with other people, in which you would hope that it wouldn’t all be struggling with text. That it could find some visual form, that it could find some practical form, that it could find some performance form, working in combination with the histories of science as they are, but also recombining to make other forms of knowledge. I would never have done this without the oceanographers and the data scientists. There is no possibility that I could have understood harmonic constants without a little bit of input.<br />
<br />
Yes, it comes form a concern that by working with a critique of technological processes of oceanography, towards data visualisation, I’m only deconstructing the different inheritances of Modernity. For example, in looking at biopower through affect theory, looking at the way that color affects the regulation of the body and its response. Or looking at it through a criticism and awareness of colonial history, and how that’s built the technologies in both extractivist and utilitarian ways. There’s a legitimacy in doing that, but it doesn’t create any kind of constructive conversation with anyone that I’ve been working with- with oceanographers, with data scientists. It does create productive conversations with philosophers but that might not reach any conclusion.<br />
<br />
My suspicion was that certain discourses that are happening in feminist science studies, in new materialisms and in feminist phenomenology could add to an understanding that in the end, a color stripe might not make that much difference, or create inaction. To do that, rather than to just open some books and read some pages, I thought that it would be more invested and involved, and careful and considerate and honest, and also confused, to take some objects and try to talk these through discourses and questions via those objects. So, I picked three.<br />
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=== Watery columns: the CTD monitor ===<br />
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The first example I picked was a CTD Monitor. CTD Monitor is a metal instrument which gets dropped down from an amazing buoy. There will be 10 or 12 CTDs which are arranged in a ring, and they get dropped, and sink to the bottom of the ocean. And then at some point, on a timer, they are released, and they will rise. And as they rise, their little metal mouths will open up and grab a gulp of sea water at a particular level. The mouths will close and they will proceed to the top and at some point they will be collected and this happens over a certain time period. Its testing for salinity, its testing for temperature, its testing for depth. Salinity is measured by conductivity and hydrostatic pressure I think.<br />
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This logic follows long history of the way that the seascape is carved up, which the CTD instruments will rise through. Originally, it would have been a hemp rope, weighted with lead, which would be dropped from the side of a ship, As it drops, it runs through the hands of the sailors. There are knots on the rope, and each knot represents a fathom, and the fathoms are called out, and someone marks them with a quill pen.<br />
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Through the architecture of Modernity, oceanography has the way of imagining the sea as a column. The sea is a very unstriated space that is imagined as an unchanging space. Even until today, this is how information is collected. Even the more unusual forms of data collection, such as the mini CTDs that are glued onto the heads of seals (a lot of the arctic data is from different seals who swim around). There is a GPS attached to it, and it still logged even though the seal is still swimming happily with that thing glued to its head. The sea is still divided up into a grid, at a certain depth, what is the salinity, temperature and conductivity, for example.<br />
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So, even when sea mammals are put to work doing scientific investigation, and this investigation is then recalibrated into what is fundamentally a giant technological system formed on axes, really. It really brings home the quite strict ontological ground for sea exploration, and the types of relationality that happen in a vast expanse of many different types of sea lives, and many different kinds of waters. Under sea vents, tectonic plates, underwater volcanoes, ecologies which are then being programmed into fundamentally the same model. The data are being used not to explore something different, but to expand Western knowledges along an axis.<br />
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=== Spongy Model Edges: FVCOM ===<br />
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Another way that the seascape is absurdly chopped or divided from its messiness and never-ending movement is the construction of maritime boundaries, which are basically virtual objects in the sea, which are carved up by what is a nation state, by what is landmass. They are geopolitical artifacts.<br />
<br />
for example, since the late 1700s, at one of the points in the Americas, atSaint Martha’s Bay, the sea is recorded all the way down that coast, over the period of a year, and the mean sea-level is found. It’s a mean sea-level, because tides go up and down, there are semi-diurnal tides, there are diurnal tides, there are mixed tides. There’s waves! There are still sea movements that are foxing oceanographers. But in any event, the sea was averaged, there was highest point, the lowest point and the mean sea level was used to construct a zero, a datum. And from this point you start to measure mountains, upwards. How many kilometers above the sea is, how can you measure the sea? You measure it from the average of the sea. It's absurd, but it's also the globally agreed protocol.<br />
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So what happens when you introduce climate change into this phenomenon is that mountains start shrinking because sea levels are rising. It has sociological, geological, urban planning, planning applications, which are in end effects political. What is classified as a disappearing island, or a non-disappearing island becomes ratified.<br />
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FVCom is one of many multiple models that are used as a coordinate system. The example I gave earlier is just one example of data that is collected: salinity, temperature, depth, and obviously there are billions of data points that are also collected along rivers, along the coastline, and within the sea. One of the interesting things about how data is collected is that the nodes of data collection are very tightly packed around the coastlines, near rivers, and they are done on an isomorphic net, so it’s a triangular grid system that can be scaled. It can be expanded or contracted depending how close you want to zoom into that particular part of ocean, or coastline. And as you move out to sea, the grid gets a lot bigger. So the point at which the data is collected is averaged so that the data can run. And way out it into the middle of the ocean, you might have a 2 kilometer or three mile point between each of those corners of the triangle of this net which, anywhere between this node, gets averaged. Whereas at the coastline, you’ll have much tighter data, and the net will be in centimeters, or meters, not in miles.<br />
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So FVCom is one of the many models, called “the ocean model” that we’ve been looking into. All of these models begin in the late ’60s, early ’70s and onward, they’ve been developed along the way in the intervening years and they take on more data points. What was initially not understood as being part of the ocean will then form one of the later models, for example, the biological model which is made of tiny life forms, phytoplankton and zooplankton - that came later. I already talked a little bit about how the models overlap and sync with each other.<br />
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Sponginess is a term used to describe the boundary conditions where one massive model meets another massive model. The data which was collected to put into the model, if I describe it historically, one of the ways in which the process of modeling happens, is - someone takes measurements over the course of the coastline over a year, and the data is sent in. And the sheets of data that are sent in would be really grubby– they would perhaps be water sodden… but they were basic tabulations about the tide heights, the moon, the distances between waves. Different data like that. Before the advent of computers as we know them now, this information would be sent, in this way to Bidston Observatory, so that’s my access point into this history. And then that data would be fundamentally programmed so that the height of the tides or the wavelength, or the effect of the moon, would be run through different differential equations, and then it would be assigned a value. The value would be put into a tidal prediction machine. This machine was made of metal, with 42 brass discs. A band ran in-between these discs, each of the discs had a different name – for example, ''m2'' was the moon. And these discs would move up and down on arms. What was produced at the end of this computation- placed onto a roll of paper that was also onto a spinning drum by an arm, attached on one end with an ink pot, and the pen at the other which would draw out the harmonics – a wave. This wave was a prediction for next years tides.<br />
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The tidal prediction machines around the time of the Second World War could do one year’s worth of predictions in one day. Different places around the world would send in their tidal calculations and they would receive back the predictions for the year, saying at what time what tide what height. The different harmonic constants, as they were called, that were run through the tidal prediction machines, they find themselves still in the predictions nowadays. They’ve been massively updated, and there are obviously so many more data points- but you can still find them in how FVCom works.<br />
<br />
One of the interesting things that happen in-between data collection, human error, different calculations and output, is that sometimes you get an output that does not resemble a harmonic – it doesn’t resemble a wave form. It needs to be smoothed. At that time, in order to correct it, it was simply rubbed out and drawn on with a pencil. The computers in the 1930s, (the women who operated the machines were called computers), had partners – the “smoother”, whose task it was to correct the prediction blip. I see that there is a connection between the isomorphic grid with the averages in the middle of the sea, and the job of the “smoother”. They are both attempts to speak to what is legitimate accuracy.<br />
<br />
One of the strands of research that I’ve been doing was helped a lot by a feminist science and technology scholar, Anna Carlsson-Hyslop, and she wrote a paper on Doodson, one of the previous directors of the observatory. He was doing a lot of work on tidal prediction. She traces a line from his conscientious objection in the First World War to his subsequent work on aircraft ballistics. So while he doesn’t want to go to war, he doesn’t want to fight, he won’t go, he is conscripted to do mathematical scientific research because he is good at math, to do calculations on the trajectory of bombs… instead of going to war. As a part of this work that he did, he developed a way of looking at the arc of a missile using differential equations.<br />
<br />
Carlsson-Hyslop writes about the interaction between patronage and what is an accurate calculation. In order for these calculations to be done, somebody’s got to pay for them. Doodson is receiving a wage, but he also knows that there are “good enough” calculations for this set of conditions. When we think of the lineage of modeling, the impetus is to become more and more accurate. But its super helpful to keep in mind that there is a difference between ''accuracy'' and ''legitimacy''. The necessity for accuracy supposedly makes it more legitimate, however, it doesn’t correlate from a feminist science point of view.<br />
<br />
I’m just trying to figure out why I thought that the depths were denser. Obviously they are because there is more life there. The amassed points of interest are not the same as organic life. The surface of the water is more recordable, visible, datafiable. The depths are unknown. I think I was trying to make a link to what superficial means… like does it mean whether there’s something productive in a literary sense. Superficial is able to be captured a lot easier.<br />
<br />
=== Squints & True Colours: CM Ocean ===<br />
<br />
The third object of study is called CM Ocean. It's a programming software that is running MATLAB, in order to output the data which has then been run in the model. It is a visualization that would run alongside, and produce varying different scales of data via color. So there’s a lot of different programs which can turn ocean data into color, like heat stripes, water warming, sea warming, water level rise, salinity… lots of different kinds of data.<br />
<br />
We started off this journey speaking about why visualization don’t produce effect when they have to do with existential questions like Climate Change. So it makes sense to talk about CM Ocean.<br />
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The data that is transformed into these visualizations are numerical, it’s quantity. And then they are translated into a scale that is absolutely not numerical, and are very subjective in terms of its reception. The aim of CM Ocean is to desubjectify and to make colour scientific. It is quite a task, which is surprising that a group would take it on. But CM Ocean is funded by BP, a multinational oil and gas company, and funded by George Bush. Its not that necessarily this has a 1 on 1 effect. But it's obvious, and worth noting that an oil company and the Texas Government would like to have a regulated way of understanding the contents of the ocean.<br />
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The second thing is that the subjectivity of color is aimed for regulation, which bypasses things like taste. It bypasses any kind of physiological reception. I was thinking that perhaps the expectation that color can be reproducible, that it can be accurate, that it can correctly represent numerical data, that it can’t be divorced from numericizing color in the first place, the attributions of CMYK and RGB. If color is printed, it is different to if it’s on a screen. There are so many unworkables to this method, if you think about it. But the belief is that its good color usage carries the responsibility of honesty. So, to use colors in an honest way is the responsibility of the scientist. But what is honesty in color representation of data points? Its previous iteration, called JETS, is supposedly not so accurate, not so precise because it has the movements through the color scale with arbitrary weights. So, this has you thinking that there’s a density of whatever it is you’re looking for in the ocean because this particular part of the color scale is more dense to you, to the reception of the eye. Dark purple rather than light yellow might misrepresent the density of the object in question, but you would never know that, because this perceived symbolism is skewed. The gradient of the color has to accelerate and decelerate but it might not do that at the scale of the numerical values have on the back-end. It might be that it looks like it's getting warmer quickly, but it depending on how this color scale is being applied, it could completely skew the numerical results that you’ve run your model for.<br />
<br />
it’s also worth saying, that these models are hugely energy expensive, and take around 40 days to run. The step from programming to output, massive amounts of electricity are used and the possibility for it to go wrong are quite large. If so, you would have to start again and try to recalculate. As I mentioned at the start of this conversation, if we look at these instances in the process of data collection to output, solely in a critical mode, then we fail in a remarkable way: the ocean, its inhabitants, what is life and what sustains us on this planet, is still and always our object of study. We need to propose other methods of working together, of offering feedback, which differently separate our object, or work with separability itself. The grid-not-monument we’re working with here, is a try towards this.<br />
<br />
[[File:Datum.jpg|thumb|none|600px|Datum point installed in the basement of Bidston Observatory, Kym Ward, 2021]]<br />
<br />
=== Frame: Expanded old school ===<br />
<br />
I want to try to think through these three cases in an expanded, old-school, social-constructivist feminist way where you would think about where that object is being produced, who produced it, how does it have an effect on and are there any, what are the linguistic and semiotic exchanges that take place because this technology has been built in this, and has been used by these people on these people. On these bodies, by bodies I mean the ocean, the body of water.<br />
<br />
It is about naming where and when something has been produced, in order to properly understand the limitations of its production, about making clear the ramifications of who and not resorting to default ‘I’ or displaced I of objectivity.<br />
<br />
=== Frame: Measurements that matter ===<br />
<br />
The second frame is to use some of the work that has been done over the last 10 to 20 years on New Materialism, to try to think about how for the fact that all of these objects measure in different ways, they produce matter in the way that they measure. So the CTD Monitor measures only X, it makes an apparatus which combines and makes the world in a certain way. Which is then, only just a tiny little data point which then is put into FV Com. It's difficult to talk about FV Com through New Materialism, because it is such an object, but it can be done in a kind of reflective mode.<br />
<br />
We tried quite hard in ''Modeling Waves and Swerves'', to work this frame. It is possible, but it's much easier to look at one instrument than it is to look at a combination of instruments that form a massive instrument.<br />
<br />
And also in the impossibility of retreat from a massive models that separate ocean life and atmosphere, for example. You need one of those models in order to have input on the data, but because they have already been divided in a certain way, you have to run with the implications of that. It is a lot easier when you go all the way out, but not when you are looking at FV Com and your looking at the back-end in order to understand as an oceanographer or a data scientist, thinking, “OK, what would the agential cut be?”.<br />
<br />
=== Frame: Gestationality ===<br />
<br />
And the third strand, I call it “the feminist phenomenological”, but it really comes from reading the work the of Astrida Neimanis, who wrote ''Bodies of Water''. In the book, she speaks to ontologic and onto-logics, on the ontological of amniotics, and she is calling ontologic- not ontology which would deal with what ‘is’ – but rather a who what when where how of commons of whatever it is we call more then human interlocutors. So, she speaks about amniotic in permeable open boundary membrane kind of ways. She is not only speaking about life that forms in the way of what she calls amniotes, life which forms in an amniotic sack, but she’s also using it as a metaphor, as a fictional philosophical tool which is useful.<br />
<br />
The reason that I had centered on this is why would feminist phenomenology have something to do with different modes of technical production of the ocean? She speaks to the water, different bodies of water that were along an evolutionary process, but also she speaks to them as a mode of reception and understanding and oneness with what is happening in the ocean. So it's a mode of understanding climate change, of potentially understanding sea warming. It has a lived bodily reality that we can connect to.<br />
<br />
The second reason that I thought it would be worthwhile to walk down this path a little bit was because if your thinking about the onto-logics of amniotics, you’re also thinking about gestationality, and gestationality also makes sense when you’re talking about predictions, ocean predictions. Because what, in the end, what this movement between data collection and running the models and producing the visualizations defines what is seen to be the ocean, and what is not seen to be the ocean, the contents of the ocean, the conditions of the ocean, the life of the ocean, what is not life in the ocean. And the kind of predictions that are accredited and valued by science are highly technologized predictions.<br />
<br />
The idea of what gestationality does is that it posits that life could come, the possibility for life is there, but we don’t know what kind of life will come and what it will look like. We don’t have a clue of it, its on the move and its emergent but there is no form to it yet. And this is something that I find, compared to prediction and its vast technologies that I tried to describe, I find gestationality useful and very exciting.<br />
<br />
=== References ===<br />
<br />
* “Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre (BOARC),” accessed October 20, 2021, http://www.bidstonobservatory.org<br />
* Carlsson-Hyslop, Anna. ''An Anatomy of storm surge science at Liverpool Tidal Institute 1919-1959: Forecasting, practices of calculation and patronage.'' Thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Life Sciences, 2010<br />
* Neimanis, Astrida. ''Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology'' (Edingburgh University Press, 2017)<br />
* Open call for “Modeling Swerves and Waves,” accessed October 20, 2021, [http://www.bidstonobservatory.org/?modelling_waves_swerves http://www.bidstonobservatory.org/?modelling_waves_swerves]</div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2580So-called Plants2021-11-24T06:35:11Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
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<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'', 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 15, no. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx.]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal,” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s,” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80 (1985): 985.</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
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<br />
'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, “This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom,” ''TEMI edition'', South Korea, 2017, http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/.</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
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<br />
'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
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Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney and Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” (2012), accessed November 10, 2021, http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561.</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects,” in: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158, no. 2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
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<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
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Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>“FOLDOUT,” accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu.</ref> <br />
<br />
''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf. https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf.]</ref> 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.<br />
<br />
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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'' 35, no. 3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
<br />
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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/. https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/.]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
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<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
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Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
<br />
''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2, no. 1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
<br />
To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, ''An Earthology of Moving Landforms'', [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene. https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
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<br />
'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
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Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>“A tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world,” ''An Ivy Generator'', accessed November 1, 2021, <br />
http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/. </ref><br />
<br />
''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
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4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis,” ''Experimental Parasitology'' 39, no. 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6, 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“An Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021, [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image6.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS, Alan Turing Institute, accessed November 1, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf. http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf.]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or “implicatedness” can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, “On Circlusion,” in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020, [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion. http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion.]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” ''Kvinder, Køn & Forskning'' (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal volumetrics'', those surfaces that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another, are made tangible in ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2579So-called Plants2021-11-24T06:34:37Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'', 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 15, no. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx.]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal,” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s,” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80 (1985): 985.</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image1.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, “This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom,” ''TEMI edition'', South Korea, 2017, http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/.</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
<br />
[[Image:Image2.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
<br />
Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney and Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” (2012), accessed November 10, 2021, http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561.</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects,” in: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158, no. 2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
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[[Image:Image3.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
<br />
Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>“FOLDOUT,” accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu.</ref> <br />
<br />
''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf. https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf.]</ref> 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.<br />
<br />
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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'' 35, no. 3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
<br />
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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/. https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/.]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
<br />
[[Image:Image4.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
<br />
''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2, no. 1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
<br />
To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, ''An Earthology of Moving Landforms'', [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene. https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image5.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>“A tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world,” ''An Ivy Generator'', accessed November 1, 2021, <br />
http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/. </ref><br />
<br />
''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
<br />
4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis,” ''Experimental Parasitology'' 39, no. 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6, 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“An Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021, [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image6.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS, Alan Turing Institute, accessed November 1, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf. http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf.]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or “implicatedness” can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, “On Circlusion,” in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020, [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion. http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion.]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal volumetrics'', those surfaces that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another, are made tangible in ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2578So-called Plants2021-11-24T06:30:25Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'', 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 15, no. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx.]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal,” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s,” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80 (1985): 985.</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image1.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, “This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom,” ''TEMI edition'', South Korea, 2017, http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/.</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
<br />
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<br />
'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
<br />
Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney and Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” (2012), accessed November 10, 2021, http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561.</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects,” in: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158, no. 2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
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[[Image:Image3.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
<br />
Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>“FOLDOUT,” accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu.</ref> <br />
<br />
''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf. https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf.]</ref> 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.<br />
<br />
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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'' 35, no. 3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
<br />
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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/. https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/.]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
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<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
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Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
<br />
''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2, no. 1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
<br />
To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, ''An Earthology of Moving Landforms'', [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene. https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
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<br />
'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>“A tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world,” ''An Ivy Generator'', accessed November 1, 2021, <br />
http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/. </ref><br />
<br />
''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
<br />
4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis,” ''Experimental Parasitology'' 39, no. 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6th 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021 [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
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<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS Alan Turing Institute, accessed 1 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy,” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or “implicatedness” can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, On circlusion, in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020. [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal volumetrics'', those surfaces that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another, are made tangible in ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2577So-called Plants2021-11-24T06:29:26Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
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<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
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<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'', 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 15, no. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx.]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal,” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s,” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80 (1985): 985.</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
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[[Image:Image1.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, “This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom,” ''TEMI edition'', South Korea, 2017, http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/.</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
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[[Image:Image2.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
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Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney and Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” (2012), accessed November 10, 2021, http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561.</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects,” in: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158, no. 2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
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[[Image:Image3.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
<br />
Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>“FOLDOUT,” accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu.</ref> <br />
<br />
''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf. https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf.]</ref> 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.<br />
<br />
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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'' 35, no. 3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
<br />
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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/. https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/.]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
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<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
<br />
''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2, no. 1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
<br />
To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, ''An Earthology of Moving Landforms'', [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene. https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image5.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>“A tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world,” ''An Ivy Generator'', accessed November 1, 2021, <br />
http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/. </ref><br />
<br />
''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
<br />
4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis” ''Experimental Parasitology'' Volume 39, Issue 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6th 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021 [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image6.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS Alan Turing Institute, accessed 1 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy,” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or “implicatedness” can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, On circlusion, in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020. [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal volumetrics'', those surfaces that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another, are made tangible in ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2576So-called Plants2021-11-24T06:25:34Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'', 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 15, no. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx.]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal,” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s,” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80 (1985): 985.</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image1.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, “This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom,” ''TEMI edition'', South Korea, 2017, http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/.</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
<br />
[[Image:Image2.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
<br />
Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney and Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” (2012), accessed November 10, 2021, http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561.</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects,” in: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158, no. 2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
<br />
[[Image:Image3.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
<br />
Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>“FOLDOUT,” accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu.</ref> <br />
<br />
''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf. https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf.]</ref> 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.<br />
<br />
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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'' 35, no. 3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
<br />
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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/. https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/.]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
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<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
<br />
''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2, no. 1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
<br />
To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, ''An Earthology of Moving Landforms'', [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020 [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image5.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>An Ivy Generator: “tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world”, accessed 1 November 2021, http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
<br />
4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis” ''Experimental Parasitology'' Volume 39, Issue 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6th 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021 [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
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[[Image:Image6.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS Alan Turing Institute, accessed 1 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy,” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or “implicatedness” can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, On circlusion, in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020. [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal volumetrics'', those surfaces that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another, are made tangible in ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2575So-called Plants2021-11-24T06:24:35Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'', 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 15, no. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx.]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal,” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s,” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80 (1985): 985.</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
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The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
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'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
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Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, “This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom,” ''TEMI edition'', South Korea, 2017, http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/.</ref><br />
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''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
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In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
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'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
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Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney and Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” (2012), accessed November 10, 2021, http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561.</ref><br />
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''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
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''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
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In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects,” in: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158, no. 2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
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The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
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=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
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In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
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With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
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'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
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Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>“FOLDOUT,” accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu.</ref> <br />
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''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf. https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf.]</ref> 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.<br />
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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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'' 35, no. 3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
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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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
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<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/. https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/.]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
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'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
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Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
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''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2/1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
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To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, An Earthology of moving landforms, [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
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The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
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<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020 [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
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'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
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Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>An Ivy Generator: “tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world”, accessed 1 November 2021, http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/</ref><br />
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''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
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2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
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3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
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4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
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The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis” ''Experimental Parasitology'' Volume 39, Issue 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6th 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021 [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image6.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS Alan Turing Institute, accessed 1 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy,” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or “implicatedness” can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, On circlusion, in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020. [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal volumetrics'', those surfaces that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another, are made tangible in ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2574So-called Plants2021-11-24T06:20:20Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'', 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 15, no. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx.]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal,” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s,” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80 (1985): 985.</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image1.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, “This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom,” ''TEMI edition'', South Korea, 2017, http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/.</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
<br />
[[Image:Image2.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
<br />
Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney and Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” (2012), accessed November 10, 2021, http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561.</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects,” in: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158, no. 2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
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[[Image:Image3.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
<br />
Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>“FOLDOUT,” accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu.</ref> <br />
<br />
''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf. https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf.]</ref> 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.<br />
<br />
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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'', 35,3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
<br />
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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020. [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/ https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
<br />
[[Image:Image4.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
<br />
''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2/1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
<br />
To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, An Earthology of moving landforms, [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020 [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image5.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>An Ivy Generator: “tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world”, accessed 1 November 2021, http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
<br />
4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis” ''Experimental Parasitology'' Volume 39, Issue 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6th 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021 [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image6.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS Alan Turing Institute, accessed 1 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy,” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or “implicatedness” can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, On circlusion, in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020. [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal volumetrics'', those surfaces that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another, are made tangible in ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2573So-called Plants2021-11-24T06:19:35Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'', 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 15, no. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx.]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal,” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s,” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80 (1985): 985.</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image1.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, “This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom,” ''TEMI edition'', South Korea, 2017, http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/.</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
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<br />
'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
<br />
Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney and Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” (2012), accessed November 10, 2021, http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561.</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects,” in: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158, no. 2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
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<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
<br />
Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>“FOLDOUT,” accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu.</ref> <br />
<br />
''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020 [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf]</ref> 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.<br />
<br />
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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'', 35,3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
<br />
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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020. [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/ https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
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<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
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Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
<br />
''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2/1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
<br />
To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, An Earthology of moving landforms, [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020 [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
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<br />
'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
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Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>An Ivy Generator: “tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world”, accessed 1 November 2021, http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/</ref><br />
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''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
<br />
4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis” ''Experimental Parasitology'' Volume 39, Issue 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6th 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021 [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
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<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS Alan Turing Institute, accessed 1 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy,” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or “implicatedness” can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, On circlusion, in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020. [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal volumetrics'', those surfaces that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another, are made tangible in ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2572So-called Plants2021-11-24T06:18:08Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
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<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
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<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'', 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 15, no. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx.]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal,” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s,” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80 (1985): 985.</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
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[[Image:Image1.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, “This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom,” ''TEMI edition'', South Korea, 2017, http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/.</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
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[[Image:Image2.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
<br />
Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney and Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” (2012), accessed November 10, 2021, http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561.</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects,” in: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158, no. 2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
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<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
<br />
Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>FOLDOUT accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu</ref> <br />
<br />
''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020 [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf]</ref> 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.<br />
<br />
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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'', 35,3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
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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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020. [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/ https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
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<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
<br />
''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2/1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
<br />
To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, An Earthology of moving landforms, [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020 [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
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[[Image:Image5.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>An Ivy Generator: “tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world”, accessed 1 November 2021, http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
<br />
4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis” ''Experimental Parasitology'' Volume 39, Issue 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6th 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021 [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image6.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS Alan Turing Institute, accessed 1 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy,” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or “implicatedness” can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, On circlusion, in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020. [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal volumetrics'', those surfaces that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another, are made tangible in ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2571So-called Plants2021-11-24T06:17:38Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'', 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 15, no. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx.]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal,” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s,” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80 (1985): 985.</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
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[[Image:Image1.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, “This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom,” ''TEMI edition'', South Korea, 2017, http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/.</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
<br />
[[Image:Image2.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
<br />
Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney and Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” (2012), accessed November 10, 2021, http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561.</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects,” in: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158, no. 2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
<br />
[[Image:Image3.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
<br />
Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>FOLDOUT accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu</ref> <br />
<br />
''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020 [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf]</ref> 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.<br />
<br />
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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'', 35,3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
<br />
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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020. [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/ https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
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<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
<br />
''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2/1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
<br />
To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, An Earthology of moving landforms, [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020 [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image5.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>An Ivy Generator: “tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world”, accessed 1 November 2021, http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
<br />
4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis” ''Experimental Parasitology'' Volume 39, Issue 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6th 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021 [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
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[[Image:Image6.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS Alan Turing Institute, accessed 1 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy,” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or “implicatedness” can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, On circlusion, in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020. [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal volumetrics'', those surfaces that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another, are made tangible in ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2570So-called Plants2021-11-24T06:16:53Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'', 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 15, no. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx.]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal,” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s,” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80 (1985): 985.</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
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'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, “This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom,” ''TEMI edition'', South Korea, 2017, http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/.</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
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'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
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Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney and Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” (2012), accessed November 10, 2021, http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561.</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects,” in: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158,2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
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<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
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Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>FOLDOUT accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu</ref> <br />
<br />
''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020 [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf]</ref> 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.<br />
<br />
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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'', 35,3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
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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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020. [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/ https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
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<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
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Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
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''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2/1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
<br />
To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, An Earthology of moving landforms, [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020 [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
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<br />
'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
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Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>An Ivy Generator: “tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world”, accessed 1 November 2021, http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/</ref><br />
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''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
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4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis” ''Experimental Parasitology'' Volume 39, Issue 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6th 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021 [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image6.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS Alan Turing Institute, accessed 1 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy,” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or “implicatedness” can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, On circlusion, in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020. [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal volumetrics'', those surfaces that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another, are made tangible in ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2569So-called Plants2021-11-24T06:15:05Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'', 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 15, no. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx.]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal,” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s,” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80 (1985): 985.</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image1.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, “This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom,” ''TEMI edition'', South Korea, 2017, http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/.</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
<br />
[[Image:Image2.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
<br />
Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney and Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking,” (2012), accessed November 10, 2021, http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561.</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.” In: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking''” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158,2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
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[[Image:Image3.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
<br />
Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>FOLDOUT accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu</ref> <br />
<br />
''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020 [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf]</ref> 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.<br />
<br />
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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'', 35,3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
<br />
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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020. [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/ https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
<br />
[[Image:Image4.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
<br />
''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2/1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
<br />
To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, An Earthology of moving landforms, [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020 [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image5.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>An Ivy Generator: “tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world”, accessed 1 November 2021, http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
<br />
4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis” ''Experimental Parasitology'' Volume 39, Issue 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6th 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021 [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image6.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS Alan Turing Institute, accessed 1 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy,” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or “implicatedness” can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, On circlusion, in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020. [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal volumetrics'', those surfaces that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another, are made tangible in ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2568So-called Plants2021-11-24T06:12:35Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'', 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 15, no. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx.]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal,” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s,” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80 (1985): 985.</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
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<br />
'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, “This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom,” ''TEMI edition'', South Korea, 2017, http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/.</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
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[[Image:Image2.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
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Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney & Tony Pridmore, RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking (2012), accessed November 10 2021 http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.” In: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking''” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158,2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
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<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
<br />
Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>FOLDOUT accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu</ref> <br />
<br />
''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020 [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf]</ref> 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.<br />
<br />
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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'', 35,3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
<br />
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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020. [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/ https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
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<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
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Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
<br />
''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2/1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
<br />
To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, An Earthology of moving landforms, [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020 [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
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<br />
'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
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Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>An Ivy Generator: “tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world”, accessed 1 November 2021, http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/</ref><br />
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''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
<br />
4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis” ''Experimental Parasitology'' Volume 39, Issue 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6th 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021 [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
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<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS Alan Turing Institute, accessed 1 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy,” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or “implicatedness” can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, On circlusion, in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020. [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal volumetrics'', those surfaces that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another, are made tangible in ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2567So-called Plants2021-11-24T06:10:18Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
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<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
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<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'', 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 15, no. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx.]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal,” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s,” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80 (1985): 985.</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, accessed October 6, 2020, [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
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[[Image:Image1.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom, TEMI edition, South Korea 2017 http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
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[[Image:Image2.png|400px|none]]<br />
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'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
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Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney & Tony Pridmore, RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking (2012), accessed November 10 2021 http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.” In: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking''” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158,2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
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<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
<br />
Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>FOLDOUT accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu</ref> <br />
<br />
''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020 [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf]</ref> 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.<br />
<br />
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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'', 35,3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
<br />
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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020. [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/ https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
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<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
<br />
''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2/1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
<br />
To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, An Earthology of moving landforms, [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020 [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
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[[Image:Image5.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>An Ivy Generator: “tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world”, accessed 1 November 2021, http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
<br />
4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis” ''Experimental Parasitology'' Volume 39, Issue 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6th 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021 [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image6.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS Alan Turing Institute, accessed 1 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy,” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or “implicatedness” can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, On circlusion, in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020. [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal volumetrics'', those surfaces that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another, are made tangible in ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2566So-called Plants2021-11-24T06:09:46Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'', 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 15, no. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx.]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal,” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s,” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80 (1985): 985.</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, acessed October 6, 2020. [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
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[[Image:Image1.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom, TEMI edition, South Korea 2017 http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
<br />
[[Image:Image2.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
<br />
Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney & Tony Pridmore, RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking (2012), accessed November 10 2021 http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.” In: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking''” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158,2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
<br />
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<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
<br />
Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>FOLDOUT accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu</ref> <br />
<br />
''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020 [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf]</ref> 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.<br />
<br />
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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'', 35,3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
<br />
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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020. [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/ https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
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<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
<br />
''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2/1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
<br />
To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, An Earthology of moving landforms, [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020 [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
<br />
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<br />
'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>An Ivy Generator: “tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world”, accessed 1 November 2021, http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
<br />
4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis” ''Experimental Parasitology'' Volume 39, Issue 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6th 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021 [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
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[[Image:Image6.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS Alan Turing Institute, accessed 1 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy,” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or “implicatedness” can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, On circlusion, in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020. [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal volumetrics'', those surfaces that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another, are made tangible in ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2565So-called Plants2021-11-24T06:06:20Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'', 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 15, no. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed., (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80, 985 (1985).</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, acessed October 6, 2020. [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
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'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
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Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom, TEMI edition, South Korea 2017 http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
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'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
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Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney & Tony Pridmore, RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking (2012), accessed November 10 2021 http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.” In: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking''” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158,2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
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<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
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Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>FOLDOUT accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu</ref> <br />
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''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020 [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf]</ref> 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.<br />
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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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'', 35,3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
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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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020. [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/ https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
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<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
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Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
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''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2/1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
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To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, An Earthology of moving landforms, [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020 [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
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'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
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Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>An Ivy Generator: “tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world”, accessed 1 November 2021, http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/</ref><br />
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''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
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4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
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The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis” ''Experimental Parasitology'' Volume 39, Issue 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6th 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021 [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image6.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS Alan Turing Institute, accessed 1 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy,” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or “implicatedness” can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, On circlusion, in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020. [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal volumetrics'', those surfaces that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another, are made tangible in ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2564So-called Plants2021-11-24T06:03:19Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'' Vol. 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange,, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” ''GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society'' Volume 15, No. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed., (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80, 985 (1985).</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, acessed October 6, 2020. [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image1.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom, TEMI edition, South Korea 2017 http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
<br />
[[Image:Image2.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
<br />
Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney & Tony Pridmore, RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking (2012), accessed November 10 2021 http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.” In: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking''” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158,2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
<br />
[[Image:Image3.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
<br />
Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>FOLDOUT accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu</ref> <br />
<br />
''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020 [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf]</ref> 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.<br />
<br />
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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'', 35,3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
<br />
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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020. [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/ https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
<br />
[[Image:Image4.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
<br />
''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2/1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
<br />
To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, An Earthology of moving landforms, [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020 [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image5.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>An Ivy Generator: “tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world”, accessed 1 November 2021, http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
<br />
4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis” ''Experimental Parasitology'' Volume 39, Issue 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6th 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021 [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image6.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS Alan Turing Institute, accessed 1 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy,” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or “implicatedness” can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, On circlusion, in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020. [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal volumetrics'', those surfaces that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another, are made tangible in ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2563So-called Plants2021-11-24T05:59:45Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'' Vol. 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange,, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” ''GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society'' Volume 15, No. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed., (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80, 985 (1985).</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, acessed October 6, 2020. [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
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<br />
'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom, TEMI edition, South Korea 2017 http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
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<br />
'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
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Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney & Tony Pridmore, RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking (2012), accessed November 10 2021 http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.” In: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking''” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158,2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
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<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
<br />
Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>FOLDOUT accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu</ref> <br />
<br />
''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020 [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf]</ref> 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.<br />
<br />
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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'', 35,3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
<br />
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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020. [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/ https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
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<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
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Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
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''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2/1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
<br />
To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, An Earthology of moving landforms, [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020 [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
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<br />
'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
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Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>An Ivy Generator: “tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world”, accessed 1 November 2021, http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/</ref><br />
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''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
<br />
4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis” ''Experimental Parasitology'' Volume 39, Issue 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6th 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021 [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
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<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS Alan Turing Institute, accessed 1 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy,” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or “implicatedness” can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, On circlusion, in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020. [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal Volumetrics'', ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'', made those surfaces tangible that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2562So-called Plants2021-11-24T05:58:41Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
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<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
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<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'' Vol. 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange,, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” ''GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society'' Volume 15, No. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed., (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80, 985 (1985).</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, acessed October 6, 2020. [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
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'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom, TEMI edition, South Korea 2017 http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
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[[Image:Image2.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
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Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney & Tony Pridmore, RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking (2012), accessed November 10 2021 http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.” In: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking''” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158,2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
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<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
<br />
Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>FOLDOUT accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu</ref> <br />
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''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020 [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf]</ref> 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.<br />
<br />
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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'', 35,3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
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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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020. [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/ https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
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<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
<br />
''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture [...] is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2/1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
<br />
To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, An Earthology of moving landforms, [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places the Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020 [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
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[[Image:Image5.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>An Ivy Generator: “tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world”, accessed 1 November 2021, http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
<br />
4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis” ''Experimental Parasitology'' Volume 39, Issue 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6th 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021 [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image6.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS Alan Turing Institute, accessed 1 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g. not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy,” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or ‘implicatedness’ can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, On circlusion, in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020. [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal Volumetrics'', ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'', made those surfaces tangible that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=So-called_Plants&diff=2561So-called Plants2021-11-24T05:55:29Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== So-called Plants ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Spray installations enhanced with fruit recognition,<ref name="ftn277">Fang Fang Gao, Longsheng Fu, Xin Zhang, Yaqoob Majeed, Rui Li, Manoj Karkee, Qin Zhang, “Multi-class fruit-on-plant detection for apple in SNAP system using Faster R-CNN,” ''Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'' Vol. 176 (2020).</ref> software tools for virtual landscape design,<ref name="ftn278">Eckart Lange, Sigrid Hehl-Lange,, “Integrating 3D Visualisation in Landscape Design and Environmental Planning,” ''GAIA- Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society'' Volume 15, No. 3 (2006).</ref> algorithmic vegetation modelling in gaming,<ref name="ftn279">Dieter Fritsch, Martin Kada, “Visualisation using game engines,” ''Archiwum ISPRS'' 35. B5 (2004).</ref> irrigation planning by agro-engineering agencies,<ref name="ftn280">GSM based automatic irrigation control system for efficient use of resources and crop planning by using an Android mobile.</ref> micro-CT renderings of root development in scientific laboratories:<ref name="ftn281">“Rootrak,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/cvl/software/rootrak.aspx]</ref> all of these protocols and paradigms make use of high-end volumetric computation. They integrate 3D-scanning, -modeling, -tracking and -printing into optimised systems for dealing with “plants” as volume. Botanical data processing techniques make up a natureculture continuum that increasingly defines the industrial topology applied to the existence of so-called plants.<br />
<br />
Thinking along the agency of cultural artifacts that capture and co-compose 3D polygon, pointcloud and other techniques for volumetric calculation, the Possible Bodies Inventory contains over a hundred items. For this text we brought together manuals, mathematical concepts, artworks and images of so-called plants in their situated computational ecologies of practice as a way to wonder about the volumetric presence of so-called plants. We write “so-called plants” because we want to problematize the limitations of the ontological figure “plant” and the isolation it implies. It is a way to question the various methods whereby finite, specified and discrete entities are being made to represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings. We are wondering about the way in which computational renderings of so-called plants reconfirm the figure-background divide that Andrea Ballestero discusses in her study of the socio-environmental behavior of aquifers.<ref name="ftn282">Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal” in ''Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthopocene'' Kregg Hetherington, ed., (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17-44.</ref> This not only happens through the default computational gestures of separation and segmentation, but also by the way cycles of flourishing, growing, pollinating, nurturing of “plants” appear animated while being technically suspended in time. Such divisions and fixities are the result of a naturalization process that managed to determine “plants” as clearly demarcated individuals or entities, arranged on landscapes along which their modes of existence develop under predictable and therefore controllable conditions. It is this production-oriented mode that 3D volumetrics seem to reproduce.<br />
<br />
The Possible Bodies Inventory is itself undeniably part of a persistently colonial and productivist practice. The culture of the inventory is rooted in the material origins of mercantilism and deeply intertwined with the contemporary data-base-based cosmology of techno-colonialist turbo-capitalism.<ref name="ftn283">See also: “Disorientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref> Inventorying is about a logi(sti)cs of continuous updates and keeping items available, potentially going beyond pre-designed ways of doing and being proposed by the mono-cultures of what we refer to as “totalitarian innovation”, and what Donna Haraway might call “informatics of domination”.<ref name="ftn284">“Informatics of domination” is a term coined by Haraway to refer to an emerging techno-social world order due to the transformation of power forms. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s” ''Socialist Review'' no. 80, 985 (1985).</ref> In line with botanic gardens, genetic notebooks and Latin nomenclatures, an inventory can be understood as a workspace arranged for constant managerial return, accessibility and – in contrast with a collection or an archive – the easy replacement of items. Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses for the production of knowledge, capital and order.<br />
<br />
Possible Bodies attends obliquely to the power relations embedded within inventories, because it provides a possibility to open up methods for disobedient action-research. Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation. Disobedient action-research implies radical un-calibration from concrete types of knowledge and hence proposes a playful, unorthodox and ‘inventive’ inhabiting of many disciplines, of learning, unlearning and relearning on the go. It also plots ways to actively intervene on the field of study and interlocutes with its communities of concern and their praxis of care. Wondering about the post-exotic<ref name="ftn285">“Post-exotic” is a term coined by Livia Alga at the ''Postesotica'' blogsite [http://postesotica.blogspot.com/ http://postesotica.blogspot.com/] and published in its Spanish translation by Ideasdestroyinmuros, acessed October 6, 2020. [https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk https://issuu.com/pensarecartoneras/docs/postexoticokgmk].</ref> rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D,<ref name="ftn286">The industrial continuum of 3D has been a key figuration for the Possible Bodies research process, see “Item 074: The Continuum,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2017.</ref> we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care<ref name="ftn287">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).</ref> and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses. This text tries to provide with a trans*feminist mode of understanding and engaging with so-called plants not as individual units, but forms of computationally implicated existence.<br />
<br />
=== Vegetal volumetrics ===<br />
<br />
The following items apply a disobedient volumetrics to pay attention to processes of vigilant naturalization of the one for the many. The items want to cultivate the ability for response-ability within computational presentations of the vegetal. Instead of the probable confirmation of hyperproductive 3D-computation, these items root for a widening of the possible and other computational ways of rendering, modeling, tracking and capturing so-called plants.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Image1.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pascale Barret'''<br />
Year: '''2017'''<br />
Entry date: '''March 2017'''<br />
Image: 3D print by Pascale Barret <ref>Pascale Barret, This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom, TEMI edition, South Korea 2017 http://www.pascalebarret.com/projects/this-obscure-side-of-sweetness-is-waiting-to-blossom/</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 033'' features a work by Brussels-based artist Pascale Barret.<ref name="ftn288">See for another discussion of ''Item 033'': Helen V. Pritchard, “Clumsy Volumetrics,” in this book.</ref> A 3D object is printed from a volumetric scan of a flowering bush with an amateur optical scanner. The object has nothing and everything to do with so-called plants, as the low-res camera never went through a machinic training process to distinguish or separate leaves. The software processing the data-points then algorithmically renders the vegetation with an ''invented'' outside membrane, a kind of outer petal or connective tissue that is sneaked into the modeling stage and is finally made through the printing device. This invention might look hallucinatory to the eyes of a trained botanist, but for us it is a reminder of the need to re-attune digital tools in a non-anthropocentric manner. Pascale printed the volumetric file at the maximum scale of the 3D printer she had available, breaking the promise of the 1:1 relationship between scanned object and its representation. Because she did not remove the scaffolding that upheld the soft plastic threads during the printing process, these now “useless” elements flourish as twigs once the object had solidified. The item talks to us about a complex switching of agencies: that of the vegetal groupings that defy linear, isolating and rigid topological axioms nested in the operations of 3D optics and also that of algorithmic renders, operating with a logic that simultaneously defies the ''realistic'' establishment of space that is kept for plants as affordable, accountable, nameable, determined, discrete entities.<br />
<br />
In the way “plants” have been historically described, there is an ongoing attempt to fix the zones where they actually can be, become and belong. But looking closely, we can easily identify paranodal spaces in-between the vegetal and other forms of existence, gaps or porous membranes which exist beyond the positive space of nodes and links . These can be seen as void and sterile spaces in-between known entities, but they can also be taken as wide open, inhabitable areas; places to be in-relation that are non-neutral and also not innocent at all: connecting surfaces that provide with the blurring travel from one isolated unit of life onto another, in specific ways. Holes, gaps or even chasms are zones of the world in and for themselves.<ref name="ftn289">This perspective has been practiced with diverse sensibilities by authors as different as Zach Blas (''paranodal spaces''), Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”) or Gloria Anzaldúa (''Nepantlas'').</ref> Mel Chen’s work on toxicity and affect tries to come to terms with the way interspecies interabsorbence is prefigured by power relations, and through it we can see how the attempt to separate, segment, identify and onto-epistemologically demarcate sharp edges must be considered as a damage due to the persistent cutting apart of dense and complex relational worlds that as a result do not show cracks as inhabitable any more. How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others. But if we think of seeds blown by the wind, roots merged with minerals or branches grabbing the whole world around them... formerly disposable cracks and gaps also have lively potential for ongoingness, as areas for circulating matters. From useless to blossoming, from separating border to articulated and activated crack, we need “circluding” moves of agency that are difficult but not impossible to uphold in computed spaces.<ref name="ftn290">Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
<br />
[[Image:Image2.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'''<br />
<br />
Author(s): '''RooTrak'''<br />
Entry date: '''2 July 2018'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Image: Segmentation of a tomato root from clay loam using RooTrak, screenshot<ref>Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney & Tony Pridmore, RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking (2012), accessed November 10 2021 http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/561</ref><br />
<br />
''En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques'' (“In Our Gardens, Forests Are Being Prepared”) is a thick para-academic publication on political potential by Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, alluding to the force of potentiality that is specific to vegetal surfaces, entities and co-habituating species which turns them into powerful carriers of political value.<ref name="ftn291">Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua, “En nuestros jardines se preparan bosques,” (MUSAC, 2012), our translation, from Spanish to English.</ref> Other than productive and extractive, they are informative of the inner functionings, inter-dependencies and convivial delicacies with so-called plants.<br />
<br />
''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' is a poetic rendering of demo-videos that accompany a manual for RooTrak, a software-suite for the automated recovery of three-dimensional plant root architecture from X-Ray microcomputed tomography images. The images we see rotating before us are the result of a layered process of manual and digital production, starting with separating a grass “plant” from it’s connected, rhizomatic neighbours. In that sense, it is a computationally gardened object. The “plant” is grown in a small, cylindrical container filled with extracted soil before being placed in a micro-CT installation and exposed to X-rays. The resulting data is then calibrated and rendered as a 3D image, where sophisticated software processes are used to demarcate the border between soil and root, coloring those vessels that count as root in blood red. The soil fades out in the background.<br />
<br />
In collaboration with RooTrak, the software package responsible for these images, X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) promise access to the living structure through “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.”<ref name="ftn292">RooTrak is “a nondestructive imaging technique that can visualize the internal structure of opaque objects.” In: Stefan Mairhofer, Susan Zappala, Saoirse R. Tracy, Craig Sturrock, Malcolm Bennett, Sacha J. Mooney, Tony Pridmore, “RooTrak: Automated Recovery of Three-Dimensional Plant Root Architecture in Soil from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Images Using Visual Tracking''” in ''Plant Physiology'' 158,2 (Feb 2012).</ref> But these quantified roots are neither growing nor changing. They rotate endlessly in a loop of frozen or virtual time, which can be counted and at the same time not. It passes through time while the loop goes on smoothly... but it does not pass at all in relation to what happens to the looped matter of the represented root. Speed and direction are kept constant and stable, providing with an illusion of permanence and durability that directly links this re-presentational practice to the presentational practice of cabinets, jars and frames. The use of animation has been persistent in the scientific study of life, as a pragmatic take on “giving life” or technically re-animating life-forms before the eyes of other students. After first having claimed the ability to own and reproduce life by determining what differentiates life from non-life, all of this is done in an efficient manner and with a focus on positivist optimization. But how does the 3D animation complex apparatus do the trick of determining life and non-life? While RooTrak prefers to contrast its particular combination of CT-imaging and 3D-rendering with “invasive” techniques such as root-washing or growing roots in transparent agar, to us this grassroot rotation seems closer to the practice of fixing, embalming and displaying species in formaldehyde.<br />
<br />
The tension between animism and animation can be studied from the dimension of time and its specific technocultural maneuvers present in ''Item 102''. It helps us see how computed representations of the animated vegetable kingdom continues to contribute to the establishment of hierarchies in living matter. What are the consequences of using techniques that isolate entities which need complex networks for their basic existence? What is kept untold if different temporalities are collapsed to smooth representations of specimens as if all happened simultaneously?<br />
<br />
=== Systemic vegetation ===<br />
<br />
In her work on the involution of plants and people, Natasha Myers invites us to consider renaming the ''Anthropocene'' into ''Planthroposcene'' as it “offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives.”<ref name="ftn293">Natasha Myers, ''From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution'', History and Anthropology Vol 18 n. 3, (2017).</ref><br />
<br />
With her proposition in mind, we now move upwards and sideways from the topological attention to surfaces of vegetal specimens, and the way they are cut together and apart by naturalized modes of (re)presentation, to the quantification and tracking of wide and thick surfaces. In this section we pay attention to a set of volumetric operations for predicting, optimizing and scaling full areas arranged as gardens, forests, landscapes or plantations in which so-called plants are placed into a system of intensive worlding, not free from similar options of measurement, control and scrutiny.<ref name="ftn294">Anna L. Tsing, “The Problem of Scale,” ''The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),</ref><br />
<br />
[[Image:Image3.jpg|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 117: FOLDOUT'''<br />
<br />
Year: '''2018-2022'''<br />
Author(s): '''HORIZON 2020'''<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Image: Diagram of “Situational Awareness and Alarming: Border surveillance made smart and seamless”<ref>FOLDOUT accessed 10 November 2021, https://foldout.eu</ref> <br />
<br />
''Item 117'' references 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.”<ref name="ftn295">“FOLDOUT: through foliage detection in the inner and outermost regions of the EU,” presentation flyer for the Mediterranean Security Event 2019, accessed October 6, 2020 [https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FOLDOUT_AKriechbaum.pdf]</ref> 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.<br />
<br />
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 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 from such a large portion of the light spectrum 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 and tracking of vehicles, land mines, wires, fruit, gold, pipes and people.<ref name="ftn296">R. Kapoor et. al., “UWB radar detection of targets in foliage using alpha-stable clutter models,” ''IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems'', 35,3 (1999): 819–834.</ref><br />
<br />
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.<ref name="ftn297">“Frontex Programme of Work 2013,” accessed October 6, 2020, [https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/observatories_files/frontex_observatory/Frontex%20Work%20Programme%202013.pdf].</ref> 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 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.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull"><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Apples are red, <br>leaves are green, <br>branches are brown,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are red, <br>leaves are blue, <br>branches are green,<br>sky is black <br>and the ground is yellow.<br><br><br />
Almonds are blue, <br>leaves are red, <br>branches are black,<br>sky is blue <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Mangoes are black, <br>leaves are white, <br>branches are yellow,<br>sky is red <br>and the ground is white.<br><br><br />
Fugitives are blue, <br>branches are red, <br>sky is yellow,<br>leaves are black <br>and the ground is white.<ref name="ftn21">Possible Bodies, ''Item 122: So-called Plants''. Performance at Nepantlas #3. Curated by Daphne Dragona at Akademie Schloss Solitude, accessed October 6, 2020. [https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/ https://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/event/nepantlas-03/]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<div class="page-break"></div> <br />
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<br />
'''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'''<br />
<br />
Entry date: '''15 July 2020'''<br />
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: '''Segmentation'''<br />
Inventor(s) for this item: '''Abelardo Gil-Fournier'''<br />
Image: Agribotix™ FarmLens™ Image Processing and Analytics Solution, viewed on WinField's Answer Tech® Portal<ref>Image reproduced from José Paulo Molin, Lucas Rios do Amaral, André Freitas Colaço, ''Agricultura de precisão'' (Sao Paulo: Oficina de textos, 2015).</ref><br />
<br />
''Item number 118'' features the research and practice of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, and with him we learn how agriculture is volumetric. He quotes Geoffrey Winthrop-Young to highlight how elemental “agriculture... is initially not a matter of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting, but of mapping and zoning, of determining a piece of arable land to be cordoned off by a boundary that will give rise to the distinction between the cultivated land and its natural other”. Gil-Fournier continues: “However, this initial two-dimensional demarcation gives rise to a practice that can be further understood when the many vertical layers that exist simultaneously above and below the ground start to be considered. From the interaction of synthetic nutrients in the soil with the roots of the plants, to the influence of weather or the effect of both human and machinic labour, agriculture appears as a volumetric activity”.<ref name="ftn299">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space,” ''Geospatial Memory'', ''Media Theory'' 2/1 (2018).</ref> The inclusion of such massive vertical management of soil with the aim of fertilizing it, reorients agriculture from a question of surface to the affections of scaling up-and-down the field.<br />
<br />
To explain the way soil matter is turned into a “legible domain”, Gil-Fournier takes as a case study the Spanish “inner colonization” that organized land and landscapes for plantation and irrigation. Through those studies, it is made materially explicit how the irrigation zones configure a network-like shape of polygonal meshes that distribute and systematize the territory for a sophisticated exploitation of its vegetal potentials. In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies. The media-archaeology perspective that is activated in Gil-Fournier’s work, facilitates a departure point for a study of the legacies carried by contemporary hypercomputational applications that are currently being tested to, for example, analyze the seasonal evolution of gigantic agro-operations or to detect the speed by which desertification revealsthe diminishing of so-called green areas.<ref name="ftn300">This approach was developed in a series of workshops. Abelardo Gil-Fournier, An Earthology of moving landforms, [https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html https://abelardogfournier.org/workshops/earthology.html].</ref> “Recent space imaging developments have given rise to a spread of commercial services based on the temporal dimensions of satellite imagery. Marketed under umbrella terms such as environmental intelligence, real-time Earth observation or orbital insight, these imaging projects deliver the surface of the planet as an image flow encoded into video streams, where change and variation become a commodified resource on the one hand, as well as a visual spectacle on the other.”<ref name="ftn301">Abelardo Gil-Fournier, “Earth Constellations: Agrarian Units and the Topological Partition of Space.”</ref><br />
<br />
The structural connection between volumetrics and Earth observation unfolds when soil is treated as a segmentable and computable surface for purposes as different as climate change monitoring, new resource location or crop growth analysis and maintenance. The big-scale top-bottom agro-optimization of vegetal surfaces by hyperproductive means places The Plantationcene at the center of the Possible Bodies inquiry: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale that is at the same time attentive to structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in such formations, and the enduring layers of history and legacies of plantation capitalism that persist, manifested in acts of racialized violence, growing land alienation, and accelerated species loss.<ref name="ftn302">“Sawyer Seminar: Interrogating the Plantationocene,” accessed October 6, 2020 [https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene https://humanities.wisc.edu/research/plantationocene].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
=== Lively math ===<br />
<br />
In the first two sections, we discussed the paradigm of “capturing” by scanning plants, and the politics of vegetal topology. Now we would like to turn to the particular technocultural conflation of “beauty”, “scientific accuracy” and “purpose” that is intensified in the modeling of 3D vegetals. We insist that this type of conflation is cultural because it explicitly depends on a classic canon that turns only certain equilibriums and techniques into paradigmatic ones. This section tries to get a handle on the many levels of aesthetic and semiotic manipulation going on in the “push and pull” between botany and computation. It is written from an uncalibrated resistance to the violence inherent in this alliance, and the probable constraints that computation inflicts on the vegetal and vice versa.<br />
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<br />
'''Item 119: IvyGen'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Thomas Luft'''<br />
Year: '''2008'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: IvyGen, screenshot<ref>An Ivy Generator: “tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world”, accessed 1 November 2021, http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/</ref><br />
<br />
''Item 119'' is called IvyGen, after a small software tool developed in 2007 by a now retired computer graphics professor Thomas Luft. Luft was looking for a “sample scene” for his work on digitally emulated watercolor renderings: “I was thinking of something complex, filled with vegetation —like trees overgrown with ivy. Fortunately I was able to implement a procedural system so that the ivy would grow by itself. The result is a small tool allowing a virtual ivy to grow in your 3d world.” 10 years later, we find Luft’s rudimentary code back as the Ivy Generator add-on which can be installed into Blender, a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. The manual for IvyGen add-on read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1. Select the object you want to grow ivy on.<br />
<br />
2. Enter Edit Mode and select a vertex that you want the ivy to spawn from.<br />
<br />
3. Snap the cursor to the selected vertex.<br />
<br />
4. Enter Object Mode and with the object selected: Sidebar ‣ Create ‣ Ivy Generator panel adjust settings and choose ''Add New Ivy''.<ref name="ftn303">Blender 2.92 Reference Manual, accessed April 11, 2021, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/ https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/].</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
The smooth blending of computational affordances with natural likeness that was already present in Luft’s original statement (promising “ivy that would grow by itself” in “your 3d world”) is further naturalized in these simplified instructions. The slippage might possibly seem banal because computational vocabulary already naturalize vegetal terms such as tree, root, branching, seeds and so on to such an extent that the phrase “Select the object you want to grow ivy on” at first causes no alarm. It is common in modeling environments to blend descriptions of so-called bodies with those of their fleshy counterparts. This normalized dysphoria is considered a short-cut without harm, a blurring of worlds that does not signal any real confusion or doubt of what belongs to what. The use of “plant” when “so-called plant” would be more accurate, effectuates a double-sided holding in place, that ignores the worlding power of modeling so-called ivy in computation, and removes the possibility for these ivies to make a difference.<br />
<br />
Non-computational ivy is a clear example of ''symbiogenesis'',<ref name="ftn304">A term substantially worked by Lynn Margulis which literally means “becoming by living together.” It refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary innovations. Lynn Margulis, “Genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis” ''Experimental Parasitology'' Volume 39, Issue 2 (April 1976): 277-349.</ref> meaning that it is materially, structurally and behaviorally always-already implicated in co-dependence with other structures, vegetal or not, straight or crooked, queer or dead. But the vegetal modeling in IvyGen takes another route. So-called Plants are drawn from one single starting point that then are modulated according to different computed forces. Parameters allow users to modulate its primary direction of expansion (the weighted average of previous expansion directions), add a random influence, simulate an adhesion force towards other objects, add an up-vector imitating the phototropy of so-called plants, and finally simulate gravity. The desire and confidence by which this procedural system makes Ivy “grow” itself, is not innocent. Technically, Ivy Gen implements a Fibonacci sequence complexified by external forces that act as “deviators”, and variation is the result of a numerical randomization applied after-the-fact. The Fibonacci sequence is a string of numbers that describes a spiral that mathematician Fibonacci coined as “golden proportions”. These proportions can allegedly also be found in biological settings such as: tree branching, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone’s bracts. It became a pet project for nature lovers, math enthusiasts and 3D-modellers who create an ongoing stream of more or less convincing computer programs and visualizations that celebrate algorithmic botany or computational phylotaxy. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical construct that has just the right combination of scientific street cred, spiritual promise and eloquent number wizardry to convincingly bring patterns in ‘nature’ in direct relation to math and computation, confirming over and over again that aesthetics and symmetry are synonymous and that simple rules can have complex consequences. “Plant” patterns are not just beautiful but they are inevitable. They can be decoded like computer programs, and isn’t computation as stunning as nature itself?<ref name="ftn305">Maddie Burakoff, “Decoding the Mathematical Secrets of Plants’ Stunning Leaf Patterns,” ''Smithsonian Magazine'' (June 6th 2019)</ref><br />
<br />
Like in many other modeling set-ups for simulating biological life, IvyGen aligns 3D computation with phyllotaxy without reservations. It constructs so-called plants as autonomous individuals through applying expansion pattern of which the “primary growth direction” is straight at the core. This is not surprising because the procedural conditionings of computation seem to make certain political fictions of life which provoke technocratic and scientific truths of so-called bodies more easy to implement than others.<ref name="ftn306">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “Invasive Imaginatons and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref> IvyGen re-asserts a non-symbiogenetic understanding of evolution and ecology where growth is a deformation of the symmetrical, a deviation after the fact. Queer angles can only arrive afterwards and are always figured as disruption, however benign and supposedly in the interest of convincing realism. Luft clarifies that “the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene”.<ref name="ftn307">“Ivy Generator,” accessed April 1, 2021 [http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/].</ref> The apparent modesty of the statement confirms that even if the goal has not been to simulate non-computational ivy, the procedural system is seen as a “simplified” approach to actual biological growth patterns, rather than an approach that conceptually and politically differs from it. The point is not to correct IvyGen to apply other procedures, but to signal that the lack of problematization around that rote normalization is deeply problematic in and of itself.<br />
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[[Image:Image6.png|400px|none]]<br />
<br />
'''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'''<br />
<br />
Author(s) of the item: '''Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, Felipe Shibuya'''<br />
Year: '''2017-2018'''<br />
Entry date: '''18 September 2020'''<br />
Image: Tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for dendrochronology of large wooden objects, screenshot<ref>AI&ARTS Alan Turing Institute, accessed 1 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBB149Togl0</ref><br />
<br />
Dendrochronologist study climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods based on tree-ring growth in wood.<ref name="ftn308">“Dendrochronology,” accessed April 1, 2020, [http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/ http://pmcruz.com/dendrochronology/].</ref> This particular scientific way to relate to life has to be individual-centered in order to make trees emerge in their ideal form. It departs from seeing a tree as a perfect circle assigned to such individual. All variations along that specimen’s existence are just the result of modifications radiating outwards from the perfect mathematical zero point. Instead of departing from a complex environment full of forces interlaced in the midst of which a tree grows, dendrochronology reads the aberrations and deviations from the geometrical circle as exceptional interventions deforming its concentric expansion, and by doing so re-confirms/projects the idealized geometry time and time again as the desired centered and equilibrated life-pattern for a tree. This approach confirms the understanding of the plant’s growth as a predictable phenomenon (i.e. beautiful), which make it become a vector into the probable (i.e. extractive/exploitative ideology) and distances it from the surprise ontologies of the possible.<br />
<br />
The ''Naturalizing Immigration dataViz''<ref name="ftn309">Pedro Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael, and Felipe Shibuya, ''Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016'', accessed April 1, 2020, [https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/ https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/].</ref> project takes dendrochronology as a visual reference to represent the development of US demographics by immigration as “natural growth”. It is a benevolent move that unfortunately almost literally flattens the lively complexity of demographics, by first offering an accountability only of “entrances” and not “exits” (e.g.: not accounting for deportations) and second imposing a naturalizing mechanism over a social behavior inextricably linked to economic, cultural and political conditionings.<br />
<br />
As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation. In other words: the horizontal strata of tree rings present a specific worlding, while the disciplinary study of them brings to their complex and rich wording comparative and quantitative methods that overimpose a view of what ought to be, an average behavior as well as a distance of that specimen from an ideal representation of its species. How could dendrochronology inform on difference, instead of imposing ideals, inviting the probable and avoiding forgiving comparisons of nation-state demographics as if it was “resembling a living organism”, only subjected to climate inclemencies? The worrying benevolence in the data visualization work, trying to naturalize immigration via the ''greenwashing'' figuration of a tree trunk cut, helps us keep alert when encountering this kind of technocultural leaps. The equation of vegetal symmetry, straightness and proportionality has deep implicancies. We simply can not afford more deadly simplifications.<br />
<br />
=== Cracks and flourishings ===<br />
<br />
In a conversation with Arjuna Neuman, Denise Fereira da Silva contrasts her use of the term “Deep Implicancy” with that of “entanglement”: “The concept of Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn310">Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Arjuna Neuman, “4 Waters: Deep Implicancy,” (Images Festival, 2019) [http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Arjuna-Denise-web-ready.pdf]</ref> She insists that by paying attention to the relations between particles, their singularity as entities (just as so-called plants, leaves or petals) is being reconfirmed. In the very matter of the notion, implicancy or ‘implicatedness’ can be understood as a circluding<ref name="ftn311">Bini Adamczak, On circlusion, in Mask Magazine (2016), accessed October 7, 2020. [http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-issue/sex/circlusion]</ref> operation to the notion of entanglement, in the sense that it affirms a mutual constitution from scratch.<ref name="ftn312">Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity*,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (2012).</ref><br />
<br />
When attempting to apply it to a disobedient action-research in volumetrics oriented towards so-called plants, we try to start from such mutuality to understand at least two things. First, what are the cracks in the apparatus of contemporary 3D that are too-often presented as seamless. How and where can those cracks be found and signaled, named and made traceable? Second, how can we provoke and experience a flourishing of volumetric computation otherwise, attentive to its implicancies and its potential to widen the possible? In ''Vegetal Volumetrics'', ''Item 033: This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'', made those surfaces tangible that provide bridges for jumping from one unit of life to another. ''Item 102: Grassroot rotation'' exposed the consequences of contrasting life and non-life all too graphically. These items call for different a-normative interfaces; ones whose settings would not already assume the usefulness or liveliness of one area over the uselessness and backgroundness of another. ''Systemic vegetation'' brought two items together to ask how plants are made complicit with deadly operations. ''Item 117: FOLDOUT'' points at the urgency to resist the automation of separation as a way to block the systematization of institutional violence. ''Item 118: Agrarian Units and Topological Zoning'' showed how staying with the volumetric traces, keeping memories of and paying attention to certain forms of life and the relationships between such formations might open up possibilities for coming to terms with the systemic alienation going on in plantations. The last section, ''Lively math'', investigated the stifling mutual confirmation of math and so-called plants as “beautiful”, “inevitable” and “true”. ''Item 119: IvyGen'' proposes non-normative dysphoria to queer and hence declutch a bit the worlding power of modeling that keeps both math and so-called plants in place. It is how “so-called” operates as a disclaimer, and thereby opens up possibility for the Ivies to make a difference. ''Item 120: Simulated dendrochronology for demographics?'' points at the need for eccentric desired life-patterns. Once we accept the limits of representation, visualizations of de-centralization, un-balancing and crookedness might make space for complexity.<br />
<br />
Nobody really believes that managing plantations through AI is beyond violence, that so-called plants can be generated, that fugitives should be separated from leaves in the wind. In our technocultures of critique, it is not rare at all to share the views on “of course, those techniques are not neutral”. Nevertheless, after studying the tricks and tips of volumetrics (from biomedicine, to mining, to sports or to court), we understood that once these complex worlds entangle with computation, the normalized assumptions of Cartesian optimization start to dominate and overrule. The cases we keep in the Possible Bodies inventory are each rather banal, far from exceptional and even everyday. They show that volumetrics are embedded in very mundane situations, but once folded into computation, concerns are easily dismissed. It shows the monocultural power of the probable, as a seemingly non-violent regulator of that what is predictable and therefore proportional, reasonable and efficient. The probable is an adjective turned into a noun, a world oriented by probabilistic vectors, in the socioeconomic sense of the “normal”. We are committed to heightening sensibility for the actual violence of such normality, in order to start considering variable forms to open up cracks for computational cultures that flourish by and for other means. By keeping complexity close, the possible becomes doable.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|Written for the forthcoming publication “Plants by Numbers”, co-edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Signs_of_Clandestine_Disorder_in_the_Uniformed_and_Coded_Crowds&diff=2560Signs of Clandestine Disorder in the Uniformed and Coded Crowds2021-11-24T05:50:13Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
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<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== Signs of Clandestine Disorder in the Uniformed and Coded Crowds ==<br />
<h2 style="display:none;">in the uniformed and coded crowds</h2><br />
'''Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting)'''<br />
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<br />
'''What are the implications of understanding bodies as political fictions in a technical sense? With what techniques, technologies, protocols and/or technoscientific paradigms are contemporary volumetric forms entangled? How are the probabilities of these technosciences strained by the urgency to broaden the spectrum of semiotic-material conditions of possibility for the bodies present? What worldly consequences does the paradigm of the quantified self bring? Bodies (their presence, their permanence, their credibility, their potential) are affected by the way they are measured, remeasured and mismeasured. This workshop-script was developed for a workshop on speculative somatic measuring and data interpretation. It invites participants to invent other systems of measuring bodies by mixing already existing disciplines or crossings with what is yet to come: anatomy, physics, chemistry, geometry, biology, economics, anthropometry...'''<br />
<br><br><br />
Duration: 2 ca. hours; between 6 and 60 participants.<br />
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=== Materials to prepare ===<br />
* Sheets with ''[[:File:Situation.pdf|situation]]'', 1 for each group<br />
* A sheet with an [[:File:Drawing.pdf|empty legend and space for description]], 1 for each group<br />
* Small pieces of colored paper, 2 for each group<br />
* A set of [[:File:Numbers.pdf|numbers]] (12, 657.68787, 24, 345, 0.00012, 2000, 1567, 4...), printed on small pieces of white paper, 5 for each group<br />
* A set of [[:File:Measurements.pdf|Measurement units]], printed on small pieces of white paper, 5 for each group: kg (weight), grams (weight), milligrams (weight), tons (weight), ρ (mass per unit, density), red (RGB), green (RGB), blue (RGB), mm (height), cm (height), km (height), mm (width), cm (width), km (width), years (age), mm (diameter), cm (diameter), meters (diameter), cm (radius), m (radius), cm2 (surface area), km2 (surface area), m2 (surface area), (number of corners), (number of limbs), liters (volume), cm3 (volume), BMI (Body Mass Index), likes, IQ...<br />
* Empty pieces of white paper, 5 for each group<br />
<br />
=== Introduction: From the probable to the possible ===<br />
<blockquote>(10 minutes)</blockquote><br />
The workshop is introduced by reminding participants of how we as quantified selves are swimming in a sea of data. Bodies (their presence, their permanence, their credibility, their potential) are affected by how they are measured, remeasured and mismeasured. These measurements mix and match measurement systems from: anatomy, physics, chemistry, geometry, biological, economic, biometrics... <br />
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=== Numbers ===<br />
<blockquote>(10 minutes)</blockquote><br />
Divide the participants in groups of between three and five participants. Each group selects 5 numbers. Ask if participants are happy with their numbers.<br />
<br />
=== Measurements ===<br />
<blockquote>(15 minutes)</blockquote><br />
Remind participants that these are raw numbers, not connected to a measuring unit. Brainstorm: What measurement units do we know? Try to extend to different dimensions, materials, disciplines. Each group receives 5 papers with measurement units. <br />
<br />
=== Bodyparts ===<br />
<blockquote>(5 minutes)</blockquote><br />
Groups have received numbers + measurement units. But what are they measuring? Each group proposes 2 body parts and writes them on the colored paper. These can be internal, external, small, composed... Gather all colored papers, mix and redistribute; each group receives 2. <br />
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<div class="page-break"></div><br />
<br />
=== Situation ===<br />
<blockquote>(5 minutes)</blockquote><br />
Alphonso Lingis, ''Dangerous Emotions'' (University of California Press, 2000): “We walk the streets among hundreds of people whose patterns of lips, breasts, and genital organs we divine; they seem to us equivalent and interchangeable. Then something snares our attention: a dimple speckled with freckles on the cheek of a woman; a steel choker around the throat of a man in a business suit; a gold ring in the punctured nipple on the hard chest of a deliveryman; a big raw fist in the delicate hand of a schoolgirl; a live python coiled about the neck of a lean, lanky adolescent with coal-black skin. Signs of Clandestine Disorder in the Uniformed and Coded Crowds.” <br />
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=== Drawing and annotating ===<br />
<blockquote>(30 minutes)</blockquote><br />
Fill out the legend with the data you received, and draw the so-called body/bodies that appear(s) in this situation. Make sure all participants in the group contribute to the drawing. Circulate or draw together. Fold back the legend and re-distribute the drawings. <br />
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=== Interpretation === <br />
<blockquote>(30 minutes)</blockquote><br />
Each group makes a technical description of the drawing they received and details the measurements where necessary. Possible modes of interpretation: engineer, anthropologist, biologist, science fiction writer... <br />
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=== Reading ===<br />
<blockquote>(15 minutes)</blockquote><br />
Re-distribute the drawings and descriptions among groups. Look at the drawing together. Read the interpretations aloud. <br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
=== Samples ===<br />
<gallery><br />
File:17.png<br />
File:05x.png <br />
File:20171128132719.png<br />
</gallery><br />
</noinclude><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
|This script was applied multiple times at a design school and then [https://www.museoreinasofia.es/sites/default/files/educacion/prototipo_4_jararochaelisagonzalez.pdf published by a museum] as a pedagogical method.<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=The_Industrial_Continuum_of_3D&diff=2559The Industrial Continuum of 3D2021-11-24T05:48:54Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
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<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== The Industrial Continuum of 3D ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
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<br />
=== The Invention of the Continuum ===<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull">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.”<ref name="ftn246">“Item 125: Disappearing around us,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory''. Source: Elizabeth Claire Alberts, Mongabay, 21 October 2020, “The rhino in the room: 3D scan brings near-extinct Sumatran species to virtual life”.</ref></blockquote><br />
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3D scanning 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.<br />
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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.<ref name="ftn247">Loren Britton, and Helen Pritchard, “For CS,” ''interactions'' 27, 4 (July - August 2020), 94–98, [https://doi.org/10.1145/3406838. https://doi.org/10.1145/3406838.] </ref><br />
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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).<ref name="ftn248">The British Standard Organisation defines Building Information Modeling (BIM) as: “Use of a shared digital representation of a built asset to facilitate design, construction and operation processes to form a reliable basis for decisions.” “BIM - Building Information Modelling - ISO 19650,” BSI, [https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/iso-19650-BIM/. https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/iso-19650-BIM/.]</ref> 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.<ref name="ftn249">GAFAM refers to the so-called Big Five tech companies: Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft.</ref> 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,<ref name="ftn250">“In this way, our contemporary encounters with data extend well beyond notions of design, ease of use, personal suggestion, surveillance or privacy. They take on new meaning if we consider the underlying principles of mathematics as the engine that drives data towards languages of normality and truth prior to any opera-tional discomforts or violences.” Ramon Amaro, “Artificial Intelligence: warped, colorful forms and their unclear geometries,” in ''Schemas of Uncertainty: Soothsayers and Soft AI'', eds. Danae Io and Callum Copley (Amsterdam: PUB/Sandberg Instituut), 69-90.</ref> but in three-dimensional operations, the industrial continuum intensifies due to their supercharged relationship to space and time.<ref name="ftn251">Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting. “Figurations of Timely Extraction,” ''Media Theory'' 4, no. 2 (2020): 158-188.</ref><br />
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By referring to this phenomenon 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 industrial 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.<br />
<br />
Our intuition is that 3D goes through a continuously smooth, multi-dimensional but concentric and loopy flow of assembled technicalities, paradigms and devices that facilitate the circulation of standards and protocols; and hence the constant reproduction of hegemonic metrics for the measurement of volume.<ref>“Logistics is straight in that metrically degrading way. This is its murderousness, its refusal to attend to contour, its supervisory neglect and, also, its wastefulness, its continual missing of all in its inveterate grasping of everything.” Steffano Harney and Fred Moten, ''All Incomplete'' (New York: Minor Compositions, 2021), 105.</ref> Such intuition is nevertheless accompanied by another: that computation can and should operate otherwise. This text 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.<br />
<br />
=== How is 3D going on? ===<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="pull">“Train, Evaluate, Assist.” The simulation and training company Heartwood moves smoothly between the classroom and the field to “help operations, maintenance, and field service teams perform complex procedures faster, safer and with less errors.” Developing solutions for clients from a wide range of industries (Audi, TetraPak and the United States Secret Service to name a few), Heartwood is proud to insist that it leverages fields as diverse as manufacturing, railroad, utilities, energy, heavy equipment, automotive, aerospace and defense.<ref name="ftn252">“Heartwood Simulations & Guides,” accessed April 3, 2021, [https://hwd3d.com/3d-interactive-training https://hwd3d.com/3d-interactive-training].</ref> Their business strategy includes founding principles such as: “There are always new industries to explore – so we do!”<ref name="ftn253">“New industries. There are always new industries to explore – so we do! We ask ourselves questions like, ‘Will 3D Interactive technology be of interest to the healthcare industry when considering medical device training?’ Maybe – but we won’t know till we try.” Raj Raheja, “When Perfection Is A Little Too Perfect: 3 Ways to Experiment,” accessed April 3, 2021.</ref></blockquote><br />
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In virtual training solutions like the ones produced by the Heartwood company, we can clearly see how multiple methodical events get arranged in one go. We want to problematize such flows of volumetric techniques and technologies, because of the way this both powers and is powered by the circulation of oppression, exclusion and extraction. The industrial continuum of 3D keeps confirming the deadly normality of European enlightenment, doubtful Judeo-Christian concision, ''mono-humanism'',<ref name="ftn254">Katherine McKittrick, ''Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as a Praxis'' (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).</ref> hetero patriarchy and settler colonialism by continuing structures and practices that produce reality. From scientific and metaphysical modes of objectivity into truth, via the establishment of political fictions such as race and gender, to accurate individuality and faithful representation.<ref name="ftn255">Paul B. Preciado, “Letter from a trans man to the old sexual regime,” ''Texte zur Kunst'', (2018), [https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/letter-trans-man-old-sexual-regime-paul-b-preciado/. https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/letter-trans-man-old-sexual-regime-paul-b-preciado/.]</ref><br />
<br />
The specific vectors that make the Industrial Continuum of 3D indeed continue, are first of all those related to what we call “optimized complexity”. It is a particular way to arrange volumetrics in the interest of optimized computation, such as drawing hyper-real surfaces on top of extremely simplified structures or the over-reliance on average simulation. We see this eschewed attention for certain complexities and not for others in how simplified color-coded anatomy travels straight from science books into educational software, and biomedical imaging alike. Divisions between tissues and bones based in standardized category systems organize the relation between demarcated elements in polygonal models, which become hard-coded in constrained sets of volumetric operations and predefined time-space settings, affirmed by scientific nomenclature and recognizable color-schemes that are re-used across software applications. As a result, inter-connective body tissues such as fascia are underrepresented in hyper-real 3D renderings. Thus, the less imperative paradigms that recognize fascia as a key participant in body movement are once again occluded by means of optimization, a very specific industrial phenomenon. As an example of evident continuity by the apparent neutrality of a continuous flow of 3D manners, tissue renderings conserve the way things used to ''look like'' on 2D anatomy manuals, contributing to the conservation of the way things ''are'' in terms of anatomical paradigms.<br />
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A second vector at work is the ''additivist'' culture of 3D that thrives on relentless forking and versions to be re-visited and taken back.<ref name="ftn256">See for example: “Item 019: The 3D Additivist manifesto,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2015.</ref> 3D computation derives agility from the re-use of particle systems, models, data-structures and data-sets to, for example, render grass, model hair or to detect border crossings.<ref name="ftn257">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “So-called Plants,” in this book.</ref> Templates, rigs and scenarios are time-consuming to produce from scratch but once their probable topology is set, 3D assets such as “hilly landscape”, “turning screw”, “first person shooter”, “average body”<ref name="ftn258">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “MakeHuman,” in this book.</ref> or “fugitive”<ref name="ftn259">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “So-called Plants,” in this book.</ref> start to act as a reserve that can be reused endlessly, adjusted and repeated at industrial scale and without ever depleting. Of course that level of flexibility is designed and maintained under positive values such as agility, efficiency and even diversity, but more often than not, their ongoing circulation leads to extreme normalization. With this, we want to point out the fiction of having many options to grab from, which is precisely the settler illusion of the accessibility of resources to take and run with. It still depends on an economy of ''asset scarcity'', or even worse: an economy of scarcity that bases its sense of technical abundance on a set of finite, regularized elements.<br />
<br />
In addition, volumetrics depends more than other screen based environments on normalized viewing interfaces which makes military training sets and viewing environments for biomedical images follow the exact same representational logic. This is where the techno-scientific paradigms of mandatory projections, perspectives, topology based on binary separations between inside and outside, polygonal treatment, Cartesian axes, Euclidean geometries and so forth are being leveraged to relentlessly spread similar techniques across different corners of practice. Polygonal models travel all too easily between applications because their viewing environments are already standardized. Despite the work of feminist visual culture or cubist avantgardes that have made representation a political issue, perspective devices, anatomy theaters or cartographic projection are once again normalized as cultural standards.<ref name="ftn260">Countless thinkers from Svetlana Alpers, to bell hooks, Suzanne Lacy, Peggy Phelan, Elisabeth Grosz and Camera Obscura Collective have critiqued the implicit assumptions in representation. “(R)epresentation produces ruptures and gaps; it fails to reproduce the real exactly. Precisely because of representation’s supplementational excess and its failure to be totalizing, close readings of the logic of representation can produce resistance, and possibly, political change.” Peggy Phelan, ''Unmarked: The Politics of Performance'' (London: Routledge, 2003), 3.</ref><br />
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The specific manners in which the techno-sciences historically present metrics of volume nest in distinct fields: from spectacle to control, from laboratories to courts of justice, from syllabi to DIY prototypes, rom architecture studies to mining pits. When those manners circulate from one industrial field to another, along vectors that relegate difference and complexity to the background, they reaffirm quite probably the very probable colonial, capitalist, hetero-patriarchal, ableist and positivist topology of contemporary volumetrics. This nauseating and intoxicating setup of variability and rigidity produces the establishment of a universal mono-culture of 3D.<br />
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To highlight the continuity of normalizing forces, is our way to critically signal a globalized technocratic behavior based on the accumulation of sameness and repetition, rather than one attuned to the radical, mutating and interconnected specificity of something as wide and multi-modal as the volume of differentiated bodies. 3D models seemingly travel with ease, and this particular easiness facilitates the erasure of politics and the reaffirmation of a central norm. It means the patriarchocolonial linear representation of measurable volumes ends up with providing only with sometimes modular, sometimes fungible entities, circulated by and circulating the everlasting convenience of Modern canons. By Modern convenience, it has become easy to represent distinct elements, but near impossible to engage with inter-connective structures.<ref name="ftn261">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “Invasive imaginations and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref><br />
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=== Volumetric sedimentation ===<br />
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<blockquote class="pull">The monomers can be grouped into segments like Lego pieces to construct functional protein-mimics. “Compare this to how cars are built,” said Xu. “There are different models, colors and shapes, but they all contain important parts such as an engine, wheels and energy source. For each part, there can be different options, such as gas or electric engines, but at the end of the day, it’s a car, not a train.” Xu and her team designed a library of polymers that are statistically similar in sequence, providing newfound flexibility in assembly.<ref name="ftn262">“Item 123: Compare this to how cars are built,” The Possible Bodies Inventory. "New discovery makes it easier to design synthetic proteins that rival their natural counterparts," ''Berkeley Engineering'', accessed April 3, 2021, https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2020/01/new-discovery-makes-it-easier-to-design-synthetic-proteins-that-rival-their-natural-counterparts/.</ref></blockquote><br />
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Contemporary biomedical engineering relies on computer generated 3D imagery for inventing materials, pharmaceuticals and fuels and for predicting their behavior. The monomers that Xu and her team compare to a car or a train, are synthetic proteins that were designed using 3D models of cylinders, spirals and spheres.<ref name="ftn263">Protein modeling for prediction: “Model Quality AssessmentPrograms (MQAPs) are also used to discriminate near-native conformations from non-native conformations.” “New discovery makes it easier to design synthetic proteins that rival their natural counterparts,” ''Berkeley Engineering''. </ref> The ease by which a researcher compares a fictional membrane to the car industry is a banal example of how in the hyper-computational environment of biomedical engineering, the interaction between observation, representation, modeling and prediction is settling around – once again – probable patterns.<br />
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When the Modern Man finished threading the frame of his latest invention, the perspective device, he could not even start to imagine that centuries later this would be the universally accepted paradigm for representing masses of volume in space.<ref name="ftn264">No name needed. Picture an average Modern male, just imagine one that inhabits the very center of power in clear familiarity. </ref> The becoming-paradigmatic of perspective from a static single point has gained terrain through years of artistic, scientific and technical usage throughout realms as diverse as fresco painting or the more recent establishment of a cinematic language. And just as one-point perspective made it all the way from Modernity to our present day, so did other even older paradigmatic techniques such as Cartesian axes, Euclidean geometry, cartographic projection or cubic measurement. These paradigms have been assimilated and naturalized to such an extent that they each lost their own history and have become inseparable from each other, interlocking in ways that have everything to do with the way they support the Modern project. In the current formation, they keep reinforcing each other as the only possible form of representation and thus reality.<ref name="ftn265">Katherine McKittrick, ''Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as a Praxis''.</ref> Their centrality in all found analysis of volume in the world means nothing less than a daily imposition of Euromodern values, modes and techniques of study, observation, description and inscription of the complexity around.<ref name="ftn266">Patricia Reed and Lewis R. Gordon define “Euromodernity” in the following way: “By “Euromodernity,” I don’t mean “European people.” The term simply means the constellation of convictions, arguments, policies, and a worldview promoting the idea that the only way legitimately to belong to the present and as a consequence the future is to be or become European.” See: Lewis R. Gordon, “Black Aesthetics, Black Value”, in ''Public Culture'' 30, no. 1 (2018): 19-34.</ref> In other words: volumetrics are being established due to the multi-vectorial political agenda of Modern technosciences, which is directly entwined with commercial colonialism and Western supremacy.<br />
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Despite daily updates, the industrial continuum of 3D is not a changing landscape even if it seems to rely on flow. We can see all sorts of 3D devices and standards circulating in a continuous current from one industry to another, but they persistently move towards a re-establishment of the same, both in terms of shape and of value. Our aim is to understand the paradigms they keep carrying along, and to attend to the assumptions, delegations and canons they impose over matter and semiotics when keeping their business as usual. We suspect there is a rigidification in the establishment of what circulates and what doesn’t and we need to see where that persistence hangs from, and how it came to be settled. What are the cultural logics underlying 3D technologies, that turn them into a rigid regime?<br />
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One key aspect of the very specific settling of 3D, is that they settle in flow. It is through use and reuse that the establishment of values and manners gets reinforced. A kind of technocratic sedimentation of protocols, standards, tools and formulas which leaves a trace of what is possible in the circuit of volumetrics. The behavior of this sedimentation implies that things just happen again because they happened already before. Every time a tool is adopted from one industry into another, an edge is re-inscribed in the spectrum of what is possible to do with it. And every time the same formula is applied, its axiom gets strengthened. This ongoing settling of the probable in volumetrics comes with its own worlding: it scaffolds the very material-semiotics of what world is to be done, by whom, and by what means. If software making is indeed worldmaking, the settlement of volumetric toolkits and technoscientific paradigms affects what worlds we can world.<ref name="ftn267">“To provide us with endless a-Modern mestizo, an escape from representational and agential normativities, software CAN and MUST provide the material conditions for wild combinations or un-suspected renders.” Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “MakeHuman,” in this book. </ref><br />
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For those of us who feel affected by the Cartesian anxiety of always feeling backward<ref name="ftn268">Heather Love, ''Feeling Backward'' (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).</ref> in a damaging axiomatic culture of assemblage and measure-all-this-way, it is important to make explicit the moves that reified what it ended up being: an exteriority-less industrial regime based on scientific truths that are being produced by that same regime. It is evident that volume counts a lot in how it came to ostent value, but how does it count and how is it counted? Was it the car industry, that settled values and forms before the Lego blocks appeared? Was it the Lego paradigm of assemblage, that was settled as a reference for biomedical researchers to use it for the predictions in their screens and speeches? The befores and afters matter in this bedrock of shapes and values, as they are telling for what is probably going to happen next.<br />
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Over the years, we detected a number of sedimenting behaviors or volumetric probables. The first is ''externalizing implications''. The outsourcing of labour and responsibilities is ubiquitous in most industrial computing, but takes a specific shape in the industrial continuum of 3D. Through a strictly hierarchical mode of organization, tasks, roles and all labour-related configurations of relationality persistently, the command is kept in the hands of a privileged minority. Their agendas set industrial priorities but without committing to specific fields or areas of application, therefore avoiding all liability. This adds up to an outsourcing of responsibilities to less powerful agents, such as confronting users with just Yes/No options for agreeing with terms and conditions, or the delegation of energetic costs to the final end of the supply chain.<br />
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The need for dealing with computational complexity when rendering volumetrics, leads to an over-reliance on socio-technical standards and protocols that become increasingly hard to undo. ''Rigging simplification'' refers to the obfuscated reduction inherent in particle systems, for example. A limited set of small samples or ‘sprites’ is randomized in order to suggest endless complexity. Another example is the way inside and outside is plotted through polygon meshes in CAD files. This technique produces a faster rendering but settles a paradigm of binary separation between interior and exterior worlds. The same goes for the normalized logics of rendering graphics with the help of ray-tracing techniques that demand planar projection for resolving a smooth move between 2D and 3D.<ref name="ftn269">POV-Ray or Persistence of Vision Raytracer, a popular tool for producing high-quality computer graphics, explains this process as follows: “For every pixel in the final image one or more viewing rays are shot from the camera into the scene to see if it intersects with any of the objects in the scene. These “viewing rays” originate from the viewer (represented by the camera), and pass through the viewing window (representing the pixels of the final image).” “POV-Ray for Unix version 3.7,” accessed April 3, 2021, [https://www.povray.org/documentation/3.7.0/u1_1.html#u1_1 https://www.povray.org/documentation/3.7.0/u1_1.html#u1_1].</ref><br />
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''Convenient universalism'' is how we refer to the way volumetrics technically facilitate modes that avoid dissent, that do not stay with complexity or how all matter becomes equally volumetric before the eyes of the 3D-scanner. Because a virtual dungeon can be rendered with the help of ray-tracing, do the same representational conventions actually apply to dead trees, human brains, aquifers, rhinoceroses and plant-roots? Convenient universalism does not bother to include nuances of minoritarian proposals in mainstream industrial development. It allows ongoing violence to take shape as reasonable, and common sense.<br />
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Then, there is the sedimentation of ''persistent hyper-realities''. The Continuum operates well when aligning so-called truths, with systems of verification, and performing objectivity. It is not a surprise that it is at ease with Modern scientific and cultural paradigms; its values and assumptions co-construct each other. This is both confirmed and suggested by the over-presence of tools for segmentation and foreground-background separation.<ref name="ftn270">See for example the way BIM is used to represent subsurface remnants of demolished structures as separate layers. Gary Morin, “Geospatial World,” September 11, 2016, [https://www.geospatialworld.net/article/geological-modelling-and-bim-infrastructure/ https://www.geospatialworld.net/article/geological-modelling-and-bim-infrastructure/].</ref><br />
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And last but not least, we can speak of ''streamlined aesthetics'' as a sedimented behavior. It can be confirmed that as the continuum circulates, the aesthetics of tools and their outcomes flatten. The same operations hide behind layers that look the same. Similar procedures are offered by devices that look alike. WYSIWYG interfaces were smoothly adjusted to the machinery of measuring volumes for any purpose... and what sediments in that process is just a sharp similarity all the way along. The aesthetic canon involves equilibrated proportions, hyperrealism and an evident optimization of rendering maneuvers.<br />
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The cultural logic of 3D is tied to the ongoing settlement of a legacy of standardization, but also to a history of converging the presences of hugely diversified entities under a rigid regime. This volumetric regime is sustained by vivid Modern techniques, vocabularies, infrastructures and protocols. Or to put it bluntly: the calculation of what it takes to count via the x, y and z axes depends on modes that are far from neutral, and of course are not innocent. The technoscience of volumetrics was settled while being already entangled with a whole world in and of its own.<br />
<br />
=== The Possible Continuums of 3D ===<br />
<br />
In the previous sections we spent some time unpacking how 3D circulates through its industrial continuum and what is sedimented as a result. We clarified what needs to be radically changed or directly abolished to get at a possible volumetrics that can happen non-industrially or at least is less marked by industrial, solutionist values. As we have seen, the industrial continuum of 3D settles and flows in particular ways, making its way through business as usual. It’s self-fulfilling moves produce increasingly normed worlds that are continued along the axes of the probable. In this last section, we would like to see what other forms of volumetric continuation, circulation and settlement might be quite possible, as a way to world differently. To find another “how” that can stay with complexity and will not negate, facilitate or altogether erase other modes of existence, we’ll need to reorient 3D from a trans*feminist perspective, and move obliquely towards 3D that can go otherwise.<br />
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Could an ethics and politics committed to volumetric complexity emerge from reverse-engineering the ebbs and flows of industrial affection? Our first task is to rescue ''continuity'' from the claws of the established, the normed and the Modern. Against the unbearable persistence of 3D, discontinuity, latency and un-settlement are evident counterforces only as long as they engage with resisting that which 3D settles by flow: neoliberal accumulation, colonial commercial normativity and one-directionality. An affirmative volumetrics does not reject or dismiss the power of volumetrics as a whole, or give up on continuity altogether either. As Donna Haraway asks in conversation with Cathy Wolfe: “How can we truly learn to compose rather than decry or impose?”<ref name="ftn271">Dona Haraway in conversation with Cary Wolfe. Donna J. Haraway, ''Manifestly Haraway ''(London: [https://muse.jhu.edu/search?action=browse&limit=publisher_id:23 University of Minnesota Press], 2016), 289.</ref><br />
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We compiled a list of proposals for what we suspect are more affirmative ways, suggestions for dealing with the “volumetric probables“ that emerged from our research endeavor so far. They are proposals which are each “nothing short of a radical shift in how we approach matter and form”.<ref name="ftn272">Denise Ferreira da Silva. “On Difference Without Separability,“ in ''Incerteza Viva: 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, ''ed. Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças (Sao Paulo: Ministry of Culture, Bienal and Itaú, 2016), 57-58.</ref> What is important to keep in mind, is that ''none of these are in fact impossible to implement'', so come on!<br />
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'''Remediating Cartesian anxiety''': What if we decide to use six instead of four axes, twelve instead of three or zero instead of n? What if we take time to get used to multiple paradigms for orientation, instead of settling for only one regime? Letting go of the finite coordinates of x, y, z and t could be a first step to break with the convenient reductions of parallel and perpendicular assumptions. It’s implementations might require rigorous inventions with a transdisciplinary attitude, but we can afford them if what is at stake is to re-orient volumetrics for non-coercive uses, right?<br />
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'''Paranodes to ever-polygonal worlds''': By paying attention to the paranodal in ever-polygonal worlds, the simplistic dominance of node-centricity might quickly shift to entirely different topological articulations.<ref name="ftn273">“The instability of paranodal space is what animates the network, and to attempt to render this space invisible is to arrive at less, not more, complete explanations of the network as a social reality.” Ulises Ali Mejias, ''Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 153; and Zach Blas, “Contra-Internet,” ''e-flux Journal ''<nowiki>#74 (June 2016).</nowiki></ref> This would allow other imaginations of relationality, this time not along the vectors of sameness and similarity but emerging from the undefined materiality of what’s there, and what was underrepresented by paradigmatic techno-sciences.<br />
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'''Extra-planar projections''': If the distance between 3D and 2D was not to be crossed quickly and straight, but allowed for curves, meanders and loops, then a whole technoscience of dissimilarity and surprise collinearity would emerge. We know the cartographies of complexity are already there, but we just have been lacking the means for their representation, their analysis and their use. Such extra-planar projections would intervene the world with a realm of possibilities in the in-between of 2D and 3D, not assuming the axioms of linear projection but rather convoking the playful articulations of elements diffracted inwards, detailing a scape of situated 2.1D, 2.5.3SD, 2.7Dbis and 2.999999D. The cartographic computation of the possible then becomes a latent one of unsolved folds, abrupt edges, unfinished integers and inaccurate parallels.<br />
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'''Multi-dimensional depth''': What background-foreground mergings can we invent for the multidimensional analysis of deep matterings besides volumetrics? Matter is not volume so we need other arrangements of depth and density than the calculating measurings of dimensional worlds. Switching, blurring and blending what comes to the fore with what usually stays behind declutches attention from the binary back-front and inside-outside divides, thickness becomes an area in need of subtle study and nuanced formulations. When the surveillance camera is turned onto the policeman, violence does not go away. But there might be ways to hold paths and crossings in mutual affection and radical sustainability. If capturing would be about soLiDARity instead of policing, about flourishing instead of conservation, about density instead of profiling then fights for social justice might have a chance to reclaim the very dimensions where mundane violence is executed on a daily basis..<br />
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'''Fits-and-starts-volumetrics:''' Which transformative moves can hold time beyond constant speed, agile advancement and smooth gait? As we learned from Heather Love and her understanding of queer life as constantly feeling backward,<ref name="ftn274">Heather Love, ''Feeling Backward''.</ref> as well as from from crip technosciences:<ref name="ftn275">Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, “Crip Technoscience Manifesto,” ''Catalyst'' 5, no. 1 (2019).</ref> linear time is a problematic norm that will always confirm and appreciate what goes forward. In any case, Possible Volumetrics can not be aligned with it. Time as mattered through computation (4D) works too hard on appearing continuous. We propose to use that energy for flowing with what gets crooked and throttled, to move with the flutters and stotterings. Along this text, we tried to show the continuous problematic of the industrialization of 3D, in order to convoke a possible volumetrics that could do 3D otherwise.<br />
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In case these proposals feel too hard or even impossible to implement, remember that this sense is always the effect of hegemony! Abolishing the Industrial Continuum of 3D means to place it at the eccentric core of a kind of computing that dares to world without patriarcho-capitalist and colonial structures holding it up.<br />
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[[file:Continuum_stuttgart.JPG|800px|thumb|left|The Industrial Continuum of 3D emerges during “Collective inventorying”, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, 2017]]<br />
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[[File:Continuum recto.png|thumb|left|800px|“[https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?074 The Industrial Continuum of 3D]”, fanzine, Barcelona, 2017 <noinclude>/ [[:File:Continuum.pdf|Download PDF]]</noinclude>]]<br />
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[[file:Continuum_barcelona_1.png|800px|thumb|left]]<br />
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[[file:Continuum_barcelona_2.png|800px|thumb|left|Exploring the continuum with participants in “Imagined Mishearings,” Hangar (Barcelona, 2017)]]<br />
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[[file:Continuum_brighton.png|800px|thumb|left|A diagram of The Industrial Continuum of 3D for the workshop “Continuous corpo-realities <-> diagramming probabilities and possibilities!”, University of Sussex, Brighton, 2018 <noinclude>/ [[:File:Continuum_brighton.pdf|Download PDF]]</noinclude>]]<br />
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=== Notes ===<br />
<references/></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=The_Industrial_Continuum_of_3D&diff=2558The Industrial Continuum of 3D2021-11-24T05:46:24Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
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== The Industrial Continuum of 3D ==<br />
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'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
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=== The Invention of the Continuum ===<br />
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<blockquote class="pull">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.”<ref name="ftn246">“Item 125: Disappearing around us,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory''. Source: Elizabeth Claire Alberts, Mongabay, 21 October 2020, “The rhino in the room: 3D scan brings near-extinct Sumatran species to virtual life”.</ref></blockquote><br />
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3D scanning 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.<br />
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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.<ref name="ftn247">Loren Britton, and Helen Pritchard, “For CS,” ''interactions'' 27, 4 (July - August 2020), 94–98, [https://doi.org/10.1145/3406838. https://doi.org/10.1145/3406838.] </ref><br />
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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).<ref name="ftn248">The British Standard Organisation defines Building Information Modeling (BIM) as: “Use of a shared digital representation of a built asset to facilitate design, construction and operation processes to form a reliable basis for decisions.” “BIM - Building Information Modelling - ISO 19650,” BSI, [https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/iso-19650-BIM/. https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/iso-19650-BIM/.]</ref> 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.<ref name="ftn249">GAFAM refers to the so-called Big Five tech companies: Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft.</ref> 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,<ref name="ftn250">“In this way, our contemporary encounters with data extend well beyond notions of design, ease of use, personal suggestion, surveillance or privacy. They take on new meaning if we consider the underlying principles of mathematics as the engine that drives data towards languages of normality and truth prior to any opera-tional discomforts or violences.” Ramon Amaro, “Artificial Intelligence: warped, colorful forms and their unclear geometries,” in ''Schemas of Uncertainty: Soothsayers and Soft AI'', eds. Danae Io and Callum Copley (Amsterdam: PUB/Sandberg Instituut), 69-90.</ref> but in three-dimensional operations, the industrial continuum intensifies due to their supercharged relationship to space and time.<ref name="ftn251">Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting. “Figurations of Timely Extraction,” ''Media Theory'' 4, no. 2 (2020): 158-188.</ref><br />
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By referring to this phenomenon 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 industrial 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.<br />
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Our intuition is that 3D goes through a continuously smooth, multi-dimensional but concentric and loopy flow of assembled technicalities, paradigms and devices that facilitate the circulation of standards and protocols; and hence the constant reproduction of hegemonic metrics for the measurement of volume.<ref>“Logistics is straight in that metrically degrading way. This is its murderousness, its refusal to attend to contour, its supervisory neglect and, also, its wastefulness, its continual missing of all in its inveterate grasping of everything.” Steffano Harney and Fred Moten, ''All Incomplete'' (New York: Minor Compositions, 2021), 105.</ref> Such intuition is nevertheless accompanied by another: that computation can and should operate otherwise. This text 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.<br />
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=== How is 3D going on? ===<br />
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<blockquote class="pull">“Train, Evaluate, Assist.” The simulation and training company Heartwood moves smoothly between the classroom and the field to “help operations, maintenance, and field service teams perform complex procedures faster, safer and with less errors.” Developing solutions for clients from a wide range of industries (Audi, TetraPak and the United States Secret Service to name a few), Heartwood is proud to insist that it leverages fields as diverse as manufacturing, railroad, utilities, energy, heavy equipment, automotive, aerospace and defense.<ref name="ftn252">“Heartwood Simulations & Guides,” accessed April 3, 2021, [https://hwd3d.com/3d-interactive-training https://hwd3d.com/3d-interactive-training].</ref> Their business strategy includes founding principles such as: “There are always new industries to explore – so we do!”<ref name="ftn253">“New industries. There are always new industries to explore – so we do! We ask ourselves questions like, ‘Will 3D Interactive technology be of interest to the healthcare industry when considering medical device training?’ Maybe – but we won’t know till we try.” Raj Raheja, “When Perfection Is A Little Too Perfect: 3 Ways to Experiment,” accessed April 3, 2021.</ref></blockquote><br />
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In virtual training solutions like the ones produced by the Heartwood company, we can clearly see how multiple methodical events get arranged in one go. We want to problematize such flows of volumetric techniques and technologies, because of the way this both powers and is powered by the circulation of oppression, exclusion and extraction. The industrial continuum of 3D keeps confirming the deadly normality of European enlightenment, doubtful Judeo-Christian concision, ''mono-humanism'',<ref name="ftn254">Katherine McKittrick, ''Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as a Praxis'' (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).</ref> hetero patriarchy and settler colonialism by continuing structures and practices that produce reality. From scientific and metaphysical modes of objectivity into truth, via the establishment of political fictions such as race and gender, to accurate individuality and faithful representation.<ref name="ftn255">Paul B. Preciado, “Letter from a trans man to the old sexual regime,” ''Texte zur Kunst'', (2018), [https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/letter-trans-man-old-sexual-regime-paul-b-preciado/. https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/letter-trans-man-old-sexual-regime-paul-b-preciado/.]</ref><br />
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The specific vectors that make the Industrial Continuum of 3D indeed continue, are first of all those related to what we call “optimized complexity”. It is a particular way to arrange volumetrics in the interest of optimized computation, such as drawing hyper-real surfaces on top of extremely simplified structures or the over-reliance on average simulation. We see this eschewed attention for certain complexities and not for others in how simplified color-coded anatomy travels straight from science books into educational software, and biomedical imaging alike. Divisions between tissues and bones based in standardized category systems organize the relation between demarcated elements in polygonal models, which become hard-coded in constrained sets of volumetric operations and predefined time-space settings, affirmed by scientific nomenclature and recognizable color-schemes that are re-used across software applications. As a result, inter-connective body tissues such as fascia are underrepresented in hyper-real 3D renderings. Thus, the less imperative paradigms that recognize fascia as a key participant in body movement are once again occluded by means of optimization, a very specific industrial phenomenon. As an example of evident continuity by the apparent neutrality of a continuous flow of 3D manners, tissue renderings conserve the way things used to ''look like'' on 2D anatomy manuals, contributing to the conservation of the way things ''are'' in terms of anatomical paradigms.<br />
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A second vector at work is the ''additivist'' culture of 3D that thrives on relentless forking and versions to be re-visited and taken back.<ref name="ftn256">See for example: “Item 019: The 3D Additivist manifesto,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2015.</ref> 3D computation derives agility from the re-use of particle systems, models, data-structures and data-sets to, for example, render grass, model hair or to detect border crossings.<ref name="ftn257">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “So-called Plants,” in this book.</ref> Templates, rigs and scenarios are time-consuming to produce from scratch but once their probable topology is set, 3D assets such as “hilly landscape”, “turning screw”, “first person shooter”, “average body”<ref name="ftn258">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “MakeHuman,” in this book.</ref> or “fugitive”<ref name="ftn259">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “So-called Plants,” in this book.</ref> start to act as a reserve that can be reused endlessly, adjusted and repeated at industrial scale and without ever depleting. Of course that level of flexibility is designed and maintained under positive values such as agility, efficiency and even diversity, but more often than not, their ongoing circulation leads to extreme normalization. With this, we want to point out the fiction of having many options to grab from, which is precisely the settler illusion of the accessibility of resources to take and run with. It still depends on an economy of ''asset scarcity'', or even worse: an economy of scarcity that bases its sense of technical abundance on a set of finite, regularized elements.<br />
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In addition, volumetrics depends more than other screen based environments on normalized viewing interfaces which makes military training sets and viewing environments for biomedical images follow the exact same representational logic. This is where the techno-scientific paradigms of mandatory projections, perspectives, topology based on binary separations between inside and outside, polygonal treatment, Cartesian axes, Euclidean geometries and so forth are being leveraged to relentlessly spread similar techniques across different corners of practice. Polygonal models travel all too easily between applications because their viewing environments are already standardized. Despite the work of feminist visual culture or cubist avantgardes that have made representation a political issue, perspective devices, anatomy theaters or cartographic projection are once again normalized as cultural standards.<ref name="ftn260">Countless thinkers from Svetlana Alpers, to bell hooks, Suzanne Lacy, Peggy Phelan, Elisabeth Grosz and Camera Obscura Collective have critiqued the implicit assumptions in representation. “(R)epresentation produces ruptures and gaps; it fails to reproduce the real exactly. Precisely because of representation’s supplementational excess and its failure to be totalizing, close readings of the logic of representation can produce resistance, and possibly, political change.” Peggy Phelan, ''Unmarked: The Politics of Performance'' (London: Routledge, 2003), 3.</ref><br />
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The specific manners in which the techno-sciences historically present metrics of volume nest in distinct fields: from spectacle to control, from laboratories to courts of justice, from syllabi to DIY prototypes, rom architecture studies to mining pits. When those manners circulate from one industrial field to another, along vectors that relegate difference and complexity to the background, they reaffirm quite probably the very probable colonial, capitalist, hetero-patriarchal, ableist and positivist topology of contemporary volumetrics. This nauseating and intoxicating setup of variability and rigidity produces the establishment of a universal mono-culture of 3D.<br />
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To highlight the continuity of normalizing forces, is our way to critically signal a globalized technocratic behavior based on the accumulation of sameness and repetition, rather than one attuned to the radical, mutating and interconnected specificity of something as wide and multi-modal as the volume of differentiated bodies. 3D models seemingly travel with ease, and this particular easiness facilitates the erasure of politics and the reaffirmation of a central norm. It means the patriarchocolonial linear representation of measurable volumes ends up with providing only with sometimes modular, sometimes fungible entities, circulated by and circulating the everlasting convenience of Modern canons. By Modern convenience, it has become easy to represent distinct elements, but near impossible to engage with inter-connective structures.<ref name="ftn261">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “Invasive imaginations and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref><br />
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=== Volumetric sedimentation ===<br />
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<blockquote class="pull">The monomers can be grouped into segments like Lego pieces to construct functional protein-mimics. “Compare this to how cars are built,” said Xu. “There are different models, colors and shapes, but they all contain important parts such as an engine, wheels and energy source. For each part, there can be different options, such as gas or electric engines, but at the end of the day, it’s a car, not a train.” Xu and her team designed a library of polymers that are statistically similar in sequence, providing newfound flexibility in assembly.<ref name="ftn262">“Item 123: Compare this to how cars are built,” The Possible Bodies Inventory. "New discovery makes it easier to design synthetic proteins that rival their natural counterparts," ''Berkeley Engineering'', accessed April 3, 2021, https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2020/01/new-discovery-makes-it-easier-to-design-synthetic-proteins-that-rival-their-natural-counterparts/.</ref></blockquote><br />
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Contemporary biomedical engineering relies on computer generated 3D imagery for inventing materials, pharmaceuticals and fuels and for predicting their behavior. The monomers that Xu and her team compare to a car or a train, are synthetic proteins that were designed using 3D models of cylinders, spirals and spheres.<ref name="ftn263">Protein modeling for prediction: “Model Quality AssessmentPrograms (MQAPs) are also used to discriminate near-native conformations from non-native conformations.” “New discovery makes it easier to design synthetic proteins that rival their natural counterparts,” ''Berkeley Engineering''. </ref> The ease by which a researcher compares a fictional membrane to the car industry is a banal example of how in the hyper-computational environment of biomedical engineering, the interaction between observation, representation, modeling and prediction is settling around – once again – probable patterns.<br />
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When the Modern Man finished threading the frame of his latest invention, the perspective device, he could not even start to imagine that centuries later this would be the universally accepted paradigm for representing masses of volume in space.<ref name="ftn264">No name needed. Picture an average Modern male, just imagine one that inhabits the very center of power in clear familiarity. </ref> The becoming-paradigmatic of perspective from a static single point has gained terrain through years of artistic, scientific and technical usage throughout realms as diverse as fresco painting or the more recent establishment of a cinematic language. And just as one-point perspective made it all the way from Modernity to our present day, so did other even older paradigmatic techniques such as Cartesian axes, Euclidean geometry, cartographic projection or cubic measurement. These paradigms have been assimilated and naturalized to such an extent that they each lost their own history and have become inseparable from each other, interlocking in ways that have everything to do with the way they support the Modern project. In the current formation, they keep reinforcing each other as the only possible form of representation and thus reality.<ref name="ftn265">Katherine McKittrick, ''Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as a Praxis''.</ref> Their centrality in all found analysis of volume in the world means nothing less than a daily imposition of Euromodern values, modes and techniques of study, observation, description and inscription of the complexity around.<ref name="ftn266">Patricia Reed and Lewis R. Gordon define “Euromodernity” in the following way: “By “Euromodernity,” I don’t mean “European people.” The term simply means the constellation of convictions, arguments, policies, and a worldview promoting the idea that the only way legitimately to belong to the present and as a consequence the future is to be or become European.” See: Lewis R. Gordon, “Black Aesthetics, Black Value”, in ''Public Culture'' 30:1 (2018): 19-34.</ref> In other words: volumetrics are being established due to the multi-vectorial political agenda of Modern technosciences, which is directly entwined with commercial colonialism and Western supremacy.<br />
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Despite daily updates, the industrial continuum of 3D is not a changing landscape even if it seems to rely on flow. We can see all sorts of 3D devices and standards circulating in a continuous current from one industry to another, but they persistently move towards a re-establishment of the same, both in terms of shape and of value. Our aim is to understand the paradigms they keep carrying along, and to attend to the assumptions, delegations and canons they impose over matter and semiotics when keeping their business as usual. We suspect there is a rigidification in the establishment of what circulates and what doesn’t and we need to see where that persistence hangs from, and how it came to be settled. What are the cultural logics underlying 3D technologies, that turn them into a rigid regime?<br />
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One key aspect of the very specific settling of 3D, is that they settle in flow. It is through use and reuse that the establishment of values and manners gets reinforced. A kind of technocratic sedimentation of protocols, standards, tools and formulas which leaves a trace of what is possible in the circuit of volumetrics. The behavior of this sedimentation implies that things just happen again because they happened already before. Every time a tool is adopted from one industry into another, an edge is re-inscribed in the spectrum of what is possible to do with it. And every time the same formula is applied, its axiom gets strengthened. This ongoing settling of the probable in volumetrics comes with its own worlding: it scaffolds the very material-semiotics of what world is to be done, by whom, and by what means. If software making is indeed worldmaking, the settlement of volumetric toolkits and technoscientific paradigms affects what worlds we can world.<ref name="ftn267">“To provide us with endless a-Modern mestizo, an escape from representational and agential normativities, software CAN and MUST provide the material conditions for wild combinations or un-suspected renders.” Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “MakeHuman,” in this book. </ref><br />
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For those of us who feel affected by the Cartesian anxiety of always feeling backward<ref name="ftn268">Heather Love, ''Feeling Backward'' (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).</ref> in a damaging axiomatic culture of assemblage and measure-all-this-way, it is important to make explicit the moves that reified what it ended up being: an exteriority-less industrial regime based on scientific truths that are being produced by that same regime. It is evident that volume counts a lot in how it came to ostent value, but how does it count and how is it counted? Was it the car industry, that settled values and forms before the Lego blocks appeared? Was it the Lego paradigm of assemblage, that was settled as a reference for biomedical researchers to use it for the predictions in their screens and speeches? The befores and afters matter in this bedrock of shapes and values, as they are telling for what is probably going to happen next.<br />
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Over the years, we detected a number of sedimenting behaviors or volumetric probables. The first is ''externalizing implications''. The outsourcing of labour and responsibilities is ubiquitous in most industrial computing, but takes a specific shape in the industrial continuum of 3D. Through a strictly hierarchical mode of organization, tasks, roles and all labour-related configurations of relationality persistently, the command is kept in the hands of a privileged minority. Their agendas set industrial priorities but without committing to specific fields or areas of application, therefore avoiding all liability. This adds up to an outsourcing of responsibilities to less powerful agents, such as confronting users with just Yes/No options for agreeing with terms and conditions, or the delegation of energetic costs to the final end of the supply chain.<br />
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The need for dealing with computational complexity when rendering volumetrics, leads to an over-reliance on socio-technical standards and protocols that become increasingly hard to undo. ''Rigging simplification'' refers to the obfuscated reduction inherent in particle systems, for example. A limited set of small samples or ‘sprites’ is randomized in order to suggest endless complexity. Another example is the way inside and outside is plotted through polygon meshes in CAD files. This technique produces a faster rendering but settles a paradigm of binary separation between interior and exterior worlds. The same goes for the normalized logics of rendering graphics with the help of ray-tracing techniques that demand planar projection for resolving a smooth move between 2D and 3D.<ref name="ftn269">POV-Ray or Persistence of Vision Raytracer, a popular tool for producing high-quality computer graphics, explains this process as follows: “For every pixel in the final image one or more viewing rays are shot from the camera into the scene to see if it intersects with any of the objects in the scene. These “viewing rays” originate from the viewer (represented by the camera), and pass through the viewing window (representing the pixels of the final image).” “POV-Ray for Unix version 3.7,” accessed April 3, 2021, [https://www.povray.org/documentation/3.7.0/u1_1.html#u1_1 https://www.povray.org/documentation/3.7.0/u1_1.html#u1_1].</ref><br />
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''Convenient universalism'' is how we refer to the way volumetrics technically facilitate modes that avoid dissent, that do not stay with complexity or how all matter becomes equally volumetric before the eyes of the 3D-scanner. Because a virtual dungeon can be rendered with the help of ray-tracing, do the same representational conventions actually apply to dead trees, human brains, aquifers, rhinoceroses and plant-roots? Convenient universalism does not bother to include nuances of minoritarian proposals in mainstream industrial development. It allows ongoing violence to take shape as reasonable, and common sense.<br />
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Then, there is the sedimentation of ''persistent hyper-realities''. The Continuum operates well when aligning so-called truths, with systems of verification, and performing objectivity. It is not a surprise that it is at ease with Modern scientific and cultural paradigms; its values and assumptions co-construct each other. This is both confirmed and suggested by the over-presence of tools for segmentation and foreground-background separation.<ref name="ftn270">See for example the way BIM is used to represent subsurface remnants of demolished structures as separate layers. Gary Morin, “Geospatial World,” September 11, 2016, [https://www.geospatialworld.net/article/geological-modelling-and-bim-infrastructure/ https://www.geospatialworld.net/article/geological-modelling-and-bim-infrastructure/].</ref><br />
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And last but not least, we can speak of ''streamlined aesthetics'' as a sedimented behavior. It can be confirmed that as the continuum circulates, the aesthetics of tools and their outcomes flatten. The same operations hide behind layers that look the same. Similar procedures are offered by devices that look alike. WYSIWYG interfaces were smoothly adjusted to the machinery of measuring volumes for any purpose... and what sediments in that process is just a sharp similarity all the way along. The aesthetic canon involves equilibrated proportions, hyperrealism and an evident optimization of rendering maneuvers.<br />
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The cultural logic of 3D is tied to the ongoing settlement of a legacy of standardization, but also to a history of converging the presences of hugely diversified entities under a rigid regime. This volumetric regime is sustained by vivid Modern techniques, vocabularies, infrastructures and protocols. Or to put it bluntly: the calculation of what it takes to count via the x, y and z axes depends on modes that are far from neutral, and of course are not innocent. The technoscience of volumetrics was settled while being already entangled with a whole world in and of its own.<br />
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=== The Possible Continuums of 3D ===<br />
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In the previous sections we spent some time unpacking how 3D circulates through its industrial continuum and what is sedimented as a result. We clarified what needs to be radically changed or directly abolished to get at a possible volumetrics that can happen non-industrially or at least is less marked by industrial, solutionist values. As we have seen, the industrial continuum of 3D settles and flows in particular ways, making its way through business as usual. It’s self-fulfilling moves produce increasingly normed worlds that are continued along the axes of the probable. In this last section, we would like to see what other forms of volumetric continuation, circulation and settlement might be quite possible, as a way to world differently. To find another “how” that can stay with complexity and will not negate, facilitate or altogether erase other modes of existence, we’ll need to reorient 3D from a trans*feminist perspective, and move obliquely towards 3D that can go otherwise.<br />
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Could an ethics and politics committed to volumetric complexity emerge from reverse-engineering the ebbs and flows of industrial affection? Our first task is to rescue ''continuity'' from the claws of the established, the normed and the Modern. Against the unbearable persistence of 3D, discontinuity, latency and un-settlement are evident counterforces only as long as they engage with resisting that which 3D settles by flow: neoliberal accumulation, colonial commercial normativity and one-directionality. An affirmative volumetrics does not reject or dismiss the power of volumetrics as a whole, or give up on continuity altogether either. As Donna Haraway asks in conversation with Cathy Wolfe: “How can we truly learn to compose rather than decry or impose?”<ref name="ftn271">Dona Haraway in conversation with Cary Wolfe. Donna J. Haraway, ''Manifestly Haraway ''(London: [https://muse.jhu.edu/search?action=browse&limit=publisher_id:23 University of Minnesota Press], 2016), 289.</ref><br />
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We compiled a list of proposals for what we suspect are more affirmative ways, suggestions for dealing with the “volumetric probables“ that emerged from our research endeavor so far. They are proposals which are each “nothing short of a radical shift in how we approach matter and form”.<ref name="ftn272">Denise Ferreira da Silva. “On Difference Without Separability,“ in ''Incerteza Viva: 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, ''ed. Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças (Sao Paulo: Ministry of Culture, Bienal and Itaú, 2016), 57-58.</ref> What is important to keep in mind, is that ''none of these are in fact impossible to implement'', so come on!<br />
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'''Remediating Cartesian anxiety''': What if we decide to use six instead of four axes, twelve instead of three or zero instead of n? What if we take time to get used to multiple paradigms for orientation, instead of settling for only one regime? Letting go of the finite coordinates of x, y, z and t could be a first step to break with the convenient reductions of parallel and perpendicular assumptions. It’s implementations might require rigorous inventions with a transdisciplinary attitude, but we can afford them if what is at stake is to re-orient volumetrics for non-coercive uses, right?<br />
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'''Paranodes to ever-polygonal worlds''': By paying attention to the paranodal in ever-polygonal worlds, the simplistic dominance of node-centricity might quickly shift to entirely different topological articulations.<ref name="ftn273">“The instability of paranodal space is what animates the network, and to attempt to render this space invisible is to arrive at less, not more, complete explanations of the network as a social reality.” Ulises Ali Mejias, ''Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 153, and Zach Blas, “Contra-Internet,” ''e-flux Journal ''<nowiki>#74 (June 2016).</nowiki></ref> This would allow other imaginations of relationality, this time not along the vectors of sameness and similarity but emerging from the undefined materiality of what’s there, and what was underrepresented by paradigmatic techno-sciences.<br />
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'''Extra-planar projections''': If the distance between 3D and 2D was not to be crossed quickly and straight, but allowed for curves, meanders and loops, then a whole technoscience of dissimilarity and surprise collinearity would emerge. We know the cartographies of complexity are already there, but we just have been lacking the means for their representation, their analysis and their use. Such extra-planar projections would intervene the world with a realm of possibilities in the in-between of 2D and 3D, not assuming the axioms of linear projection but rather convoking the playful articulations of elements diffracted inwards, detailing a scape of situated 2.1D, 2.5.3SD, 2.7Dbis and 2.999999D. The cartographic computation of the possible then becomes a latent one of unsolved folds, abrupt edges, unfinished integers and inaccurate parallels.<br />
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'''Multi-dimensional depth''': What background-foreground mergings can we invent for the multidimensional analysis of deep matterings besides volumetrics? Matter is not volume so we need other arrangements of depth and density than the calculating measurings of dimensional worlds. Switching, blurring and blending what comes to the fore with what usually stays behind declutches attention from the binary back-front and inside-outside divides, thickness becomes an area in need of subtle study and nuanced formulations. When the surveillance camera is turned onto the policeman, violence does not go away. But there might be ways to hold paths and crossings in mutual affection and radical sustainability. If capturing would be about soLiDARity instead of policing, about flourishing instead of conservation, about density instead of profiling then fights for social justice might have a chance to reclaim the very dimensions where mundane violence is executed on a daily basis..<br />
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'''Fits-and-starts-volumetrics:''' Which transformative moves can hold time beyond constant speed, agile advancement and smooth gait? As we learned from Heather Love and her understanding of queer life as constantly feeling backward,<ref name="ftn274">Heather Love, ''Feeling Backward''.</ref> as well as from from crip technosciences:<ref name="ftn275">Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, “Crip Technoscience Manifesto,” Catalyst, Vol 5 No 1 (2019).</ref> linear time is a problematic norm that will always confirm and appreciate what goes forward. In any case, Possible Volumetrics can not be aligned with it. Time as mattered through computation (4D) works too hard on appearing continuous. We propose to use that energy for flowing with what gets crooked and throttled, to move with the flutters and stotterings. Along this text, we tried to show the continuous problematic of the industrialization of 3D, in order to convoke a possible volumetrics that could do 3D otherwise.<br />
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In case these proposals feel too hard or even impossible to implement, remember that this sense is always the effect of hegemony! Abolishing the Industrial Continuum of 3D means to place it at the eccentric core of a kind of computing that dares to world without patriarcho-capitalist and colonial structures holding it up.<br />
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[[file:Continuum_stuttgart.JPG|800px|thumb|left|The Industrial Continuum of 3D emerges during “Collective inventorying”, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, 2017]]<br />
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[[File:Continuum recto.png|thumb|left|800px|“[https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?074 The Industrial Continuum of 3D]”, fanzine, Barcelona, 2017 <noinclude>/ [[:File:Continuum.pdf|Download PDF]]</noinclude>]]<br />
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[[file:Continuum_barcelona_1.png|800px|thumb|left]]<br />
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[[file:Continuum_barcelona_2.png|800px|thumb|left|Exploring the continuum with participants in “Imagined Mishearings,” Hangar (Barcelona, 2017)]]<br />
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[[file:Continuum_brighton.png|800px|thumb|left|A diagram of The Industrial Continuum of 3D for the workshop “Continuous corpo-realities <-> diagramming probabilities and possibilities!”, University of Sussex, Brighton, 2018 <noinclude>/ [[:File:Continuum_brighton.pdf|Download PDF]]</noinclude>]]<br />
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=== Notes ===<br />
<references/></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=The_Industrial_Continuum_of_3D&diff=2557The Industrial Continuum of 3D2021-11-24T05:41:19Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
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== The Industrial Continuum of 3D ==<br />
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'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
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=== The Invention of the Continuum ===<br />
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<blockquote class="pull">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.”<ref name="ftn246">“Item 125: Disappearing around us,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory''. Source: Elizabeth Claire Alberts, Mongabay, 21 October 2020, “The rhino in the room: 3D scan brings near-extinct Sumatran species to virtual life”.</ref></blockquote><br />
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3D scanning 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.<br />
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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.<ref name="ftn247">Loren Britton, and Helen Pritchard, “For CS,” ''interactions'' 27, 4 (July - August 2020), 94–98, [https://doi.org/10.1145/3406838. https://doi.org/10.1145/3406838.] </ref><br />
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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).<ref name="ftn248">The British Standard Organisation defines Building Information Modeling (BIM) as: “Use of a shared digital representation of a built asset to facilitate design, construction and operation processes to form a reliable basis for decisions.” “BIM - Building Information Modelling - ISO 19650,” BSI, [https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/iso-19650-BIM/. https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/iso-19650-BIM/.]</ref> 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.<ref name="ftn249">GAFAM refers to the so-called Big Five tech companies: Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft.</ref> 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,<ref name="ftn250">“In this way, our contemporary encounters with data extend well beyond notions of design, ease of use, personal suggestion, surveillance or privacy. They take on new meaning if we consider the underlying principles of mathematics as the engine that drives data towards languages of normality and truth prior to any opera-tional discomforts or violences.” Ramon Amaro, “Artificial Intelligence: warped, colorful forms and their unclear geometries,” in ''Schemas of Uncertainty: Soothsayers and Soft AI'', eds. Danae Io and Callum Copley (Amsterdam: PUB/Sandberg Instituut), 69-90.</ref> but in three-dimensional operations, the industrial continuum intensifies due to their supercharged relationship to space and time.<ref name="ftn251">Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting. “Figurations of Timely Extraction,” ''Media Theory'' 4, no. 2 (2020): 158-188.</ref><br />
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By referring to this phenomenon 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 industrial 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.<br />
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Our intuition is that 3D goes through a continuously smooth, multi-dimensional but concentric and loopy flow of assembled technicalities, paradigms and devices that facilitate the circulation of standards and protocols; and hence the constant reproduction of hegemonic metrics for the measurement of volume.<ref>“Logistics is straight in that metrically degrading way. This is its murderousness, its refusal to attend to contour, its supervisory neglect and, also, its wastefulness, its continual missing of all in its inveterate grasping of everything.” Steffano Harney and Fred Moten, ''All Incomplete'' (New York: Minor Compositions, 2021), 105.</ref> Such intuition is nevertheless accompanied by another: that computation can and should operate otherwise. This text 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.<br />
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=== How is 3D going on? ===<br />
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<blockquote class="pull">“Train, Evaluate, Assist.” The simulation and training company Heartwood moves smoothly between the classroom and the field to “help operations, maintenance, and field service teams perform complex procedures faster, safer and with less errors.” Developing solutions for clients from a wide range of industries (Audi, TetraPak and the United States Secret Service to name a few), Heartwood is proud to insist that it leverages fields as diverse as manufacturing, railroad, utilities, energy, heavy equipment, automotive, aerospace and defense.<ref name="ftn252">“Heartwood Simulations & Guides,” accessed April 3, 2021, [https://hwd3d.com/3d-interactive-training https://hwd3d.com/3d-interactive-training].</ref> Their business strategy includes founding principles such as: “There are always new industries to explore – so we do!”<ref name="ftn253">“New industries. There are always new industries to explore – so we do! We ask ourselves questions like, ‘Will 3D Interactive technology be of interest to the healthcare industry when considering medical device training?’ Maybe – but we won’t know till we try.” Raj Raheja, “When Perfection Is A Little Too Perfect: 3 Ways to Experiment,” accessed April 3, 2021.</ref></blockquote><br />
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In virtual training solutions like the ones produced by the Heartwood company, we can clearly see how multiple methodical events get arranged in one go. We want to problematize such flows of volumetric techniques and technologies, because of the way this both powers and is powered by the circulation of oppression, exclusion and extraction. The industrial continuum of 3D keeps confirming the deadly normality of European enlightenment, doubtful Judeo-Christian concision, ''mono-humanism'',<ref name="ftn254">Katherine McKittrick, ''Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as a Praxis'' (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).</ref> hetero patriarchy and settler colonialism by continuing structures and practices that produce reality. From scientific and metaphysical modes of objectivity into truth, via the establishment of political fictions such as race and gender, to accurate individuality and faithful representation.<ref name="ftn255">Paul B. Preciado, “Letter from a trans man to the old sexual regime,” ''Texte zur Kunst'', (2018), [https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/letter-trans-man-old-sexual-regime-paul-b-preciado/. https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/letter-trans-man-old-sexual-regime-paul-b-preciado/.]</ref><br />
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The specific vectors that make the Industrial Continuum of 3D indeed continue, are first of all those related to what we call “optimized complexity”. It is a particular way to arrange volumetrics in the interest of optimized computation, such as drawing hyper-real surfaces on top of extremely simplified structures or the over-reliance on average simulation. We see this eschewed attention for certain complexities and not for others in how simplified color-coded anatomy travels straight from science books into educational software, and biomedical imaging alike. Divisions between tissues and bones based in standardized category systems organize the relation between demarcated elements in polygonal models, which become hard-coded in constrained sets of volumetric operations and predefined time-space settings, affirmed by scientific nomenclature and recognizable color-schemes that are re-used across software applications. As a result, inter-connective body tissues such as fascia are underrepresented in hyper-real 3D renderings. Thus, the less imperative paradigms that recognize fascia as a key participant in body movement are once again occluded by means of optimization, a very specific industrial phenomenon. As an example of evident continuity by the apparent neutrality of a continuous flow of 3D manners, tissue renderings conserve the way things used to ''look like'' on 2D anatomy manuals, contributing to the conservation of the way things ''are'' in terms of anatomical paradigms.<br />
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A second vector at work is the ''additivist'' culture of 3D that thrives on relentless forking and versions to be re-visited and taken back.<ref name="ftn256">See for example: “Item 019: The 3D Additivist manifesto,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2015.</ref> 3D computation derives agility from the re-use of particle systems, models, data-structures and data-sets to, for example, render grass, model hair or to detect border crossings.<ref name="ftn257">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “So-called Plants,” in this book.</ref> Templates, rigs and scenarios are time-consuming to produce from scratch but once their probable topology is set, 3D assets such as “hilly landscape”, “turning screw”, “first person shooter”, “average body”<ref name="ftn258">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “MakeHuman,” in this book.</ref> or “fugitive”<ref name="ftn259">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “So-called Plants,” in this book.</ref> start to act as a reserve that can be reused endlessly, adjusted and repeated at industrial scale and without ever depleting. Of course that level of flexibility is designed and maintained under positive values such as agility, efficiency and even diversity, but more often than not, their ongoing circulation leads to extreme normalization. With this, we want to point out the fiction of having many options to grab from, which is precisely the settler illusion of the accessibility of resources to take and run with. It still depends on an economy of ''asset scarcity'', or even worse: an economy of scarcity that bases its sense of technical abundance on a set of finite, regularized elements.<br />
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In addition, volumetrics depends more than other screen based environments on normalized viewing interfaces which makes military training sets and viewing environments for biomedical images follow the exact same representational logic. This is where the techno-scientific paradigms of mandatory projections, perspectives, topology based on binary separations between inside and outside, polygonal treatment, Cartesian axes, Euclidean geometries and so forth are being leveraged to relentlessly spread similar techniques across different corners of practice. Polygonal models travel all too easily between applications because their viewing environments are already standardized. Despite the work of feminist visual culture or cubist avantgardes that have made representation a political issue, perspective devices, anatomy theaters or cartographic projection are once again normalized as cultural standards.<ref name="ftn260">Countless thinkers from Svetlana Alpers, to bell hooks, Suzanne Lacy, Peggy Phelan, Elisabeth Grosz and Camera Obscura Collective have critiqued the implicit assumptions in representation. “(R)epresentation produces ruptures and gaps; it fails to reproduce the real exactly. Precisely because of representation’s supplementational excess and its failure to be totalizing, close readings of the logic of representation can produce resistance, and possibly, political change.” Peggy Phelan, ''Unmarked: The Politics of Performance'' (London: Routledge, 2003), 3.</ref><br />
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The specific manners in which the techno-sciences historically present metrics of volume nest in distinct fields: from spectacle to control, from laboratories to courts of justice, from syllabi to DIY prototypes, rom architecture studies to mining pits. When those manners circulate from one industrial field to another, along vectors that relegate difference and complexity to the background, they reaffirm quite probably the very probable colonial, capitalist, hetero-patriarchal, ableist and positivist topology of contemporary volumetrics. This nauseating and intoxicating setup of variability and rigidity produces the establishment of a universal mono-culture of 3D.<br />
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To highlight the continuity of normalizing forces, is our way to critically signal a globalized technocratic behavior based on the accumulation of sameness and repetition, rather than one attuned to the radical, mutating and interconnected specificity of something as wide and multi-modal as the volume of differentiated bodies. 3D models seemingly travel with ease, and this particular easiness facilitates the erasure of politics and the reaffirmation of a central norm. It means the patriarchocolonial linear representation of measurable volumes ends up with providing only with sometimes modular, sometimes fungible entities, circulated by and circulating the everlasting convenience of Modern canons. By Modern convenience, it has become easy to represent distinct elements, but near impossible to engage with inter-connective structures.<ref name="ftn261">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “Invasive imaginations and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref><br />
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=== Volumetric sedimentation ===<br />
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<blockquote class="pull">The monomers can be grouped into segments like Lego pieces to construct functional protein-mimics. “Compare this to how cars are built,” said Xu. “There are different models, colors and shapes, but they all contain important parts such as an engine, wheels and energy source. For each part, there can be different options, such as gas or electric engines, but at the end of the day, it’s a car, not a train.” Xu and her team designed a library of polymers that are statistically similar in sequence, providing newfound flexibility in assembly.<ref name="ftn262">“Item 123: Compare this to how cars are built,” The Possible Bodies Inventory. "New discovery makes it easier to design synthetic proteins that rival their natural counterparts," ''Berkeley Engineering'', accessed April 3, 2021, https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2020/01/new-discovery-makes-it-easier-to-design-synthetic-proteins-that-rival-their-natural-counterparts/.</ref></blockquote><br />
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Contemporary biomedical engineering relies on computer generated 3D imagery for inventing materials, pharmaceuticals and fuels and for predicting their behavior. The monomers that Xu and her team compare to a car or a train, are synthetic proteins that were designed using 3D models of cylinders, spirals and spheres.<ref name="ftn263">“Item 123: Compare this to how cars are built,” The Possible Bodies Inventory. "New discovery makes it easier to design synthetic proteins that rival their natural counterparts," ''Berkeley Engineering'', accessed April 2021, https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2020/01/new-discovery-makes-it-easier-to-design-synthetic-proteins-that-rival-their-natural-counterparts/. ]</ref> The ease by which a researcher compares a fictional membrane to the car industry is a banal example of how in the hyper-computational environment of biomedical engineering, the interaction between observation, representation, modeling and prediction is settling around – once again – probable patterns.<br />
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When the Modern Man finished threading the frame of his latest invention, the perspective device, he could not even start to imagine that centuries later this would be the universally accepted paradigm for representing masses of volume in space.<ref name="ftn264">No name needed. Picture an average Modern male, just imagine one that inhabits the very center of power in clear familiarity. </ref> The becoming-paradigmatic of perspective from a static single point has gained terrain through years of artistic, scientific and technical usage throughout realms as diverse as fresco painting or the more recent establishment of a cinematic language. And just as one-point perspective made it all the way from Modernity to our present day, so did other even older paradigmatic techniques such as Cartesian axes, Euclidean geometry, cartographic projection or cubic measurement. These paradigms have been assimilated and naturalized to such an extent that they each lost their own history and have become inseparable from each other, interlocking in ways that have everything to do with the way they support the Modern project. In the current formation, they keep reinforcing each other as the only possible form of representation and thus reality.<ref name="ftn265">Katherine McKittrick, ''Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as a Praxis''.</ref> Their centrality in all found analysis of volume in the world means nothing less than a daily imposition of Euromodern values, modes and techniques of study, observation, description and inscription of the complexity around.<ref name="ftn266">Patricia Reed and Lewis R. Gordon define “Euromodernity” in the following way: “By “Euromodernity,” I don’t mean “European people.” The term simply means the constellation of convictions, arguments, policies, and a worldview promoting the idea that the only way legitimately to belong to the present and as a consequence the future is to be or become European.” See: Lewis R. Gordon, “Black Aesthetics, Black Value”, in ''Public Culture'' 30:1 (2018): 19-34.</ref> In other words: volumetrics are being established due to the multi-vectorial political agenda of Modern technosciences, which is directly entwined with commercial colonialism and Western supremacy.<br />
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Despite daily updates, the industrial continuum of 3D is not a changing landscape even if it seems to rely on flow. We can see all sorts of 3D devices and standards circulating in a continuous current from one industry to another, but they persistently move towards a re-establishment of the same, both in terms of shape and of value. Our aim is to understand the paradigms they keep carrying along, and to attend to the assumptions, delegations and canons they impose over matter and semiotics when keeping their business as usual. We suspect there is a rigidification in the establishment of what circulates and what doesn’t and we need to see where that persistence hangs from, and how it came to be settled. What are the cultural logics underlying 3D technologies, that turn them into a rigid regime?<br />
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One key aspect of the very specific settling of 3D, is that they settle in flow. It is through use and reuse that the establishment of values and manners gets reinforced. A kind of technocratic sedimentation of protocols, standards, tools and formulas which leaves a trace of what is possible in the circuit of volumetrics. The behavior of this sedimentation implies that things just happen again because they happened already before. Every time a tool is adopted from one industry into another, an edge is re-inscribed in the spectrum of what is possible to do with it. And every time the same formula is applied, its axiom gets strengthened. This ongoing settling of the probable in volumetrics comes with its own worlding: it scaffolds the very material-semiotics of what world is to be done, by whom, and by what means. If software making is indeed worldmaking, the settlement of volumetric toolkits and technoscientific paradigms affects what worlds we can world.<ref name="ftn267">“To provide us with endless a-Modern mestizo, an escape from representational and agential normativities, software CAN and MUST provide the material conditions for wild combinations or un-suspected renders.” Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “MakeHuman,” in this book. </ref><br />
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For those of us who feel affected by the Cartesian anxiety of always feeling backward<ref name="ftn268">Heather Love, ''Feeling Backward'' (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).</ref> in a damaging axiomatic culture of assemblage and measure-all-this-way, it is important to make explicit the moves that reified what it ended up being: an exteriority-less industrial regime based on scientific truths that are being produced by that same regime. It is evident that volume counts a lot in how it came to ostent value, but how does it count and how is it counted? Was it the car industry, that settled values and forms before the Lego blocks appeared? Was it the Lego paradigm of assemblage, that was settled as a reference for biomedical researchers to use it for the predictions in their screens and speeches? The befores and afters matter in this bedrock of shapes and values, as they are telling for what is probably going to happen next.<br />
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Over the years, we detected a number of sedimenting behaviors or volumetric probables. The first is ''externalizing implications''. The outsourcing of labour and responsibilities is ubiquitous in most industrial computing, but takes a specific shape in the industrial continuum of 3D. Through a strictly hierarchical mode of organization, tasks, roles and all labour-related configurations of relationality persistently, the command is kept in the hands of a privileged minority. Their agendas set industrial priorities but without committing to specific fields or areas of application, therefore avoiding all liability. This adds up to an outsourcing of responsibilities to less powerful agents, such as confronting users with just Yes/No options for agreeing with terms and conditions, or the delegation of energetic costs to the final end of the supply chain.<br />
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The need for dealing with computational complexity when rendering volumetrics, leads to an over-reliance on socio-technical standards and protocols that become increasingly hard to undo. ''Rigging simplification'' refers to the obfuscated reduction inherent in particle systems, for example. A limited set of small samples or ‘sprites’ is randomized in order to suggest endless complexity. Another example is the way inside and outside is plotted through polygon meshes in CAD files. This technique produces a faster rendering but settles a paradigm of binary separation between interior and exterior worlds. The same goes for the normalized logics of rendering graphics with the help of ray-tracing techniques that demand planar projection for resolving a smooth move between 2D and 3D.<ref name="ftn269">POV-Ray or Persistence of Vision Raytracer, a popular tool for producing high-quality computer graphics, explains this process as follows: “For every pixel in the final image one or more viewing rays are shot from the camera into the scene to see if it intersects with any of the objects in the scene. These “viewing rays” originate from the viewer (represented by the camera), and pass through the viewing window (representing the pixels of the final image).” “POV-Ray for Unix version 3.7,” accessed April 3, 2021, [https://www.povray.org/documentation/3.7.0/u1_1.html#u1_1 https://www.povray.org/documentation/3.7.0/u1_1.html#u1_1].</ref><br />
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''Convenient universalism'' is how we refer to the way volumetrics technically facilitate modes that avoid dissent, that do not stay with complexity or how all matter becomes equally volumetric before the eyes of the 3D-scanner. Because a virtual dungeon can be rendered with the help of ray-tracing, do the same representational conventions actually apply to dead trees, human brains, aquifers, rhinoceroses and plant-roots? Convenient universalism does not bother to include nuances of minoritarian proposals in mainstream industrial development. It allows ongoing violence to take shape as reasonable, and common sense.<br />
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Then, there is the sedimentation of ''persistent hyper-realities''. The Continuum operates well when aligning so-called truths, with systems of verification, and performing objectivity. It is not a surprise that it is at ease with Modern scientific and cultural paradigms; its values and assumptions co-construct each other. This is both confirmed and suggested by the over-presence of tools for segmentation and foreground-background separation.<ref name="ftn270">See for example the way BIM is used to represent subsurface remnants of demolished structures as separate layers. Gary Morin, “Geospatial World,” September 11, 2016, [https://www.geospatialworld.net/article/geological-modelling-and-bim-infrastructure/ https://www.geospatialworld.net/article/geological-modelling-and-bim-infrastructure/].</ref><br />
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And last but not least, we can speak of ''streamlined aesthetics'' as a sedimented behavior. It can be confirmed that as the continuum circulates, the aesthetics of tools and their outcomes flatten. The same operations hide behind layers that look the same. Similar procedures are offered by devices that look alike. WYSIWYG interfaces were smoothly adjusted to the machinery of measuring volumes for any purpose... and what sediments in that process is just a sharp similarity all the way along. The aesthetic canon involves equilibrated proportions, hyperrealism and an evident optimization of rendering maneuvers.<br />
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The cultural logic of 3D is tied to the ongoing settlement of a legacy of standardization, but also to a history of converging the presences of hugely diversified entities under a rigid regime. This volumetric regime is sustained by vivid Modern techniques, vocabularies, infrastructures and protocols. Or to put it bluntly: the calculation of what it takes to count via the x, y and z axes depends on modes that are far from neutral, and of course are not innocent. The technoscience of volumetrics was settled while being already entangled with a whole world in and of its own.<br />
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=== The Possible Continuums of 3D ===<br />
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In the previous sections we spent some time unpacking how 3D circulates through its industrial continuum and what is sedimented as a result. We clarified what needs to be radically changed or directly abolished to get at a possible volumetrics that can happen non-industrially or at least is less marked by industrial, solutionist values. As we have seen, the industrial continuum of 3D settles and flows in particular ways, making its way through business as usual. It’s self-fulfilling moves produce increasingly normed worlds that are continued along the axes of the probable. In this last section, we would like to see what other forms of volumetric continuation, circulation and settlement might be quite possible, as a way to world differently. To find another “how” that can stay with complexity and will not negate, facilitate or altogether erase other modes of existence, we’ll need to reorient 3D from a trans*feminist perspective, and move obliquely towards 3D that can go otherwise.<br />
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Could an ethics and politics committed to volumetric complexity emerge from reverse-engineering the ebbs and flows of industrial affection? Our first task is to rescue ''continuity'' from the claws of the established, the normed and the Modern. Against the unbearable persistence of 3D, discontinuity, latency and un-settlement are evident counterforces only as long as they engage with resisting that which 3D settles by flow: neoliberal accumulation, colonial commercial normativity and one-directionality. An affirmative volumetrics does not reject or dismiss the power of volumetrics as a whole, or give up on continuity altogether either. As Donna Haraway asks in conversation with Cathy Wolfe: “How can we truly learn to compose rather than decry or impose?”<ref name="ftn271">Dona Haraway in conversation with Cary Wolfe. Donna J. Haraway, ''Manifestly Haraway ''(London: [https://muse.jhu.edu/search?action=browse&limit=publisher_id:23 University of Minnesota Press], 2016), 289.</ref><br />
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We compiled a list of proposals for what we suspect are more affirmative ways, suggestions for dealing with the “volumetric probables“ that emerged from our research endeavor so far. They are proposals which are each “nothing short of a radical shift in how we approach matter and form”.<ref name="ftn272">Denise Ferreira da Silva. “On Difference Without Separability,“ in ''Incerteza Viva: 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, ''ed. Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças (Sao Paulo: Ministry of Culture, Bienal and Itaú, 2016), 57-58.</ref> What is important to keep in mind, is that ''none of these are in fact impossible to implement'', so come on!<br />
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'''Remediating Cartesian anxiety''': What if we decide to use six instead of four axes, twelve instead of three or zero instead of n? What if we take time to get used to multiple paradigms for orientation, instead of settling for only one regime? Letting go of the finite coordinates of x, y, z and t could be a first step to break with the convenient reductions of parallel and perpendicular assumptions. It’s implementations might require rigorous inventions with a transdisciplinary attitude, but we can afford them if what is at stake is to re-orient volumetrics for non-coercive uses, right?<br />
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'''Paranodes to ever-polygonal worlds''': By paying attention to the paranodal in ever-polygonal worlds, the simplistic dominance of node-centricity might quickly shift to entirely different topological articulations.<ref name="ftn273">“The instability of paranodal space is what animates the network, and to attempt to render this space invisible is to arrive at less, not more, complete explanations of the network as a social reality.” Ulises Ali Mejias, ''Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 153, and Zach Blas, “Contra-Internet,” ''e-flux Journal ''<nowiki>#74 (June 2016).</nowiki></ref> This would allow other imaginations of relationality, this time not along the vectors of sameness and similarity but emerging from the undefined materiality of what’s there, and what was underrepresented by paradigmatic techno-sciences.<br />
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'''Extra-planar projections''': If the distance between 3D and 2D was not to be crossed quickly and straight, but allowed for curves, meanders and loops, then a whole technoscience of dissimilarity and surprise collinearity would emerge. We know the cartographies of complexity are already there, but we just have been lacking the means for their representation, their analysis and their use. Such extra-planar projections would intervene the world with a realm of possibilities in the in-between of 2D and 3D, not assuming the axioms of linear projection but rather convoking the playful articulations of elements diffracted inwards, detailing a scape of situated 2.1D, 2.5.3SD, 2.7Dbis and 2.999999D. The cartographic computation of the possible then becomes a latent one of unsolved folds, abrupt edges, unfinished integers and inaccurate parallels.<br />
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'''Multi-dimensional depth''': What background-foreground mergings can we invent for the multidimensional analysis of deep matterings besides volumetrics? Matter is not volume so we need other arrangements of depth and density than the calculating measurings of dimensional worlds. Switching, blurring and blending what comes to the fore with what usually stays behind declutches attention from the binary back-front and inside-outside divides, thickness becomes an area in need of subtle study and nuanced formulations. When the surveillance camera is turned onto the policeman, violence does not go away. But there might be ways to hold paths and crossings in mutual affection and radical sustainability. If capturing would be about soLiDARity instead of policing, about flourishing instead of conservation, about density instead of profiling then fights for social justice might have a chance to reclaim the very dimensions where mundane violence is executed on a daily basis..<br />
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'''Fits-and-starts-volumetrics:''' Which transformative moves can hold time beyond constant speed, agile advancement and smooth gait? As we learned from Heather Love and her understanding of queer life as constantly feeling backward,<ref name="ftn274">Heather Love, ''Feeling Backward''.</ref> as well as from from crip technosciences:<ref name="ftn275">Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, “Crip Technoscience Manifesto,” Catalyst, Vol 5 No 1 (2019).</ref> linear time is a problematic norm that will always confirm and appreciate what goes forward. In any case, Possible Volumetrics can not be aligned with it. Time as mattered through computation (4D) works too hard on appearing continuous. We propose to use that energy for flowing with what gets crooked and throttled, to move with the flutters and stotterings. Along this text, we tried to show the continuous problematic of the industrialization of 3D, in order to convoke a possible volumetrics that could do 3D otherwise.<br />
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In case these proposals feel too hard or even impossible to implement, remember that this sense is always the effect of hegemony! Abolishing the Industrial Continuum of 3D means to place it at the eccentric core of a kind of computing that dares to world without patriarcho-capitalist and colonial structures holding it up.<br />
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[[file:Continuum_stuttgart.JPG|800px|thumb|left|The Industrial Continuum of 3D emerges during “Collective inventorying”, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, 2017]]<br />
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[[File:Continuum recto.png|thumb|left|800px|“[https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?074 The Industrial Continuum of 3D]”, fanzine, Barcelona, 2017 <noinclude>/ [[:File:Continuum.pdf|Download PDF]]</noinclude>]]<br />
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[[file:Continuum_barcelona_1.png|800px|thumb|left]]<br />
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[[file:Continuum_barcelona_2.png|800px|thumb|left|Exploring the continuum with participants in “Imagined Mishearings,” Hangar (Barcelona, 2017)]]<br />
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[[file:Continuum_brighton.png|800px|thumb|left|A diagram of The Industrial Continuum of 3D for the workshop “Continuous corpo-realities <-> diagramming probabilities and possibilities!”, University of Sussex, Brighton, 2018 <noinclude>/ [[:File:Continuum_brighton.pdf|Download PDF]]</noinclude>]]<br />
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=== Notes ===<br />
<references/></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=The_Industrial_Continuum_of_3D&diff=2556The Industrial Continuum of 3D2021-11-24T05:39:40Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
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== The Industrial Continuum of 3D ==<br />
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'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
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=== The Invention of the Continuum ===<br />
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<blockquote class="pull">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.”<ref name="ftn246">“Item 125: Disappearing around us,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory''. Source: Elizabeth Claire Alberts, Mongabay, 21 October 2020, “The rhino in the room: 3D scan brings near-extinct Sumatran species to virtual life”.</ref></blockquote><br />
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3D scanning 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.<br />
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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.<ref name="ftn247">Loren Britton, and Helen Pritchard, “For CS,” ''interactions'' 27, 4 (July - August 2020), 94–98, [https://doi.org/10.1145/3406838. https://doi.org/10.1145/3406838.] </ref><br />
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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).<ref name="ftn248">The British Standard Organisation defines Building Information Modeling (BIM) as: “Use of a shared digital representation of a built asset to facilitate design, construction and operation processes to form a reliable basis for decisions.” “BIM - Building Information Modelling - ISO 19650,” BSI, [https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/iso-19650-BIM/. https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/iso-19650-BIM/.]</ref> 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.<ref name="ftn249">GAFAM refers to the so-called Big Five tech companies: Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft.</ref> 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,<ref name="ftn250">“In this way, our contemporary encounters with data extend well beyond notions of design, ease of use, personal suggestion, surveillance or privacy. They take on new meaning if we consider the underlying principles of mathematics as the engine that drives data towards languages of normality and truth prior to any opera-tional discomforts or violences.” Ramon Amaro, “Artificial Intelligence: warped, colorful forms and their unclear geometries,” in ''Schemas of Uncertainty: Soothsayers and Soft AI'', eds. Danae Io and Callum Copley (Amsterdam: PUB/Sandberg Instituut), 69-90.</ref> but in three-dimensional operations, the industrial continuum intensifies due to their supercharged relationship to space and time.<ref name="ftn251">Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting. “Figurations of Timely Extraction,” ''Media Theory'' 4, no. 2 (2020): 158-188.</ref><br />
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By referring to this phenomenon 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 industrial 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.<br />
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Our intuition is that 3D goes through a continuously smooth, multi-dimensional but concentric and loopy flow of assembled technicalities, paradigms and devices that facilitate the circulation of standards and protocols; and hence the constant reproduction of hegemonic metrics for the measurement of volume.<ref>“Logistics is straight in that metrically degrading way. This is its murderousness, its refusal to attend to contour, its supervisory neglect and, also, its wastefulness, its continual missing of all in its inveterate grasping of everything.” Steffano Harney and Fred Moten, ''All Incomplete'' (New York: Minor Compositions, 2021), 105.</ref> Such intuition is nevertheless accompanied by another: that computation can and should operate otherwise. This text 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.<br />
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=== How is 3D going on? ===<br />
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<blockquote class="pull">“Train, Evaluate, Assist.” The simulation and training company Heartwood moves smoothly between the classroom and the field to “help operations, maintenance, and field service teams perform complex procedures faster, safer and with less errors.” Developing solutions for clients from a wide range of industries (Audi, TetraPak and the United States Secret Service to name a few), Heartwood is proud to insist that it leverages fields as diverse as manufacturing, railroad, utilities, energy, heavy equipment, automotive, aerospace and defense.<ref name="ftn252">“Heartwood Simulations & Guides,” accessed April 3, 2021, [https://hwd3d.com/3d-interactive-training https://hwd3d.com/3d-interactive-training].</ref> Their business strategy includes founding principles such as: “There are always new industries to explore – so we do!”<ref name="ftn253">“New industries. There are always new industries to explore – so we do! We ask ourselves questions like, ‘Will 3D Interactive technology be of interest to the healthcare industry when considering medical device training?’ Maybe – but we won’t know till we try.” Raj Raheja, “When Perfection Is A Little Too Perfect: 3 Ways to Experiment,” accessed April 3, 2021.</ref></blockquote><br />
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In virtual training solutions like the ones produced by the Heartwood company, we can clearly see how multiple methodical events get arranged in one go. We want to problematize such flows of volumetric techniques and technologies, because of the way this both powers and is powered by the circulation of oppression, exclusion and extraction. The industrial continuum of 3D keeps confirming the deadly normality of European enlightenment, doubtful Judeo-Christian concision, ''mono-humanism'',<ref name="ftn254">Katherine McKittrick, ''Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as a Praxis'' (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).</ref> hetero patriarchy and settler colonialism by continuing structures and practices that produce reality. From scientific and metaphysical modes of objectivity into truth, via the establishment of political fictions such as race and gender, to accurate individuality and faithful representation.<ref name="ftn255">Paul B. Preciado, “Letter from a trans man to the old sexual regime,” ''Texte zur Kunst'', (2018), [https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/letter-trans-man-old-sexual-regime-paul-b-preciado/. https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/letter-trans-man-old-sexual-regime-paul-b-preciado/.]</ref><br />
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The specific vectors that make the Industrial Continuum of 3D indeed continue, are first of all those related to what we call “optimized complexity”. It is a particular way to arrange volumetrics in the interest of optimized computation, such as drawing hyper-real surfaces on top of extremely simplified structures or the over-reliance on average simulation. We see this eschewed attention for certain complexities and not for others in how simplified color-coded anatomy travels straight from science books into educational software, and biomedical imaging alike. Divisions between tissues and bones based in standardized category systems organize the relation between demarcated elements in polygonal models, which become hard-coded in constrained sets of volumetric operations and predefined time-space settings, affirmed by scientific nomenclature and recognizable color-schemes that are re-used across software applications. As a result, inter-connective body tissues such as fascia are underrepresented in hyper-real 3D renderings. Thus, the less imperative paradigms that recognize fascia as a key participant in body movement are once again occluded by means of optimization, a very specific industrial phenomenon. As an example of evident continuity by the apparent neutrality of a continuous flow of 3D manners, tissue renderings conserve the way things used to ''look like'' on 2D anatomy manuals, contributing to the conservation of the way things ''are'' in terms of anatomical paradigms.<br />
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A second vector at work is the ''additivist'' culture of 3D that thrives on relentless forking and versions to be re-visited and taken back.<ref name="ftn256">See for example: “Item 019: The 3D Additivist manifesto,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2015.</ref> 3D computation derives agility from the re-use of particle systems, models, data-structures and data-sets to, for example, render grass, model hair or to detect border crossings.<ref name="ftn257">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “So-called Plants,” in this book.</ref> Templates, rigs and scenarios are time-consuming to produce from scratch but once their probable topology is set, 3D assets such as “hilly landscape”, “turning screw”, “first person shooter”, “average body”<ref name="ftn258">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “MakeHuman,” in this book.</ref> or “fugitive”<ref name="ftn259">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “So-called Plants,” in this book.</ref> start to act as a reserve that can be reused endlessly, adjusted and repeated at industrial scale and without ever depleting. Of course that level of flexibility is designed and maintained under positive values such as agility, efficiency and even diversity, but more often than not, their ongoing circulation leads to extreme normalization. With this, we want to point out the fiction of having many options to grab from, which is precisely the settler illusion of the accessibility of resources to take and run with. It still depends on an economy of ''asset scarcity'', or even worse: an economy of scarcity that bases its sense of technical abundance on a set of finite, regularized elements.<br />
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In addition, volumetrics depends more than other screen based environments on normalized viewing interfaces which makes military training sets and viewing environments for biomedical images follow the exact same representational logic. This is where the techno-scientific paradigms of mandatory projections, perspectives, topology based on binary separations between inside and outside, polygonal treatment, Cartesian axes, Euclidean geometries and so forth are being leveraged to relentlessly spread similar techniques across different corners of practice. Polygonal models travel all too easily between applications because their viewing environments are already standardized. Despite the work of feminist visual culture or cubist avantgardes that have made representation a political issue, perspective devices, anatomy theaters or cartographic projection are once again normalized as cultural standards.<ref name="ftn260">Countless thinkers from Svetlana Alpers, to bell hooks, Suzanne Lacy, Peggy Phelan, Elisabeth Grosz and Camera Obscura Collective have critiqued the implicit assumptions in representation. “(R)epresentation produces ruptures and gaps; it fails to reproduce the real exactly. Precisely because of representation’s supplementational excess and its failure to be totalizing, close readings of the logic of representation can produce resistance, and possibly, political change.” Peggy Phelan, ''Unmarked: The Politics of Performance'' (London: Routledge, 2003), 3.</ref><br />
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The specific manners in which the techno-sciences historically present metrics of volume nest in distinct fields: from spectacle to control, from laboratories to courts of justice, from syllabi to DIY prototypes, rom architecture studies to mining pits. When those manners circulate from one industrial field to another, along vectors that relegate difference and complexity to the background, they reaffirm quite probably the very probable colonial, capitalist, hetero-patriarchal, ableist and positivist topology of contemporary volumetrics. This nauseating and intoxicating setup of variability and rigidity produces the establishment of a universal mono-culture of 3D.<br />
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To highlight the continuity of normalizing forces, is our way to critically signal a globalized technocratic behavior based on the accumulation of sameness and repetition, rather than one attuned to the radical, mutating and interconnected specificity of something as wide and multi-modal as the volume of differentiated bodies. 3D models seemingly travel with ease, and this particular easiness facilitates the erasure of politics and the reaffirmation of a central norm. It means the patriarchocolonial linear representation of measurable volumes ends up with providing only with sometimes modular, sometimes fungible entities, circulated by and circulating the everlasting convenience of Modern canons. By Modern convenience, it has become easy to represent distinct elements, but near impossible to engage with inter-connective structures.<ref name="ftn261">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “Invasive imaginations and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref><br />
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=== Volumetric sedimentation ===<br />
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<blockquote class="pull">The monomers can be grouped into segments like Lego pieces to construct functional protein-mimics. “Compare this to how cars are built,” said Xu. “There are different models, colors and shapes, but they all contain important parts such as an engine, wheels and energy source. For each part, there can be different options, such as gas or electric engines, but at the end of the day, it’s a car, not a train.” Xu and her team designed a library of polymers that are statistically similar in sequence, providing newfound flexibility in assembly.<ref name="ftn262">“Item 123: Compare this to how cars are built,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory''. Source: Berkeley Engineering, accessed April 3, 2021. 3</ref></blockquote><br />
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Contemporary biomedical engineering relies on computer generated 3D imagery for inventing materials, pharmaceuticals and fuels and for predicting their behavior. The monomers that Xu and her team compare to a car or a train, are synthetic proteins that were designed using 3D models of cylinders, spirals and spheres.<ref name="ftn263">“Item 123: Compare this to how cars are built,” The Possible Bodies Inventory. "New discovery makes it easier to design synthetic proteins that rival their natural counterparts," ''Berkeley Engineering'', accessed April 2021, https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2020/01/new-discovery-makes-it-easier-to-design-synthetic-proteins-that-rival-their-natural-counterparts/. ]</ref> The ease by which a researcher compares a fictional membrane to the car industry is a banal example of how in the hyper-computational environment of biomedical engineering, the interaction between observation, representation, modeling and prediction is settling around – once again – probable patterns.<br />
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When the Modern Man finished threading the frame of his latest invention, the perspective device, he could not even start to imagine that centuries later this would be the universally accepted paradigm for representing masses of volume in space.<ref name="ftn264">No name needed. Picture an average Modern male, just imagine one that inhabits the very center of power in clear familiarity. </ref> The becoming-paradigmatic of perspective from a static single point has gained terrain through years of artistic, scientific and technical usage throughout realms as diverse as fresco painting or the more recent establishment of a cinematic language. And just as one-point perspective made it all the way from Modernity to our present day, so did other even older paradigmatic techniques such as Cartesian axes, Euclidean geometry, cartographic projection or cubic measurement. These paradigms have been assimilated and naturalized to such an extent that they each lost their own history and have become inseparable from each other, interlocking in ways that have everything to do with the way they support the Modern project. In the current formation, they keep reinforcing each other as the only possible form of representation and thus reality.<ref name="ftn265">Katherine McKittrick, ''Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as a Praxis''.</ref> Their centrality in all found analysis of volume in the world means nothing less than a daily imposition of Euromodern values, modes and techniques of study, observation, description and inscription of the complexity around.<ref name="ftn266">Patricia Reed and Lewis R. Gordon define “Euromodernity” in the following way: “By “Euromodernity,” I don’t mean “European people.” The term simply means the constellation of convictions, arguments, policies, and a worldview promoting the idea that the only way legitimately to belong to the present and as a consequence the future is to be or become European.” See: Lewis R. Gordon, “Black Aesthetics, Black Value”, in ''Public Culture'' 30:1 (2018): 19-34.</ref> In other words: volumetrics are being established due to the multi-vectorial political agenda of Modern technosciences, which is directly entwined with commercial colonialism and Western supremacy.<br />
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Despite daily updates, the industrial continuum of 3D is not a changing landscape even if it seems to rely on flow. We can see all sorts of 3D devices and standards circulating in a continuous current from one industry to another, but they persistently move towards a re-establishment of the same, both in terms of shape and of value. Our aim is to understand the paradigms they keep carrying along, and to attend to the assumptions, delegations and canons they impose over matter and semiotics when keeping their business as usual. We suspect there is a rigidification in the establishment of what circulates and what doesn’t and we need to see where that persistence hangs from, and how it came to be settled. What are the cultural logics underlying 3D technologies, that turn them into a rigid regime?<br />
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One key aspect of the very specific settling of 3D, is that they settle in flow. It is through use and reuse that the establishment of values and manners gets reinforced. A kind of technocratic sedimentation of protocols, standards, tools and formulas which leaves a trace of what is possible in the circuit of volumetrics. The behavior of this sedimentation implies that things just happen again because they happened already before. Every time a tool is adopted from one industry into another, an edge is re-inscribed in the spectrum of what is possible to do with it. And every time the same formula is applied, its axiom gets strengthened. This ongoing settling of the probable in volumetrics comes with its own worlding: it scaffolds the very material-semiotics of what world is to be done, by whom, and by what means. If software making is indeed worldmaking, the settlement of volumetric toolkits and technoscientific paradigms affects what worlds we can world.<ref name="ftn267">“To provide us with endless a-Modern mestizo, an escape from representational and agential normativities, software CAN and MUST provide the material conditions for wild combinations or un-suspected renders.” Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “MakeHuman,” in this book. </ref><br />
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For those of us who feel affected by the Cartesian anxiety of always feeling backward<ref name="ftn268">Heather Love, ''Feeling Backward'' (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).</ref> in a damaging axiomatic culture of assemblage and measure-all-this-way, it is important to make explicit the moves that reified what it ended up being: an exteriority-less industrial regime based on scientific truths that are being produced by that same regime. It is evident that volume counts a lot in how it came to ostent value, but how does it count and how is it counted? Was it the car industry, that settled values and forms before the Lego blocks appeared? Was it the Lego paradigm of assemblage, that was settled as a reference for biomedical researchers to use it for the predictions in their screens and speeches? The befores and afters matter in this bedrock of shapes and values, as they are telling for what is probably going to happen next.<br />
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Over the years, we detected a number of sedimenting behaviors or volumetric probables. The first is ''externalizing implications''. The outsourcing of labour and responsibilities is ubiquitous in most industrial computing, but takes a specific shape in the industrial continuum of 3D. Through a strictly hierarchical mode of organization, tasks, roles and all labour-related configurations of relationality persistently, the command is kept in the hands of a privileged minority. Their agendas set industrial priorities but without committing to specific fields or areas of application, therefore avoiding all liability. This adds up to an outsourcing of responsibilities to less powerful agents, such as confronting users with just Yes/No options for agreeing with terms and conditions, or the delegation of energetic costs to the final end of the supply chain.<br />
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The need for dealing with computational complexity when rendering volumetrics, leads to an over-reliance on socio-technical standards and protocols that become increasingly hard to undo. ''Rigging simplification'' refers to the obfuscated reduction inherent in particle systems, for example. A limited set of small samples or ‘sprites’ is randomized in order to suggest endless complexity. Another example is the way inside and outside is plotted through polygon meshes in CAD files. This technique produces a faster rendering but settles a paradigm of binary separation between interior and exterior worlds. The same goes for the normalized logics of rendering graphics with the help of ray-tracing techniques that demand planar projection for resolving a smooth move between 2D and 3D.<ref name="ftn269">POV-Ray or Persistence of Vision Raytracer, a popular tool for producing high-quality computer graphics, explains this process as follows: “For every pixel in the final image one or more viewing rays are shot from the camera into the scene to see if it intersects with any of the objects in the scene. These “viewing rays” originate from the viewer (represented by the camera), and pass through the viewing window (representing the pixels of the final image).” “POV-Ray for Unix version 3.7,” accessed April 3, 2021, [https://www.povray.org/documentation/3.7.0/u1_1.html#u1_1 https://www.povray.org/documentation/3.7.0/u1_1.html#u1_1].</ref><br />
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''Convenient universalism'' is how we refer to the way volumetrics technically facilitate modes that avoid dissent, that do not stay with complexity or how all matter becomes equally volumetric before the eyes of the 3D-scanner. Because a virtual dungeon can be rendered with the help of ray-tracing, do the same representational conventions actually apply to dead trees, human brains, aquifers, rhinoceroses and plant-roots? Convenient universalism does not bother to include nuances of minoritarian proposals in mainstream industrial development. It allows ongoing violence to take shape as reasonable, and common sense.<br />
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Then, there is the sedimentation of ''persistent hyper-realities''. The Continuum operates well when aligning so-called truths, with systems of verification, and performing objectivity. It is not a surprise that it is at ease with Modern scientific and cultural paradigms; its values and assumptions co-construct each other. This is both confirmed and suggested by the over-presence of tools for segmentation and foreground-background separation.<ref name="ftn270">See for example the way BIM is used to represent subsurface remnants of demolished structures as separate layers. Gary Morin, “Geospatial World,” September 11, 2016, [https://www.geospatialworld.net/article/geological-modelling-and-bim-infrastructure/ https://www.geospatialworld.net/article/geological-modelling-and-bim-infrastructure/].</ref><br />
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And last but not least, we can speak of ''streamlined aesthetics'' as a sedimented behavior. It can be confirmed that as the continuum circulates, the aesthetics of tools and their outcomes flatten. The same operations hide behind layers that look the same. Similar procedures are offered by devices that look alike. WYSIWYG interfaces were smoothly adjusted to the machinery of measuring volumes for any purpose... and what sediments in that process is just a sharp similarity all the way along. The aesthetic canon involves equilibrated proportions, hyperrealism and an evident optimization of rendering maneuvers.<br />
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The cultural logic of 3D is tied to the ongoing settlement of a legacy of standardization, but also to a history of converging the presences of hugely diversified entities under a rigid regime. This volumetric regime is sustained by vivid Modern techniques, vocabularies, infrastructures and protocols. Or to put it bluntly: the calculation of what it takes to count via the x, y and z axes depends on modes that are far from neutral, and of course are not innocent. The technoscience of volumetrics was settled while being already entangled with a whole world in and of its own.<br />
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=== The Possible Continuums of 3D ===<br />
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In the previous sections we spent some time unpacking how 3D circulates through its industrial continuum and what is sedimented as a result. We clarified what needs to be radically changed or directly abolished to get at a possible volumetrics that can happen non-industrially or at least is less marked by industrial, solutionist values. As we have seen, the industrial continuum of 3D settles and flows in particular ways, making its way through business as usual. It’s self-fulfilling moves produce increasingly normed worlds that are continued along the axes of the probable. In this last section, we would like to see what other forms of volumetric continuation, circulation and settlement might be quite possible, as a way to world differently. To find another “how” that can stay with complexity and will not negate, facilitate or altogether erase other modes of existence, we’ll need to reorient 3D from a trans*feminist perspective, and move obliquely towards 3D that can go otherwise.<br />
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Could an ethics and politics committed to volumetric complexity emerge from reverse-engineering the ebbs and flows of industrial affection? Our first task is to rescue ''continuity'' from the claws of the established, the normed and the Modern. Against the unbearable persistence of 3D, discontinuity, latency and un-settlement are evident counterforces only as long as they engage with resisting that which 3D settles by flow: neoliberal accumulation, colonial commercial normativity and one-directionality. An affirmative volumetrics does not reject or dismiss the power of volumetrics as a whole, or give up on continuity altogether either. As Donna Haraway asks in conversation with Cathy Wolfe: “How can we truly learn to compose rather than decry or impose?”<ref name="ftn271">Dona Haraway in conversation with Cary Wolfe. Donna J. Haraway, ''Manifestly Haraway ''(London: [https://muse.jhu.edu/search?action=browse&limit=publisher_id:23 University of Minnesota Press], 2016), 289.</ref><br />
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We compiled a list of proposals for what we suspect are more affirmative ways, suggestions for dealing with the “volumetric probables“ that emerged from our research endeavor so far. They are proposals which are each “nothing short of a radical shift in how we approach matter and form”.<ref name="ftn272">Denise Ferreira da Silva. “On Difference Without Separability,“ in ''Incerteza Viva: 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, ''ed. Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças (Sao Paulo: Ministry of Culture, Bienal and Itaú, 2016), 57-58.</ref> What is important to keep in mind, is that ''none of these are in fact impossible to implement'', so come on!<br />
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'''Remediating Cartesian anxiety''': What if we decide to use six instead of four axes, twelve instead of three or zero instead of n? What if we take time to get used to multiple paradigms for orientation, instead of settling for only one regime? Letting go of the finite coordinates of x, y, z and t could be a first step to break with the convenient reductions of parallel and perpendicular assumptions. It’s implementations might require rigorous inventions with a transdisciplinary attitude, but we can afford them if what is at stake is to re-orient volumetrics for non-coercive uses, right?<br />
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'''Paranodes to ever-polygonal worlds''': By paying attention to the paranodal in ever-polygonal worlds, the simplistic dominance of node-centricity might quickly shift to entirely different topological articulations.<ref name="ftn273">“The instability of paranodal space is what animates the network, and to attempt to render this space invisible is to arrive at less, not more, complete explanations of the network as a social reality.” Ulises Ali Mejias, ''Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 153, and Zach Blas, “Contra-Internet,” ''e-flux Journal ''<nowiki>#74 (June 2016).</nowiki></ref> This would allow other imaginations of relationality, this time not along the vectors of sameness and similarity but emerging from the undefined materiality of what’s there, and what was underrepresented by paradigmatic techno-sciences.<br />
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'''Extra-planar projections''': If the distance between 3D and 2D was not to be crossed quickly and straight, but allowed for curves, meanders and loops, then a whole technoscience of dissimilarity and surprise collinearity would emerge. We know the cartographies of complexity are already there, but we just have been lacking the means for their representation, their analysis and their use. Such extra-planar projections would intervene the world with a realm of possibilities in the in-between of 2D and 3D, not assuming the axioms of linear projection but rather convoking the playful articulations of elements diffracted inwards, detailing a scape of situated 2.1D, 2.5.3SD, 2.7Dbis and 2.999999D. The cartographic computation of the possible then becomes a latent one of unsolved folds, abrupt edges, unfinished integers and inaccurate parallels.<br />
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'''Multi-dimensional depth''': What background-foreground mergings can we invent for the multidimensional analysis of deep matterings besides volumetrics? Matter is not volume so we need other arrangements of depth and density than the calculating measurings of dimensional worlds. Switching, blurring and blending what comes to the fore with what usually stays behind declutches attention from the binary back-front and inside-outside divides, thickness becomes an area in need of subtle study and nuanced formulations. When the surveillance camera is turned onto the policeman, violence does not go away. But there might be ways to hold paths and crossings in mutual affection and radical sustainability. If capturing would be about soLiDARity instead of policing, about flourishing instead of conservation, about density instead of profiling then fights for social justice might have a chance to reclaim the very dimensions where mundane violence is executed on a daily basis..<br />
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'''Fits-and-starts-volumetrics:''' Which transformative moves can hold time beyond constant speed, agile advancement and smooth gait? As we learned from Heather Love and her understanding of queer life as constantly feeling backward,<ref name="ftn274">Heather Love, ''Feeling Backward''.</ref> as well as from from crip technosciences:<ref name="ftn275">Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, “Crip Technoscience Manifesto,” Catalyst, Vol 5 No 1 (2019).</ref> linear time is a problematic norm that will always confirm and appreciate what goes forward. In any case, Possible Volumetrics can not be aligned with it. Time as mattered through computation (4D) works too hard on appearing continuous. We propose to use that energy for flowing with what gets crooked and throttled, to move with the flutters and stotterings. Along this text, we tried to show the continuous problematic of the industrialization of 3D, in order to convoke a possible volumetrics that could do 3D otherwise.<br />
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In case these proposals feel too hard or even impossible to implement, remember that this sense is always the effect of hegemony! Abolishing the Industrial Continuum of 3D means to place it at the eccentric core of a kind of computing that dares to world without patriarcho-capitalist and colonial structures holding it up.<br />
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[[file:Continuum_stuttgart.JPG|800px|thumb|left|The Industrial Continuum of 3D emerges during “Collective inventorying”, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, 2017]]<br />
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[[File:Continuum recto.png|thumb|left|800px|“[https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?074 The Industrial Continuum of 3D]”, fanzine, Barcelona, 2017 <noinclude>/ [[:File:Continuum.pdf|Download PDF]]</noinclude>]]<br />
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[[file:Continuum_barcelona_1.png|800px|thumb|left]]<br />
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[[file:Continuum_barcelona_2.png|800px|thumb|left|Exploring the continuum with participants in “Imagined Mishearings,” Hangar (Barcelona, 2017)]]<br />
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[[file:Continuum_brighton.png|800px|thumb|left|A diagram of The Industrial Continuum of 3D for the workshop “Continuous corpo-realities <-> diagramming probabilities and possibilities!”, University of Sussex, Brighton, 2018 <noinclude>/ [[:File:Continuum_brighton.pdf|Download PDF]]</noinclude>]]<br />
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=== Notes ===<br />
<references/></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=The_Industrial_Continuum_of_3D&diff=2555The Industrial Continuum of 3D2021-11-24T05:35:26Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
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== The Industrial Continuum of 3D ==<br />
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'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
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=== The Invention of the Continuum ===<br />
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<blockquote class="pull">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.”<ref name="ftn246">“Item 125: Disappearing around us,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory''. Source: Elizabeth Claire Alberts, Mongabay, 21 October 2020, “The rhino in the room: 3D scan brings near-extinct Sumatran species to virtual life”.</ref></blockquote><br />
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3D scanning 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.<br />
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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.<ref name="ftn247">Loren Britton, and Helen Pritchard, “For CS,” ''interactions'' 27, 4 (July - August 2020), 94–98, [https://doi.org/10.1145/3406838. https://doi.org/10.1145/3406838.] </ref><br />
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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).<ref name="ftn248">The British Standard Organisation defines Building Information Modeling (BIM) as: “Use of a shared digital representation of a built asset to facilitate design, construction and operation processes to form a reliable basis for decisions.” “BIM - Building Information Modelling - ISO 19650,” BSI, [https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/iso-19650-BIM/. https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/iso-19650-BIM/.]</ref> 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.<ref name="ftn249">GAFAM refers to the so-called Big Five tech companies: Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft.</ref> 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,<ref name="ftn250">“In this way, our contemporary encounters with data extend well beyond notions of design, ease of use, personal suggestion, surveillance or privacy. They take on new meaning if we consider the underlying principles of mathematics as the engine that drives data towards languages of normality and truth prior to any opera-tional discomforts or violences.” Ramon Amaro, “Artificial Intelligence: warped, colorful forms and their unclear geometries,” in ''Schemas of Uncertainty: Soothsayers and Soft AI'', eds. Danae Io and Callum Copley (Amsterdam: PUB/Sandberg Instituut), 69-90.</ref> but in three-dimensional operations, the industrial continuum intensifies due to their supercharged relationship to space and time.<ref name="ftn251">Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting. “Figurations of Timely Extraction,” ''Media Theory'' 4, no. 2 (2020): 158-188.</ref><br />
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By referring to this phenomenon 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 industrial 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.<br />
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Our intuition is that 3D goes through a continuously smooth, multi-dimensional but concentric and loopy flow of assembled technicalities, paradigms and devices that facilitate the circulation of standards and protocols; and hence the constant reproduction of hegemonic metrics for the measurement of volume.<ref>“Logistics is straight in that metrically degrading way. This is its murderousness, its refusal to attend to contour, its supervisory neglect and, also, its wastefulness, its continual missing of all in its inveterate grasping of everything.” Steffano Harney and Fred Moten, ''All Incomplete'' (New York: Minor Compositions, 2021), 105.</ref> Such intuition is nevertheless accompanied by another: that computation can and should operate otherwise. This text 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.<br />
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=== How is 3D going on? ===<br />
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<blockquote class="pull">“Train, Evaluate, Assist.” The simulation and training company Heartwood moves smoothly between the classroom and the field to “help operations, maintenance, and field service teams perform complex procedures faster, safer and with less errors.” Developing solutions for clients from a wide range of industries (Audi, TetraPak and the United States Secret Service to name a few), Heartwood is proud to insist that it leverages fields as diverse as manufacturing, railroad, utilities, energy, heavy equipment, automotive, aerospace and defense.<ref name="ftn252">“Heartwood Simulations & Guides,” accessed April 3, 2021, [https://hwd3d.com/3d-interactive-training https://hwd3d.com/3d-interactive-training].</ref> Their business strategy includes founding principles such as: “There are always new industries to explore – so we do!”<ref name="ftn253">“New industries. There are always new industries to explore – so we do! We ask ourselves questions like, ‘Will 3D Interactive technology be of interest to the healthcare industry when considering medical device training?’ Maybe – but we won’t know till we try.” Raj Raheja, “When Perfection Is A Little Too Perfect: 3 Ways to Experiment,” accessed April 3, 2021.</ref></blockquote><br />
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In virtual training solutions like the ones produced by the Heartwood company, we can clearly see how multiple methodical events get arranged in one go. We want to problematize such flows of volumetric techniques and technologies, because of the way this both powers and is powered by the circulation of oppression, exclusion and extraction. The industrial continuum of 3D keeps confirming the deadly normality of European enlightenment, doubtful Judeo-Christian concision, ''mono-humanism'',<ref name="ftn254">Katherine McKittrick, ''Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as a Praxis'' (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).</ref> hetero patriarchy and settler colonialism by continuing structures and practices that produce reality. From scientific and metaphysical modes of objectivity into truth, via the establishment of political fictions such as race and gender, to accurate individuality and faithful representation.<ref name="ftn255">Paul B. Preciado, “Letter from a trans man to the old sexual regime,” ''Texte zur Kunst'', (2018), [https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/letter-trans-man-old-sexual-regime-paul-b-preciado/. https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/letter-trans-man-old-sexual-regime-paul-b-preciado/.]</ref><br />
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The specific vectors that make the Industrial Continuum of 3D indeed continue, are first of all those related to what we call “optimized complexity”. It is a particular way to arrange volumetrics in the interest of optimized computation, such as drawing hyper-real surfaces on top of extremely simplified structures or the over-reliance on average simulation. We see this eschewed attention for certain complexities and not for others in how simplified color-coded anatomy travels straight from science books into educational software, and biomedical imaging alike. Divisions between tissues and bones based in standardized category systems organize the relation between demarcated elements in polygonal models, which become hard-coded in constrained sets of volumetric operations and predefined time-space settings, affirmed by scientific nomenclature and recognizable color-schemes that are re-used across software applications. As a result, inter-connective body tissues such as fascia are underrepresented in hyper-real 3D renderings. Thus, the less imperative paradigms that recognize fascia as a key participant in body movement are once again occluded by means of optimization, a very specific industrial phenomenon. As an example of evident continuity by the apparent neutrality of a continuous flow of 3D manners, tissue renderings conserve the way things used to ''look like'' on 2D anatomy manuals, contributing to the conservation of the way things ''are'' in terms of anatomical paradigms.<br />
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A second vector at work is the ''additivist'' culture of 3D that thrives on relentless forking and versions to be re-visited and taken back.<ref name="ftn256">See for example: “Item 019: The 3D Additivist manifesto,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2015.</ref> 3D computation derives agility from the re-use of particle systems, models, data-structures and data-sets to, for example, render grass, model hair or to detect border crossings.<ref name="ftn257">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “So-called Plants,” in this book.</ref> Templates, rigs and scenarios are time-consuming to produce from scratch but once their probable topology is set, 3D assets such as “hilly landscape”, “turning screw”, “first person shooter”, “average body”<ref name="ftn258">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “MakeHuman,” in this book.</ref> or “fugitive”<ref name="ftn259">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “So-called Plants,” in this book.</ref> start to act as a reserve that can be reused endlessly, adjusted and repeated at industrial scale and without ever depleting. Of course that level of flexibility is designed and maintained under positive values such as agility, efficiency and even diversity, but more often than not, their ongoing circulation leads to extreme normalization. With this, we want to point out the fiction of having many options to grab from, which is precisely the settler illusion of the accessibility of resources to take and run with. It still depends on an economy of ''asset scarcity'', or even worse: an economy of scarcity that bases its sense of technical abundance on a set of finite, regularized elements.<br />
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In addition, volumetrics depends more than other screen based environments on normalized viewing interfaces which makes military training sets and viewing environments for biomedical images follow the exact same representational logic. This is where the techno-scientific paradigms of mandatory projections, perspectives, topology based on binary separations between inside and outside, polygonal treatment, Cartesian axes, Euclidean geometries and so forth are being leveraged to relentlessly spread similar techniques across different corners of practice. Polygonal models travel all too easily between applications because their viewing environments are already standardized. Despite the work of feminist visual culture or cubist avantgardes that have made representation a political issue, perspective devices, anatomy theaters or cartographic projection are once again normalized as cultural standards.<ref name="ftn260">Countless thinkers from Svetlana Alpers, to bell hooks, Suzanne Lacy, Peggy Phelan, Elisabeth Grosz and Camera Obscura Collective have critiqued the implicit assumptions in representation. “(R)epresentation produces ruptures and gaps; it fails to reproduce the real exactly. Precisely because of representation’s supplementational excess and its failure to be totalizing, close readings of the logic of representation can produce resistance, and possibly, political change.” Peggy Phelan, ''Unmarked: The Politics of Performance'' (London: Routledge, 2003), 3.</ref><br />
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The specific manners in which the techno-sciences historically present metrics of volume nest in distinct fields: from spectacle to control, from laboratories to courts of justice, from syllabi to DIY prototypes, rom architecture studies to mining pits. When those manners circulate from one industrial field to another, along vectors that relegate difference and complexity to the background, they reaffirm quite probably the very probable colonial, capitalist, hetero-patriarchal, ableist and positivist topology of contemporary volumetrics. This nauseating and intoxicating setup of variability and rigidity produces the establishment of a universal mono-culture of 3D.<br />
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To highlight the continuity of normalizing forces, is our way to critically signal a globalized technocratic behavior based on the accumulation of sameness and repetition, rather than one attuned to the radical, mutating and interconnected specificity of something as wide and multi-modal as the volume of differentiated bodies. 3D models seemingly travel with ease, and this particular easiness facilitates the erasure of politics and the reaffirmation of a central norm. It means the patriarchocolonial linear representation of measurable volumes ends up with providing only with sometimes modular, sometimes fungible entities, circulated by and circulating the everlasting convenience of Modern canons. By Modern convenience, it has become easy to represent distinct elements, but near impossible to engage with inter-connective structures.<ref name="ftn261">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “Invasive imaginations and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref><br />
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=== Volumetric sedimentation ===<br />
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<blockquote class="pull">The monomers can be grouped into segments like Lego pieces to construct functional protein-mimics. “Compare this to how cars are built,” said Xu. “There are different models, colors and shapes, but they all contain important parts such as an engine, wheels and energy source. For each part, there can be different options, such as gas or electric engines, but at the end of the day, it’s a car, not a train.” Xu and her team designed a library of polymers that are statistically similar in sequence, providing newfound flexibility in assembly.<ref name="ftn262">“Item 123: Compare this to how cars are built,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory''. Source: Berkeley Engineering, accessed April 3, 2021. 3</ref></blockquote><br />
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Contemporary biomedical engineering relies on computer generated 3D imagery for inventing materials, pharmaceuticals and fuels and for predicting their behavior. The monomers that Xu and her team compare to a car or a train, are synthetic proteins that were designed using 3D models of cylinders, spirals and spheres.<ref name="ftn263">Protein modeling for prediction: “Model Quality Assessment Programs (MQAPs) are also used to discriminate near-native conformations from non-native conformations.” Berkely Engineering, accessed April 3, 2021. [https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2020/01/new-discovery-makes-it-easier-to-design-synthetic-proteins-that-rival-their-natural-counterparts/ https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2020/01/new-discovery-makes-it-easier-to-design-synthetic-proteins-that-rival-their-natural-counterparts/]</ref> The ease by which a researcher compares a fictional membrane to the car industry is a banal example of how in the hyper-computational environment of biomedical engineering, the interaction between observation, representation, modeling and prediction is settling around – once again – probable patterns.<br />
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When the Modern Man finished threading the frame of his latest invention, the perspective device, he could not even start to imagine that centuries later this would be the universally accepted paradigm for representing masses of volume in space.<ref name="ftn264">No name needed. Picture an average Modern male, just imagine one that inhabits the very center of power in clear familiarity. </ref> The becoming-paradigmatic of perspective from a static single point has gained terrain through years of artistic, scientific and technical usage throughout realms as diverse as fresco painting or the more recent establishment of a cinematic language. And just as one-point perspective made it all the way from Modernity to our present day, so did other even older paradigmatic techniques such as Cartesian axes, Euclidean geometry, cartographic projection or cubic measurement. These paradigms have been assimilated and naturalized to such an extent that they each lost their own history and have become inseparable from each other, interlocking in ways that have everything to do with the way they support the Modern project. In the current formation, they keep reinforcing each other as the only possible form of representation and thus reality.<ref name="ftn265">Katherine McKittrick, ''Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as a Praxis''.</ref> Their centrality in all found analysis of volume in the world means nothing less than a daily imposition of Euromodern values, modes and techniques of study, observation, description and inscription of the complexity around.<ref name="ftn266">Patricia Reed and Lewis R. Gordon define “Euromodernity” in the following way: “By “Euromodernity,” I don’t mean “European people.” The term simply means the constellation of convictions, arguments, policies, and a worldview promoting the idea that the only way legitimately to belong to the present and as a consequence the future is to be or become European.” See: Lewis R. Gordon, “Black Aesthetics, Black Value”, in ''Public Culture'' 30:1 (2018): 19-34.</ref> In other words: volumetrics are being established due to the multi-vectorial political agenda of Modern technosciences, which is directly entwined with commercial colonialism and Western supremacy.<br />
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Despite daily updates, the industrial continuum of 3D is not a changing landscape even if it seems to rely on flow. We can see all sorts of 3D devices and standards circulating in a continuous current from one industry to another, but they persistently move towards a re-establishment of the same, both in terms of shape and of value. Our aim is to understand the paradigms they keep carrying along, and to attend to the assumptions, delegations and canons they impose over matter and semiotics when keeping their business as usual. We suspect there is a rigidification in the establishment of what circulates and what doesn’t and we need to see where that persistence hangs from, and how it came to be settled. What are the cultural logics underlying 3D technologies, that turn them into a rigid regime?<br />
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One key aspect of the very specific settling of 3D, is that they settle in flow. It is through use and reuse that the establishment of values and manners gets reinforced. A kind of technocratic sedimentation of protocols, standards, tools and formulas which leaves a trace of what is possible in the circuit of volumetrics. The behavior of this sedimentation implies that things just happen again because they happened already before. Every time a tool is adopted from one industry into another, an edge is re-inscribed in the spectrum of what is possible to do with it. And every time the same formula is applied, its axiom gets strengthened. This ongoing settling of the probable in volumetrics comes with its own worlding: it scaffolds the very material-semiotics of what world is to be done, by whom, and by what means. If software making is indeed worldmaking, the settlement of volumetric toolkits and technoscientific paradigms affects what worlds we can world.<ref name="ftn267">“To provide us with endless a-Modern mestizo, an escape from representational and agential normativities, software CAN and MUST provide the material conditions for wild combinations or un-suspected renders.” Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “MakeHuman,” in this book. </ref><br />
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For those of us who feel affected by the Cartesian anxiety of always feeling backward<ref name="ftn268">Heather Love, ''Feeling Backward'' (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).</ref> in a damaging axiomatic culture of assemblage and measure-all-this-way, it is important to make explicit the moves that reified what it ended up being: an exteriority-less industrial regime based on scientific truths that are being produced by that same regime. It is evident that volume counts a lot in how it came to ostent value, but how does it count and how is it counted? Was it the car industry, that settled values and forms before the Lego blocks appeared? Was it the Lego paradigm of assemblage, that was settled as a reference for biomedical researchers to use it for the predictions in their screens and speeches? The befores and afters matter in this bedrock of shapes and values, as they are telling for what is probably going to happen next.<br />
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Over the years, we detected a number of sedimenting behaviors or volumetric probables. The first is ''externalizing implications''. The outsourcing of labour and responsibilities is ubiquitous in most industrial computing, but takes a specific shape in the industrial continuum of 3D. Through a strictly hierarchical mode of organization, tasks, roles and all labour-related configurations of relationality persistently, the command is kept in the hands of a privileged minority. Their agendas set industrial priorities but without committing to specific fields or areas of application, therefore avoiding all liability. This adds up to an outsourcing of responsibilities to less powerful agents, such as confronting users with just Yes/No options for agreeing with terms and conditions, or the delegation of energetic costs to the final end of the supply chain.<br />
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The need for dealing with computational complexity when rendering volumetrics, leads to an over-reliance on socio-technical standards and protocols that become increasingly hard to undo. ''Rigging simplification'' refers to the obfuscated reduction inherent in particle systems, for example. A limited set of small samples or ‘sprites’ is randomized in order to suggest endless complexity. Another example is the way inside and outside is plotted through polygon meshes in CAD files. This technique produces a faster rendering but settles a paradigm of binary separation between interior and exterior worlds. The same goes for the normalized logics of rendering graphics with the help of ray-tracing techniques that demand planar projection for resolving a smooth move between 2D and 3D.<ref name="ftn269">POV-Ray or Persistence of Vision Raytracer, a popular tool for producing high-quality computer graphics, explains this process as follows: “For every pixel in the final image one or more viewing rays are shot from the camera into the scene to see if it intersects with any of the objects in the scene. These “viewing rays” originate from the viewer (represented by the camera), and pass through the viewing window (representing the pixels of the final image).” “POV-Ray for Unix version 3.7,” accessed April 3, 2021, [https://www.povray.org/documentation/3.7.0/u1_1.html#u1_1 https://www.povray.org/documentation/3.7.0/u1_1.html#u1_1].</ref><br />
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''Convenient universalism'' is how we refer to the way volumetrics technically facilitate modes that avoid dissent, that do not stay with complexity or how all matter becomes equally volumetric before the eyes of the 3D-scanner. Because a virtual dungeon can be rendered with the help of ray-tracing, do the same representational conventions actually apply to dead trees, human brains, aquifers, rhinoceroses and plant-roots? Convenient universalism does not bother to include nuances of minoritarian proposals in mainstream industrial development. It allows ongoing violence to take shape as reasonable, and common sense.<br />
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Then, there is the sedimentation of ''persistent hyper-realities''. The Continuum operates well when aligning so-called truths, with systems of verification, and performing objectivity. It is not a surprise that it is at ease with Modern scientific and cultural paradigms; its values and assumptions co-construct each other. This is both confirmed and suggested by the over-presence of tools for segmentation and foreground-background separation.<ref name="ftn270">See for example the way BIM is used to represent subsurface remnants of demolished structures as separate layers. Gary Morin, “Geospatial World,” September 11, 2016, [https://www.geospatialworld.net/article/geological-modelling-and-bim-infrastructure/ https://www.geospatialworld.net/article/geological-modelling-and-bim-infrastructure/].</ref><br />
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And last but not least, we can speak of ''streamlined aesthetics'' as a sedimented behavior. It can be confirmed that as the continuum circulates, the aesthetics of tools and their outcomes flatten. The same operations hide behind layers that look the same. Similar procedures are offered by devices that look alike. WYSIWYG interfaces were smoothly adjusted to the machinery of measuring volumes for any purpose... and what sediments in that process is just a sharp similarity all the way along. The aesthetic canon involves equilibrated proportions, hyperrealism and an evident optimization of rendering maneuvers.<br />
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The cultural logic of 3D is tied to the ongoing settlement of a legacy of standardization, but also to a history of converging the presences of hugely diversified entities under a rigid regime. This volumetric regime is sustained by vivid Modern techniques, vocabularies, infrastructures and protocols. Or to put it bluntly: the calculation of what it takes to count via the x, y and z axes depends on modes that are far from neutral, and of course are not innocent. The technoscience of volumetrics was settled while being already entangled with a whole world in and of its own.<br />
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=== The Possible Continuums of 3D ===<br />
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In the previous sections we spent some time unpacking how 3D circulates through its industrial continuum and what is sedimented as a result. We clarified what needs to be radically changed or directly abolished to get at a possible volumetrics that can happen non-industrially or at least is less marked by industrial, solutionist values. As we have seen, the industrial continuum of 3D settles and flows in particular ways, making its way through business as usual. It’s self-fulfilling moves produce increasingly normed worlds that are continued along the axes of the probable. In this last section, we would like to see what other forms of volumetric continuation, circulation and settlement might be quite possible, as a way to world differently. To find another “how” that can stay with complexity and will not negate, facilitate or altogether erase other modes of existence, we’ll need to reorient 3D from a trans*feminist perspective, and move obliquely towards 3D that can go otherwise.<br />
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Could an ethics and politics committed to volumetric complexity emerge from reverse-engineering the ebbs and flows of industrial affection? Our first task is to rescue ''continuity'' from the claws of the established, the normed and the Modern. Against the unbearable persistence of 3D, discontinuity, latency and un-settlement are evident counterforces only as long as they engage with resisting that which 3D settles by flow: neoliberal accumulation, colonial commercial normativity and one-directionality. An affirmative volumetrics does not reject or dismiss the power of volumetrics as a whole, or give up on continuity altogether either. As Donna Haraway asks in conversation with Cathy Wolfe: “How can we truly learn to compose rather than decry or impose?”<ref name="ftn271">Dona Haraway in conversation with Cary Wolfe. Donna J. Haraway, ''Manifestly Haraway ''(London: [https://muse.jhu.edu/search?action=browse&limit=publisher_id:23 University of Minnesota Press], 2016), 289.</ref><br />
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We compiled a list of proposals for what we suspect are more affirmative ways, suggestions for dealing with the “volumetric probables“ that emerged from our research endeavor so far. They are proposals which are each “nothing short of a radical shift in how we approach matter and form”.<ref name="ftn272">Denise Ferreira da Silva. “On Difference Without Separability,“ in ''Incerteza Viva: 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, ''ed. Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças (Sao Paulo: Ministry of Culture, Bienal and Itaú, 2016), 57-58.</ref> What is important to keep in mind, is that ''none of these are in fact impossible to implement'', so come on!<br />
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'''Remediating Cartesian anxiety''': What if we decide to use six instead of four axes, twelve instead of three or zero instead of n? What if we take time to get used to multiple paradigms for orientation, instead of settling for only one regime? Letting go of the finite coordinates of x, y, z and t could be a first step to break with the convenient reductions of parallel and perpendicular assumptions. It’s implementations might require rigorous inventions with a transdisciplinary attitude, but we can afford them if what is at stake is to re-orient volumetrics for non-coercive uses, right?<br />
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'''Paranodes to ever-polygonal worlds''': By paying attention to the paranodal in ever-polygonal worlds, the simplistic dominance of node-centricity might quickly shift to entirely different topological articulations.<ref name="ftn273">“The instability of paranodal space is what animates the network, and to attempt to render this space invisible is to arrive at less, not more, complete explanations of the network as a social reality.” Ulises Ali Mejias, ''Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 153, and Zach Blas, “Contra-Internet,” ''e-flux Journal ''<nowiki>#74 (June 2016).</nowiki></ref> This would allow other imaginations of relationality, this time not along the vectors of sameness and similarity but emerging from the undefined materiality of what’s there, and what was underrepresented by paradigmatic techno-sciences.<br />
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'''Extra-planar projections''': If the distance between 3D and 2D was not to be crossed quickly and straight, but allowed for curves, meanders and loops, then a whole technoscience of dissimilarity and surprise collinearity would emerge. We know the cartographies of complexity are already there, but we just have been lacking the means for their representation, their analysis and their use. Such extra-planar projections would intervene the world with a realm of possibilities in the in-between of 2D and 3D, not assuming the axioms of linear projection but rather convoking the playful articulations of elements diffracted inwards, detailing a scape of situated 2.1D, 2.5.3SD, 2.7Dbis and 2.999999D. The cartographic computation of the possible then becomes a latent one of unsolved folds, abrupt edges, unfinished integers and inaccurate parallels.<br />
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'''Multi-dimensional depth''': What background-foreground mergings can we invent for the multidimensional analysis of deep matterings besides volumetrics? Matter is not volume so we need other arrangements of depth and density than the calculating measurings of dimensional worlds. Switching, blurring and blending what comes to the fore with what usually stays behind declutches attention from the binary back-front and inside-outside divides, thickness becomes an area in need of subtle study and nuanced formulations. When the surveillance camera is turned onto the policeman, violence does not go away. But there might be ways to hold paths and crossings in mutual affection and radical sustainability. If capturing would be about soLiDARity instead of policing, about flourishing instead of conservation, about density instead of profiling then fights for social justice might have a chance to reclaim the very dimensions where mundane violence is executed on a daily basis..<br />
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'''Fits-and-starts-volumetrics:''' Which transformative moves can hold time beyond constant speed, agile advancement and smooth gait? As we learned from Heather Love and her understanding of queer life as constantly feeling backward,<ref name="ftn274">Heather Love, ''Feeling Backward''.</ref> as well as from from crip technosciences:<ref name="ftn275">Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, “Crip Technoscience Manifesto,” Catalyst, Vol 5 No 1 (2019).</ref> linear time is a problematic norm that will always confirm and appreciate what goes forward. In any case, Possible Volumetrics can not be aligned with it. Time as mattered through computation (4D) works too hard on appearing continuous. We propose to use that energy for flowing with what gets crooked and throttled, to move with the flutters and stotterings. Along this text, we tried to show the continuous problematic of the industrialization of 3D, in order to convoke a possible volumetrics that could do 3D otherwise.<br />
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In case these proposals feel too hard or even impossible to implement, remember that this sense is always the effect of hegemony! Abolishing the Industrial Continuum of 3D means to place it at the eccentric core of a kind of computing that dares to world without patriarcho-capitalist and colonial structures holding it up.<br />
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[[file:Continuum_stuttgart.JPG|800px|thumb|left|The Industrial Continuum of 3D emerges during “Collective inventorying”, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, 2017]]<br />
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[[File:Continuum recto.png|thumb|left|800px|“[https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?074 The Industrial Continuum of 3D]”, fanzine, Barcelona, 2017 <noinclude>/ [[:File:Continuum.pdf|Download PDF]]</noinclude>]]<br />
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[[file:Continuum_barcelona_1.png|800px|thumb|left]]<br />
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[[file:Continuum_barcelona_2.png|800px|thumb|left|Exploring the continuum with participants in “Imagined Mishearings,” Hangar (Barcelona, 2017)]]<br />
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[[file:Continuum_brighton.png|800px|thumb|left|A diagram of The Industrial Continuum of 3D for the workshop “Continuous corpo-realities <-> diagramming probabilities and possibilities!”, University of Sussex, Brighton, 2018 <noinclude>/ [[:File:Continuum_brighton.pdf|Download PDF]]</noinclude>]]<br />
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=== Notes ===<br />
<references/></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=The_Industrial_Continuum_of_3D&diff=2554The Industrial Continuum of 3D2021-11-24T05:28:34Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
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== The Industrial Continuum of 3D ==<br />
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'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
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=== The Invention of the Continuum ===<br />
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<blockquote class="pull">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.”<ref name="ftn246">“Item 125: Disappearing around us,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory''. Source: Elizabeth Claire Alberts, Mongabay, 21 October 2020, “The rhino in the room: 3D scan brings near-extinct Sumatran species to virtual life”</ref></blockquote><br />
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3D scanning 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.<br />
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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.<ref name="ftn247">Loren Britton, and Helen Pritchard, “For CS,” ''interactions'' 27, 4 (July - August 2020), 94–98, [https://doi.org/10.1145/3406838 https://doi.org/10.1145/3406838] </ref><br />
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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).<ref name="ftn248">The British Standard Organisation defines Building Information Modeling (BIM) as: “Use of a shared digital representation of a built asset to facilitate design, construction and operation processes to form a reliable basis for decisions.” “BIM - Building Information Modelling - ISO 19650,” BSI, [https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/iso-19650-BIM/ https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/iso-19650-BIM/]</ref> 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.<ref name="ftn249">GAFAM refers to the so-called Big Five tech companies: Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft.</ref> 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,<ref name="ftn250">“In this way, our contemporary encounters with data extend well beyond notions of design, ease of use, personal suggestion, surveillance or privacy. They take on new meaning if we consider the underlying principles of mathematics as the engine that drives data towards languages of normality and truth prior to any opera-tional discomforts or violences.” Ramon Amaro, “Artificial Intelligence: warped, colorful forms and their unclear geometries,” in ''Schemas of Uncertainty: Soothsayers and Soft AI'', eds. Danae Io and Callum Copley (Amsterdam: PUB/Sandberg Instituut), 69-90.</ref> but in three-dimensional operations, the industrial continuum intensifies due to their supercharged relationship to space and time.<ref name="ftn251">Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting. “Figurations of Timely Extraction,” ''Media Theory'', [S.l.], v. 4, n. 2, p. 159-188, dec. 2020. </ref><br />
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By referring to this phenomenon 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 industrial 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.<br />
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Our intuition is that 3D goes through a continuously smooth, multi-dimensional but concentric and loopy flow of assembled technicalities, paradigms and devices that facilitate the circulation of standards and protocols; and hence the constant reproduction of hegemonic metrics for the measurement of volume.<ref>“Logistics is straight in that metrically degrading way. This is its murderousness, its refusal to attend to contour, its supervisory neglect and, also, its wastefulness, its continual missing of all in its inveterate grasping of everything.” Steffano Harney and Fred Moten, ''All Incomplete'' (New York: Minor Compositions, 2021), 105.</ref> Such intuition is nevertheless accompanied by another: that computation can and should operate otherwise. This text 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.<br />
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=== How is 3D going on? ===<br />
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<blockquote class="pull">“Train, Evaluate, Assist.” The simulation and training company Heartwood moves smoothly between the classroom and the field to “help operations, maintenance, and field service teams perform complex procedures faster, safer and with less errors.” Developing solutions for clients from a wide range of industries (Audi, TetraPak and the United States Secret Service to name a few), Heartwood is proud to insist that it leverages fields as diverse as manufacturing, railroad, utilities, energy, heavy equipment, automotive, aerospace and defense.<ref name="ftn252">“Heartwood Simulations & Guides,” accessed April 3, 2021, [https://hwd3d.com/3d-interactive-training https://hwd3d.com/3d-interactive-training].</ref> Their business strategy includes founding principles such as: “There are always new industries to explore – so we do!”<ref name="ftn253">“New industries. There are always new industries to explore – so we do! We ask ourselves questions like, “Will 3D Interactive technology be of interest to the healthcare industry when considering medical device training?” Maybe – but we won’t know till we try.” Raj Raheja, “When Perfection Is A Little Too Perfect: 3 Ways to Experiment,” accessed April 3, 2021.</ref></blockquote><br />
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In virtual training solutions like the ones produced by the Heartwood company, we can clearly see how multiple methodical events get arranged in one go. We want to problematize such flows of volumetric techniques and technologies, because of the way this both powers and is powered by the circulation of oppression, exclusion and extraction. The industrial continuum of 3D keeps confirming the deadly normality of European enlightenment, doubtful Judeo-Christian concision, ''mono-humanism'',<ref name="ftn254">Katherine McKittrick, ''Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as a Praxis'' (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).</ref> hetero patriarchy and settler colonialism by continuing structures and practices that produce reality. From scientific and metaphysical modes of objectivity into truth, via the establishment of political fictions such as race and gender, to accurate individuality and faithful representation.<ref name="ftn255">Paul B. Preciado, “Letter from a trans man to the old sexual regime,” ''Texte zur kunst'', (2018) [https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/letter-trans-man-old-sexual-regime-paul-b-preciado/ https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/letter-trans-man-old-sexual-regime-paul-b-preciado/]</ref><br />
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The specific vectors that make the Industrial Continuum of 3D indeed continue, are first of all those related to what we call “optimized complexity”. It is a particular way to arrange volumetrics in the interest of optimized computation, such as drawing hyper-real surfaces on top of extremely simplified structures or the over-reliance on average simulation. We see this eschewed attention for certain complexities and not for others in how simplified color-coded anatomy travels straight from science books into educational software, and biomedical imaging alike. Divisions between tissues and bones based in standardized category systems organize the relation between demarcated elements in polygonal models, which become hard-coded in constrained sets of volumetric operations and predefined time-space settings, affirmed by scientific nomenclature and recognizable color-schemes that are re-used across software applications. As a result, inter-connective body tissues such as fascia are underrepresented in hyper-real 3D renderings. Thus, the less imperative paradigms that recognize fascia as a key participant in body movement are once again occluded by means of optimization, a very specific industrial phenomenon. As an example of evident continuity by the apparent neutrality of a continuous flow of 3D manners, tissue renderings conserve the way things used to ''look like'' on 2D anatomy manuals, contributing to the conservation of the way things ''are'' in terms of anatomical paradigms.<br />
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A second vector at work is the ''additivist'' culture of 3D that thrives on relentless forking and versions to be re-visited and taken back.<ref name="ftn256">See for example: “Item 019: The 3D Additivist manifesto,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory'', 2015.</ref> 3D computation derives agility from the re-use of particle systems, models, data-structures and data-sets to, for example, render grass, model hair or to detect border crossings.<ref name="ftn257">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “So-called Plants,” in this book.</ref> Templates, rigs and scenarios are time-consuming to produce from scratch but once their probable topology is set, 3D assets such as “hilly landscape”, “turning screw”, “first person shooter”, “average body”<ref name="ftn258">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “MakeHuman,” in this book.</ref> or “fugitive”<ref name="ftn259">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “So-called Plants,” in this book.</ref> start to act as a reserve that can be reused endlessly, adjusted and repeated at industrial scale and without ever depleting. Of course that level of flexibility is designed and maintained under positive values such as agility, efficiency and even diversity, but more often than not, their ongoing circulation leads to extreme normalization. With this, we want to point out the fiction of having many options to grab from, which is precisely the settler illusion of the accessibility of resources to take and run with. It still depends on an economy of ''asset scarcity'', or even worse: an economy of scarcity that bases its sense of technical abundance on a set of finite, regularized elements.<br />
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In addition, volumetrics depends more than other screen based environments on normalized viewing interfaces which makes military training sets and viewing environments for biomedical images follow the exact same representational logic. This is where the techno-scientific paradigms of mandatory projections, perspectives, topology based on binary separations between inside and outside, polygonal treatment, Cartesian axes, Euclidean geometries and so forth are being leveraged to relentlessly spread similar techniques across different corners of practice. Polygonal models travel all too easily between applications because their viewing environments are already standardized. Despite the work of feminist visual culture or cubist avantgardes that have made representation a political issue, perspective devices, anatomy theaters or cartographic projection are once again normalized as cultural standards.<ref name="ftn260">Countless thinkers from Svetlana Alpers, to bell hooks, Suzanne Lacy, Peggy Phelan, Elisabeth Grosz and Camera Obscura Collective have critiqued the implicit assumptions in representation. “(R)epresentation produces ruptures and gaps; it fails to reproduce the real exactly. Precisely because of representation’s supplementational excess and its failure to be totalizing, close readings of the logic of representation can produce resistance, and possibly, political change.” Peggy Phelan, ''Unmarked: The Politics of Performance'' (London: Routledge, 2003), 3.</ref><br />
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The specific manners in which the techno-sciences historically present metrics of volume nest in distinct fields: from spectacle to control, from laboratories to courts of justice, from syllabi to DIY prototypes, rom architecture studies to mining pits. When those manners circulate from one industrial field to another, along vectors that relegate difference and complexity to the background, they reaffirm quite probably the very probable colonial, capitalist, hetero-patriarchal, ableist and positivist topology of contemporary volumetrics. This nauseating and intoxicating setup of variability and rigidity produces the establishment of a universal mono-culture of 3D.<br />
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To highlight the continuity of normalizing forces, is our way to critically signal a globalized technocratic behavior based on the accumulation of sameness and repetition, rather than one attuned to the radical, mutating and interconnected specificity of something as wide and multi-modal as the volume of differentiated bodies. 3D models seemingly travel with ease, and this particular easiness facilitates the erasure of politics and the reaffirmation of a central norm. It means the patriarchocolonial linear representation of measurable volumes ends up with providing only with sometimes modular, sometimes fungible entities, circulated by and circulating the everlasting convenience of Modern canons. By Modern convenience, it has become easy to represent distinct elements, but near impossible to engage with inter-connective structures.<ref name="ftn261">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “Invasive imaginations and its agential cuts,” in this book.</ref><br />
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=== Volumetric sedimentation ===<br />
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<blockquote class="pull">The monomers can be grouped into segments like Lego pieces to construct functional protein-mimics. “Compare this to how cars are built,” said Xu. “There are different models, colors and shapes, but they all contain important parts such as an engine, wheels and energy source. For each part, there can be different options, such as gas or electric engines, but at the end of the day, it’s a car, not a train.” Xu and her team designed a library of polymers that are statistically similar in sequence, providing newfound flexibility in assembly.<ref name="ftn262">“Item 123: Compare this to how cars are built,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory''. Source: Berkeley Engineering, accessed April 3, 2021. 3</ref></blockquote><br />
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Contemporary biomedical engineering relies on computer generated 3D imagery for inventing materials, pharmaceuticals and fuels and for predicting their behavior. The monomers that Xu and her team compare to a car or a train, are synthetic proteins that were designed using 3D models of cylinders, spirals and spheres.<ref name="ftn263">Protein modeling for prediction: “Model Quality Assessment Programs (MQAPs) are also used to discriminate near-native conformations from non-native conformations.” Berkely Engineering, accessed April 3, 2021. [https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2020/01/new-discovery-makes-it-easier-to-design-synthetic-proteins-that-rival-their-natural-counterparts/ https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2020/01/new-discovery-makes-it-easier-to-design-synthetic-proteins-that-rival-their-natural-counterparts/]</ref> The ease by which a researcher compares a fictional membrane to the car industry is a banal example of how in the hyper-computational environment of biomedical engineering, the interaction between observation, representation, modeling and prediction is settling around – once again – probable patterns.<br />
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When the Modern Man finished threading the frame of his latest invention, the perspective device, he could not even start to imagine that centuries later this would be the universally accepted paradigm for representing masses of volume in space.<ref name="ftn264">No name needed. Picture an average Modern male, just imagine one that inhabits the very center of power in clear familiarity. </ref> The becoming-paradigmatic of perspective from a static single point has gained terrain through years of artistic, scientific and technical usage throughout realms as diverse as fresco painting or the more recent establishment of a cinematic language. And just as one-point perspective made it all the way from Modernity to our present day, so did other even older paradigmatic techniques such as Cartesian axes, Euclidean geometry, cartographic projection or cubic measurement. These paradigms have been assimilated and naturalized to such an extent that they each lost their own history and have become inseparable from each other, interlocking in ways that have everything to do with the way they support the Modern project. In the current formation, they keep reinforcing each other as the only possible form of representation and thus reality.<ref name="ftn265">Katherine McKittrick, ''Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as a Praxis''.</ref> Their centrality in all found analysis of volume in the world means nothing less than a daily imposition of Euromodern values, modes and techniques of study, observation, description and inscription of the complexity around.<ref name="ftn266">Patricia Reed and Lewis R. Gordon define “Euromodernity” in the following way: “By “Euromodernity,” I don’t mean “European people.” The term simply means the constellation of convictions, arguments, policies, and a worldview promoting the idea that the only way legitimately to belong to the present and as a consequence the future is to be or become European.” See: Lewis R. Gordon, “Black Aesthetics, Black Value”, in ''Public Culture'' 30:1 (2018): 19-34.</ref> In other words: volumetrics are being established due to the multi-vectorial political agenda of Modern technosciences, which is directly entwined with commercial colonialism and Western supremacy.<br />
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Despite daily updates, the industrial continuum of 3D is not a changing landscape even if it seems to rely on flow. We can see all sorts of 3D devices and standards circulating in a continuous current from one industry to another, but they persistently move towards a re-establishment of the same, both in terms of shape and of value. Our aim is to understand the paradigms they keep carrying along, and to attend to the assumptions, delegations and canons they impose over matter and semiotics when keeping their business as usual. We suspect there is a rigidification in the establishment of what circulates and what doesn’t and we need to see where that persistence hangs from, and how it came to be settled. What are the cultural logics underlying 3D technologies, that turn them into a rigid regime?<br />
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One key aspect of the very specific settling of 3D, is that they settle in flow. It is through use and reuse that the establishment of values and manners gets reinforced. A kind of technocratic sedimentation of protocols, standards, tools and formulas which leaves a trace of what is possible in the circuit of volumetrics. The behavior of this sedimentation implies that things just happen again because they happened already before. Every time a tool is adopted from one industry into another, an edge is re-inscribed in the spectrum of what is possible to do with it. And every time the same formula is applied, its axiom gets strengthened. This ongoing settling of the probable in volumetrics comes with its own worlding: it scaffolds the very material-semiotics of what world is to be done, by whom, and by what means. If software making is indeed worldmaking, the settlement of volumetric toolkits and technoscientific paradigms affects what worlds we can world.<ref name="ftn267">“To provide us with endless a-Modern mestizo, an escape from representational and agential normativities, software CAN and MUST provide the material conditions for wild combinations or un-suspected renders.” Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “MakeHuman,” in this book. </ref><br />
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For those of us who feel affected by the Cartesian anxiety of always feeling backward<ref name="ftn268">Heather Love, ''Feeling Backward'' (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).</ref> in a damaging axiomatic culture of assemblage and measure-all-this-way, it is important to make explicit the moves that reified what it ended up being: an exteriority-less industrial regime based on scientific truths that are being produced by that same regime. It is evident that volume counts a lot in how it came to ostent value, but how does it count and how is it counted? Was it the car industry, that settled values and forms before the Lego blocks appeared? Was it the Lego paradigm of assemblage, that was settled as a reference for biomedical researchers to use it for the predictions in their screens and speeches? The befores and afters matter in this bedrock of shapes and values, as they are telling for what is probably going to happen next.<br />
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Over the years, we detected a number of sedimenting behaviors or volumetric probables. The first is ''externalizing implications''. The outsourcing of labour and responsibilities is ubiquitous in most industrial computing, but takes a specific shape in the industrial continuum of 3D. Through a strictly hierarchical mode of organization, tasks, roles and all labour-related configurations of relationality persistently, the command is kept in the hands of a privileged minority. Their agendas set industrial priorities but without committing to specific fields or areas of application, therefore avoiding all liability. This adds up to an outsourcing of responsibilities to less powerful agents, such as confronting users with just Yes/No options for agreeing with terms and conditions, or the delegation of energetic costs to the final end of the supply chain.<br />
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The need for dealing with computational complexity when rendering volumetrics, leads to an over-reliance on socio-technical standards and protocols that become increasingly hard to undo. ''Rigging simplification'' refers to the obfuscated reduction inherent in particle systems, for example. A limited set of small samples or ‘sprites’ is randomized in order to suggest endless complexity. Another example is the way inside and outside is plotted through polygon meshes in CAD files. This technique produces a faster rendering but settles a paradigm of binary separation between interior and exterior worlds. The same goes for the normalized logics of rendering graphics with the help of ray-tracing techniques that demand planar projection for resolving a smooth move between 2D and 3D.<ref name="ftn269">POV-Ray or Persistence of Vision Raytracer, a popular tool for producing high-quality computer graphics, explains this process as follows: “For every pixel in the final image one or more viewing rays are shot from the camera into the scene to see if it intersects with any of the objects in the scene. These “viewing rays” originate from the viewer (represented by the camera), and pass through the viewing window (representing the pixels of the final image).” “POV-Ray for Unix version 3.7,” accessed April 3, 2021, [https://www.povray.org/documentation/3.7.0/u1_1.html#u1_1 https://www.povray.org/documentation/3.7.0/u1_1.html#u1_1].</ref><br />
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''Convenient universalism'' is how we refer to the way volumetrics technically facilitate modes that avoid dissent, that do not stay with complexity or how all matter becomes equally volumetric before the eyes of the 3D-scanner. Because a virtual dungeon can be rendered with the help of ray-tracing, do the same representational conventions actually apply to dead trees, human brains, aquifers, rhinoceroses and plant-roots? Convenient universalism does not bother to include nuances of minoritarian proposals in mainstream industrial development. It allows ongoing violence to take shape as reasonable, and common sense.<br />
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Then, there is the sedimentation of ''persistent hyper-realities''. The Continuum operates well when aligning so-called truths, with systems of verification, and performing objectivity. It is not a surprise that it is at ease with Modern scientific and cultural paradigms; its values and assumptions co-construct each other. This is both confirmed and suggested by the over-presence of tools for segmentation and foreground-background separation.<ref name="ftn270">See for example the way BIM is used to represent subsurface remnants of demolished structures as separate layers. Gary Morin, “Geospatial World,” September 11, 2016, [https://www.geospatialworld.net/article/geological-modelling-and-bim-infrastructure/ https://www.geospatialworld.net/article/geological-modelling-and-bim-infrastructure/].</ref><br />
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And last but not least, we can speak of ''streamlined aesthetics'' as a sedimented behavior. It can be confirmed that as the continuum circulates, the aesthetics of tools and their outcomes flatten. The same operations hide behind layers that look the same. Similar procedures are offered by devices that look alike. WYSIWYG interfaces were smoothly adjusted to the machinery of measuring volumes for any purpose... and what sediments in that process is just a sharp similarity all the way along. The aesthetic canon involves equilibrated proportions, hyperrealism and an evident optimization of rendering maneuvers.<br />
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The cultural logic of 3D is tied to the ongoing settlement of a legacy of standardization, but also to a history of converging the presences of hugely diversified entities under a rigid regime. This volumetric regime is sustained by vivid Modern techniques, vocabularies, infrastructures and protocols. Or to put it bluntly: the calculation of what it takes to count via the x, y and z axes depends on modes that are far from neutral, and of course are not innocent. The technoscience of volumetrics was settled while being already entangled with a whole world in and of its own.<br />
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=== The Possible Continuums of 3D ===<br />
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In the previous sections we spent some time unpacking how 3D circulates through its industrial continuum and what is sedimented as a result. We clarified what needs to be radically changed or directly abolished to get at a possible volumetrics that can happen non-industrially or at least is less marked by industrial, solutionist values. As we have seen, the industrial continuum of 3D settles and flows in particular ways, making its way through business as usual. It’s self-fulfilling moves produce increasingly normed worlds that are continued along the axes of the probable. In this last section, we would like to see what other forms of volumetric continuation, circulation and settlement might be quite possible, as a way to world differently. To find another “how” that can stay with complexity and will not negate, facilitate or altogether erase other modes of existence, we’ll need to reorient 3D from a trans*feminist perspective, and move obliquely towards 3D that can go otherwise.<br />
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Could an ethics and politics committed to volumetric complexity emerge from reverse-engineering the ebbs and flows of industrial affection? Our first task is to rescue ''continuity'' from the claws of the established, the normed and the Modern. Against the unbearable persistence of 3D, discontinuity, latency and un-settlement are evident counterforces only as long as they engage with resisting that which 3D settles by flow: neoliberal accumulation, colonial commercial normativity and one-directionality. An affirmative volumetrics does not reject or dismiss the power of volumetrics as a whole, or give up on continuity altogether either. As Donna Haraway asks in conversation with Cathy Wolfe: “How can we truly learn to compose rather than decry or impose?”<ref name="ftn271">Dona Haraway in conversation with Cary Wolfe. Donna J. Haraway, ''Manifestly Haraway ''(London: [https://muse.jhu.edu/search?action=browse&limit=publisher_id:23 University of Minnesota Press], 2016), 289.</ref><br />
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We compiled a list of proposals for what we suspect are more affirmative ways, suggestions for dealing with the “volumetric probables“ that emerged from our research endeavor so far. They are proposals which are each “nothing short of a radical shift in how we approach matter and form”.<ref name="ftn272">Denise Ferreira da Silva. “On Difference Without Separability,“ in ''Incerteza Viva: 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, ''ed. Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças (Sao Paulo: Ministry of Culture, Bienal and Itaú, 2016), 57-58.</ref> What is important to keep in mind, is that ''none of these are in fact impossible to implement'', so come on!<br />
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'''Remediating Cartesian anxiety''': What if we decide to use six instead of four axes, twelve instead of three or zero instead of n? What if we take time to get used to multiple paradigms for orientation, instead of settling for only one regime? Letting go of the finite coordinates of x, y, z and t could be a first step to break with the convenient reductions of parallel and perpendicular assumptions. It’s implementations might require rigorous inventions with a transdisciplinary attitude, but we can afford them if what is at stake is to re-orient volumetrics for non-coercive uses, right?<br />
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'''Paranodes to ever-polygonal worlds''': By paying attention to the paranodal in ever-polygonal worlds, the simplistic dominance of node-centricity might quickly shift to entirely different topological articulations.<ref name="ftn273">“The instability of paranodal space is what animates the network, and to attempt to render this space invisible is to arrive at less, not more, complete explanations of the network as a social reality.” Ulises Ali Mejias, ''Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 153, and Zach Blas, “Contra-Internet,” ''e-flux Journal ''<nowiki>#74 (June 2016).</nowiki></ref> This would allow other imaginations of relationality, this time not along the vectors of sameness and similarity but emerging from the undefined materiality of what’s there, and what was underrepresented by paradigmatic techno-sciences.<br />
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'''Extra-planar projections''': If the distance between 3D and 2D was not to be crossed quickly and straight, but allowed for curves, meanders and loops, then a whole technoscience of dissimilarity and surprise collinearity would emerge. We know the cartographies of complexity are already there, but we just have been lacking the means for their representation, their analysis and their use. Such extra-planar projections would intervene the world with a realm of possibilities in the in-between of 2D and 3D, not assuming the axioms of linear projection but rather convoking the playful articulations of elements diffracted inwards, detailing a scape of situated 2.1D, 2.5.3SD, 2.7Dbis and 2.999999D. The cartographic computation of the possible then becomes a latent one of unsolved folds, abrupt edges, unfinished integers and inaccurate parallels.<br />
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'''Multi-dimensional depth''': What background-foreground mergings can we invent for the multidimensional analysis of deep matterings besides volumetrics? Matter is not volume so we need other arrangements of depth and density than the calculating measurings of dimensional worlds. Switching, blurring and blending what comes to the fore with what usually stays behind declutches attention from the binary back-front and inside-outside divides, thickness becomes an area in need of subtle study and nuanced formulations. When the surveillance camera is turned onto the policeman, violence does not go away. But there might be ways to hold paths and crossings in mutual affection and radical sustainability. If capturing would be about soLiDARity instead of policing, about flourishing instead of conservation, about density instead of profiling then fights for social justice might have a chance to reclaim the very dimensions where mundane violence is executed on a daily basis..<br />
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'''Fits-and-starts-volumetrics:''' Which transformative moves can hold time beyond constant speed, agile advancement and smooth gait? As we learned from Heather Love and her understanding of queer life as constantly feeling backward,<ref name="ftn274">Heather Love, ''Feeling Backward''.</ref> as well as from from crip technosciences:<ref name="ftn275">Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, “Crip Technoscience Manifesto,” Catalyst, Vol 5 No 1 (2019).</ref> linear time is a problematic norm that will always confirm and appreciate what goes forward. In any case, Possible Volumetrics can not be aligned with it. Time as mattered through computation (4D) works too hard on appearing continuous. We propose to use that energy for flowing with what gets crooked and throttled, to move with the flutters and stotterings. Along this text, we tried to show the continuous problematic of the industrialization of 3D, in order to convoke a possible volumetrics that could do 3D otherwise.<br />
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In case these proposals feel too hard or even impossible to implement, remember that this sense is always the effect of hegemony! Abolishing the Industrial Continuum of 3D means to place it at the eccentric core of a kind of computing that dares to world without patriarcho-capitalist and colonial structures holding it up.<br />
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[[file:Continuum_stuttgart.JPG|800px|thumb|left|The Industrial Continuum of 3D emerges during “Collective inventorying”, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, 2017]]<br />
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[[File:Continuum recto.png|thumb|left|800px|“[https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?074 The Industrial Continuum of 3D]”, fanzine, Barcelona, 2017 <noinclude>/ [[:File:Continuum.pdf|Download PDF]]</noinclude>]]<br />
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[[file:Continuum_barcelona_1.png|800px|thumb|left]]<br />
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[[file:Continuum_barcelona_2.png|800px|thumb|left|Exploring the continuum with participants in “Imagined Mishearings,” Hangar (Barcelona, 2017)]]<br />
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[[file:Continuum_brighton.png|800px|thumb|left|A diagram of The Industrial Continuum of 3D for the workshop “Continuous corpo-realities <-> diagramming probabilities and possibilities!,” University of Sussex (Brighton, 2018) <noinclude>/ [[:File:Continuum_brighton.pdf|Download PDF]]</noinclude>]]<br />
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=== Notes ===<br />
<references/></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Endured_Instances_of_Relation&diff=2442Endured Instances of Relation2021-11-23T06:52:34Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
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<div>== Endured instances of relation ==<br />
<br />
'''Romi Ron Morrison in conversation with Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting'''<br />
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'''After listening to your talk ''The forgotten past of black computational thought,'''''<ref name="ftn234">Romi Ron Morrison, “Speaking Nearby: The forgotten past of computational thought”, paper presented at EASSST/4S ''Conference: Crafting Critical Methodologies in Computing: Theories, Practices and Future Directions,'' Prague, August 18-21, 2020.</ref>''' we would like to ask you about your specific understanding of what “difference without separation” could mean. We are trying to think about separation and difference specifically in relation to volumetric computational processes that de-flatten or re-flatten, model, capture, track and so forth.'''<br />
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I think entanglement is the word.<br />
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For me, your question seems to recursively return to this. Entanglement implies a relation. Perhaps one that evades or overdetermines what cannot presently be grasped but nonetheless, a relation. Entanglement is helpful for me to think through because it doesn’t resolve into an easy self contained knowability, but it also doesn’t mask itself within the complete opacity of being unknowable to the extent of any totality. Rather, entanglement moves towards a question of “how” and “what if”. It refuses the punctuation of a period to give space for what follows. It is something we must work with outside of pursuits of resolution, and each attempt is one that strives for a better understanding of the richness of the relation. To engage entanglement in this way is a practice of endurance.<br />
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Thinking about the questions that you have asked to start this conversation, difference without separability is invested in these spaces of entanglement, or perhaps what Glissant would call a poetics of duration, of relation. This phrase “difference without separability” comes from Denise Ferreira da Silva’s work. In her article, “On Difference Without Separability”, da Silva gives a brief history of modern thought through Descartes, Newton, Kant, Cuvier, Boas and Foucault. She traces the ways that these “modern texts” scientifically image The World as an “ordered whole composed of separate parts relating through the mediation of constant units of measurement and/or a limiting violent force”.<ref name="ftn235">Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference Without Separability,” in ''Incerteza Viva: 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, ''ed. Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças (Sao Paulo, Ministry of Culture, Bienal and Itaú, 2016), 57-58.</ref> This separability is a constitutive component for ushering in modernity by which difference is rendered as fixed and irreconcilable. This negation built upon the overrepresentation of the human as Man, is what upholds the human (body as sovereign property) as a moral figure that necessitates the edgeless violence of enslavement and genocide on those deemed nonhuman or partially human (body as flesh). This separability is a crucial modern text that fixes the present world in a scene of constant reenactment of these violences though the name of the violence has shifted and is proclaimed as national security, sovereignty, austerity, structural adjustment, sanctity of the family, or freedom. In ''The forgotten past of black computational thought'', I speak of an operating system overdetermined by anti-black violence regardless of who the programmer is, I am speaking to the repetition of this logic of separability that is constituted through a justification of violence.<br />
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Separability is built upon a kind of racial technoscience. It severs the possibility of relation and masks entanglement in pursuit of the pure. There are only rounded decimals here, they always terminate. Thinking about your interest in “bodies” and the ways that they are rendered and constituted through volumetric digital technologies, this emphasis on separability is germane, as possible bodies become captured into standard fixed units of difference.<br />
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'''In hegemonic applications of computation, we see that separation is supposed to function as a neutral, necessary, efficient gesture. Do you think this is how anti-blackness ends up in the bowels of computation? Is it already prefigured in the binary “nature” of computing, not just as a technical basis, but also as an ethics a politics and material culture? Is separation where the coerciveness of computation stems from? And if computation is inherently anti-black, does it make sense to ask it to engage with other lives and relationalities, such as fair algorithms, data justice and infrastructures of care?'''<br />
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I return to this separability because it seems so central for understanding and rethinking both the violences and possibilities for computation. In my prior talk that you referenced, I am trying to make a connection between separability in the da Silvian sense and what David Golumbia calls computationalism. Golumbia makes a distinction between computers and computationalism. For him computationalism “is the view that not just human minds are computers but that mind itself must be a computer—that our notion of intellect is, at bottom, identical with abstract computation”.<ref name="ftn236">David Golumbia, ''The Cultural Logic of Computation'' (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 7.</ref> Computationalism understands cognition itself as inherently a computing process, and by extension, all matters of phenomena in the world can be understood as a function of computation. Thinking about computationalism rather than computing or computation potentially frees the latter from the violences of the former and opens some space for experimentation and reimagining. Computationalism inherits the violences of the modern text that da Silva details. Its central episteme upheld by irreconcilably fixed difference, universal measurements, and separation continues largely undisturbed.<br />
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'''How to think about messiness in relation to possible forms of computation? Flesh, complexity and mess are also already-with computation, not before or after data, but somehow simultaneous and constituent of computation and constituent of mess in reciprocity. How could computation and flesh together constitute more livable messes, if at all?'''<br />
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Sketching the shared contours between modernity, and its dependence on black and native violence, and to call it ‘computationalism’ perhaps allows for computing to return to a much more expansive capacity that doesn’t always require such violence. This is where I’m interested in speculation and in particular speculative histories, presents, and futures of computation that come out of the political, poetic, and erotic practices of blackness and fugitive fungibility. This thinking thrives in relationship to the work of black queer, trans, feminist scholars and artists such as Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, C. Riley Snorton, Tiffany Lethabo King, Tina Campt, Saidiya Hartman, Katherine McKittrick, and Marquis Bey. Rather than taking up the body as a site of the liberal human subject imbued with agency, ownership, and stability, these scholars theorize through the flesh and fungibility of blackness. Flesh is distinguished from the body as a result of the unimaginable violence wrought on black people in making them property, unfree laborers, and fungible sites of death, expansion, desire, sensuousness, and commodity. Spillers and King in particular write about the ways in which Black people under capture, conquest, and enslavement were made fungible. They were made into constantly exchangeable resources able to malleably stand in for any needs white colonizers could imagine. While fungibility is born from and determined by continuous violence, Snorton also notices the simultaneous life and possibility even in the shadow of such death. For Snorton fugitive fungibility marks a space of indeterminacy and possibility, which might open other ways of being outside the trappings of the human. This fleshy fungibility is a porous space to inhabit that exists in shared relations to land and other nonhuman and extrahuman others. It is a relation of entanglement. From this place I hope to speculate on different forms of computing that thrive in indeterminacy and work from an ethical relationship of entanglement. Thinking computation from this place works from the assumptions that computation cannot be done away with as a means of addressing violence. It understands that computation is a method, practice, ideology, and episteme. And in its most hegemonic understanding is a very limited form of discourse. As many of the theorists above hold no romances about the extent and saturation of anti-black violence in the modern world, they also tend to the possibilities of life and living that extend beyond that violence. While violence cannot be ignored, it also doesn’t overdetermine life to the extent of rendering it abject and wholly without. I believe it is possible to contend with the violences of computation while simultaneously lingering in the vitality of the flesh. To think and practice computing otherwise as technologies of the flesh that thrive within indeterminacy and interdependency. This is what informs where I think we might look to recover some of these forms. Within my work I look at practices of computation that live in the poetics, politics, erotics, and movements of blackness.<br />
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'''Through your studies of the legacies of code, you ask: What if computation engaged with indexing different zones of life, facilitated relationalities other than those of capitalist anti-blackness? Could you say more about the kind of computation this would generate, because you seem to call into question most of all that which is indexed and who is indexing, rather than indexing as a problem in and of itself? The question could also be formulated like this: is there space for attending to volumes technically in their singularity, while not reproducing the exclusions that the very techniques of measuring carry? Or, are there other uses of volumetric techniques that apply separation and indexing, while disassembling those practices from the episteme of exclusion?'''<br />
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As you referenced earlier, my interests in fugitive fungibility informs how I have been thinking about indexing and the database as a potential space to make connections and practice a kind of endured proximity by which we are in relation to that which we index. That we can be in a fungible relationship through porosity. That entanglement is allowed to exist and can be seen as a source for ethical encounter. I suppose this would drastically change how we consider indexing and what we consider indexing to be. Within current hegemonic practices of data capture and indexing the world through measuring, there are certain paradigms that need to be challenged. For me these primarily stem from separability by which measurement simultaneously fixes difference as stable and as irreconcilable. Rather, I believe indexing can hold a different potential when deracinated from this episteme of separability. Instead I think of indexing as a way of accounting for an instance of something. And that because of its shared relations it evades static standardization and is instead in flux and changing. I suppose this gives more texture to the ways that I think about entanglement. Or to be more direct, I believe the benefits of indexing are temporally bounded. They are not absolute nor axiomatic. But I believe indexing can also serve to better emphasize the multiple relations between things in a much more robust way than simply the observable measured differences that scientific rationality often privileges. This form of indexing is malleable and contextual, it depends on the one indexing, the method, and on that which is indexed. Its endured proximity doesn’t seek to remove complications through the rhetoric of universality or transparency, but is invested in the particular and chronic.<br />
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'''Computation and life (“bodies”, spaces, relationalities) are already entangled in so many ways; they are mutually constituent, for example the category of life wouldn’t exist without a whole apparatus of segmentation producing it as different from the non-living. To us it feels urgent to think with and towards computing-otherwise rather than to side with the uncomputable or to count on that which escapes calculation. What would it mean to critique math and quantification in their Modern shape, by calling for other logics instead?'''<br />
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In earlier writing, I have returned to theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s practice of ''speaking nearby'' to illustrate this relationship.<ref name="ftn237">Nancy N. Chen, ''“''Speaking Nearby: A Conversation with Trinh T. Minnh-ha,” ''Visual Anthropology Review'' 8, no. 1 (Sping 1992): 87.</ref> In an interview with Nancy N. Chen for the ''Visual Anthropology Review'', Minh-ha elaborates further: “In other words, a speaking that does not objectify, does not point to an object as if it is distant from the speaking subject or absent from the speaking place. A speaking that reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or claiming it. A speaking in brief, whose closures are only moments of transition opening up to other possible moments of transition”.<ref name="ftn238">Chen, “Speaking Nearby,” 87.</ref> I believe this could be an opening potential for indexing and the database, as a temporal marker of an instance of something in relation. What it tells us is not data about the essence of a fixed object, but of something caught in flux that we are in relation to.<br />
<br />
I also think this is a place where different practices of computation can be speculated on. To be able engage this type of indexed entanglement, it opens questions of method or protocol. It requires practice. More and more, I stick with computation to describe some of this complexity for a few reasons. The first is in refusing to relinquish computation as an already closed system that no longer requires definition. The second is in acknowledging the economic, cultural, imaginative, and disciplinary power that computation presently holds. And lastly, to speculate on the unique capacity of computation to contend with complex variables and their relationship to flux and modulation.<br />
<br />
Speaking on this capacity, Édouard Glissant writes about the trappings and potential that the computer holds towards poetics. In his text, ''Poetics of Relation'', Glissant briefly discusses computation and how it differs from poetry. On this he writes, “Accident that is not the result of chance is natural to poems, whereas it is the consummate vice (the “virus”) of any self-enclosed system, such as the computer. The poet’s truth is also the desired truth of the other, whereas, precisely, the truth of a computer system is closed back upon its own sufficient logic. Moreover, every conclusion reached by such a system has been inscribed in the original data, whereas poetics open onto unpredictable and unheard of things.”<ref name="ftn239">Édouard Glissant, ''Poetics of Relation'' (University of Michigan Press, 1997), 82.</ref> Glissant contrasts computation and poetry focusing on the closed, controlled, and binary character of computationalism. He understands it as a mechanism of separability. However, the potential for the computer when working outside of computationalism is not foreclosed. Just a few pages later he writes, “The computer, on the other hand, seems to be the privileged instrument of someone wanting to “follow” any Whole whose variants multiply vetiginously. It is useful for suggesting what is stable within the unstable. Therefore, though it does not create poetry, it can ‘show the way’ to a poetics.”<ref name="ftn240">Édouard, ''Poetics of Relation,'' 84.</ref><br />
<br />
Because computation is able to contend with complex multiplicity Glissant leaves it open as a wayfinder towards a poetics. He makes a slight but crucial distinction that computation is useful for suggesting what is stable within the unstable. He doesn’t state that computing itself creates stability or static fixed variables, but instead is able to suggest stability as an open and incomplete instance within a field of instability. While his first quote indexes some of the trappings of computation as a closed logic, he follows it by hinting at the possibility for computation to move through the complexities of entanglement. Perhaps at best, computation in this sense can hold the tension of indeterminacy without either becoming paralyzed or reducing the complexity of the Whole into predictable calculable units. Within this slight shift in language, computation is nudged open. It is made porous again and moves towards the direction of a poetics. Perhaps then this porousness can allow for finding a poetics of space within volumetric capture, by underlining the stable and unstable within computation, and resituated computation as a manner and mode of engaging the entanglement between those two poles. It is a practice of “showing the way” to a relation. Both bodies and space in this mode of computation hold a certain openness. They cannot completely be foreclosed as inherently separable parts.<br />
<br />
'''We wondered about the voluminosity of “bodies” but also of entanglement, and how to pay attention to it. Reading Denise Fereirra da Silva’s email conversation with Arjuna Neuman about her use of “Deep Implicancy” rather than “entanglement”, we were struck by the relation between spatiality and separation she brings up: “Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”<ref name="ftn241">Email correspondence between Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva, 2017-2018 [https://www.theshowroom.org/system/files/062020/5ef3716252712a038b005fbc/original/email_correspondence_AN_DFDS.pdf?1605089604 https://www.theshowroom.org/system/files/062020/5ef3716252712a038b005fbc/original/email_correspondence_AN_DFDS.pdf?1605089604].</ref><br />
<br />
'''So what if the spaces of entanglement provide a semiotic-material arena for cohabiting with and practicing 3D computation-otherwise? Could “Deep Implicancy” be where computing otherwise already happens, by means of speculation, indeterminacy and possibility located beyond, or below perhaps, normed actions like capturing, modeling or tracking that are all so complicit with the making of fungibility?'''<br />
<br />
So this question of Deep Implicancy is interesting. I think in reading through da Silva and Neumann’s email exchanges, I have a sense of the difference that she is trying to draw between entanglement and its inherent dependence on a kind of separability, because of its embedded focus on particles inherited from physics. Even things such as quantum entanglement or nonlocality, are still built from some kind of separability. I think that is an important distinction and contribution which breaks open some of my earlier thoughts on entanglement. That being said, I’m not sure I understand Deep Implicancy beyond the ways that it complicates the inherent separability within entanglement. It makes me want to ask, how does Deep Implicancy account for or contend with difference? It seems that there would still need to be room for variation or modulation. Perhaps even modulation and distance can become the language through which to speak to fluctuations, changes, variations, and instances within a dynamic implicancy. Because then we are able to account for difference without flattening it to an equivalence or commensurability. This thinking on modulation and difference is very much informed by Kara Keeling’s work in ''Queer Times Black Futures'',<ref name="ftn242">Kara Keeling, ''Queer Times Black Futures'' (New York: New York University Press, 2019).</ref> and Abdoumaliq Simone’s work in ''Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South''.<ref name="ftn243">AbdouMaliq Simone, ''Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South'' (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019).</ref> In her discussion of James A. Snead’s work on Black culture and repetition,<ref name="ftn244">James A. Snead, “On Repetition in Black Culture,” ''African American Review ''50, no. 4 (Winter 2017).</ref> Keeling makes connections to the computational practice of modulation and incommensurability. Evoking Snead, she states, “repetition means that the thing circulates (exactly in the manner of any flow, including capital flows) there in an equilibrium”. The “thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is there for you to pick up when you come back to get it”. She argues that this repetition and the ability to return rather than progress allows for a kind of cultural coverage that builds spaces for the unpredictable, errant, and accidental to happen. Keeling sees this practice as a mechanism of modulation, a mode of social and cultural continuity, which does not rely upon commensuration. Instead, it makes “incommensurability” into a relation. Perhaps this incommensurability, the impossibility of neat resolve can provide a helpful language to engage Deep Implicancy and its relationship to difference.<br />
<br />
'''The episteme of Modern technosciences classifies “bodies” as entities that occupy the dimensions of space and time at a certain scale, with a certain density, at a certain speed, etc. It is complicit with productivist, segregating, extractivist and deadly aims when calculating volumes of so-called bodies and their surroundings. But maybe such displacements, dimensional and material conditions, could also be of use for a disobedient rearranging of so-called bodies? How to think with possible forms of computation that do not leave its oppressions in place?'''<br />
<br />
Simone picks up this relation of incommensurability and stretches it to describe the movements, motions, calculations, and alterations of bodies as they converge and depart in space. Simone describes these bodies as “technical forces” that “speak, spit, stomp, fuck, gesture, lunge, or hover”. His understanding of space is constructed through these rhythms of endurance that bodies undertake in a constant renegotiation towards “a liveliness of things in general”. For Simone, “endurance also entails the actions of bodies indifferent to their own coherence, where bodies proliferate a churning that staves off death in their extension toward a liveliness of things in general, and where bodies become a transversal technology, as gesture, sex, gathering, and circulation operate as techniques of prolonging”. His writings on bodies as transversal technologies is really intriguing, in that they are always intersecting, crossing, and circulating. In doing so, it creates the spaces that they momentarily inhabit. The space does not precede the bodies. It is not a container in this analysis but is constructed through the circuitous gestures, gatherings, and sex of bodies churning together in incommensurability. Similarly, to Keeling’s focus on repetition Simone offers us a musical lexicon of rhythm, refrain and pulse to find stabilizing moments that thrive in response to risk and incalculability. For Simone the refrain works as this stabilizing repetition that creates “contexts of operation that cannot be stabilized”. Again, space for Simone is dependent and created through these undulating intersections of bodies that enact open modulating refrains. This works against easy practices of tracking or capturing, that volumetrically rendered spaces require, as it exceeds any preemptive containment. Space for Simone is not predetermined but is interdependent. More importantly, it is interdependent on the relations of bodies that evade stable categorization or coherence. Instead these relations are constantly modulating and shifting. Perhaps most beautifully, Simone articulates these intersecting modulations as care. On this he writes:<br />
<br />
''For the intersections among spiraling trajectories are a matter of care<ref name="ftn245">María Puig de la Bellacasa, ''Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds'' (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).''</ref>, inexplicable care, rogue care, care on the run, a tending not to people or by people, but a care that precedes them. It is a care that makes it possible for residents to navigate the need to submit and exceed, submerge themselves into a darkness in which they are submerged but to read its textures, its tissues, to see something that cannot be seen. It enables them to experience the operations of a sociality besides, right next to the glaring strictures of their obligations, expulsions, and exploitation, something that enables endurance, not necessarily their own endurance as human subjects, but the endurance of care indifferent to whatever or whoever it embraces. This is a process that entails both composition and refusal.<ref name="ftn246">AbdouMaliq Simone, ''Improvised Lives.''</ref><br />
<br />
Care here seems to emerge as an ethic void of preconditions. It simply is because it must be. It is a practice of endurance outright. One that enables fugitive flights, the promise of continued evasion, and a relation beyond commensurable equivalences. Perhaps this gives us more texture for what a Deep Implicancy can offer, no longer entangled, but stomping, speaking, and spitting in a space made through care without preconditions, indifferent to quantification.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<br />
<references/></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=MakeHuman&diff=2441MakeHuman2021-11-23T06:35:47Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== MakeHuman ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="portrait"><br />
[[file:Makehuman.png|300px|thumb|none|Default settings. Detail of MakeHuman’s main interface (MakeHuman<br>version 1.0.2)]]<br />
</div><br />
<br />
MakeHuman is an Open Source software for modeling 3-dimensional humanoid characters.<ref name="ftn214">Since we wrote this text, The MakeHuman project has forked into [http://makehumancommunity.org/ http://][http://makehumancommunity.org/ makehumancommunity.org] and the original website is off-line. </ref> Thinking with such a concrete software object meant to address specific entanglements of technology, representation and normativity: a potent triangle that MakeHuman sits in the middle of. But MakeHuman does not only deserve our attention due to the technological power of self-representation that it affords. As an Open Source project, it is shaped by the conditions of interrogation and transformability, guaranteed through its license. Like many other F/LOSS projects, MakeHuman is surrounded by a rich constellation of textual objects, expressed through publicly accessible source code, code-comments, bugtrackers, forums and documentation.<ref name="ftn215">Free, Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS) licenses stipulate that users of the software should have the freedom to run the program for any purpose, to study how the program works, to redistribute copies and to improve the program.</ref> This porousness facilitated the shaping of a collective inquiry, activated through experiments, conversations and mediations.<ref name="ftn216">In 2014, the association for art and media Constant organized ''GenderBlending'', a worksession to look at the way 3D-imaging technologies condition social readings and imaginations of gender. The collective inquiry continued with several performative iterations and includes contributions by Rebekka Eisner, Xavier Gorgol, Martino Morandi, Phil Langley and Adva Zakai, [http://genderblending.constantvzw.org/. http://genderblending.constantvzw.org.]</ref> In collaboration with architects, dancers, trans* activists, design students, animators and others, we are turning MakeHuman into a thinking machine, a device to critically think along physical and virtual imaginaries. Software is culture and hence software-making is world-making. It is a means for relationalities, not a crystallized cultural end.<ref name="ftn217">[http://www.makehuman.org/ http://www.makehuman.org] (off-line). </ref><br />
<br />
=== Software: we’ve got a situation here ===<br />
<br />
MakeHuman is “3D computer graphics middleware designed for the prototyping of photo realistic humanoids” and has gained visibility and popularity over time.<ref name="ftn218">“Makehuman is an open source 3D computer graphics software middleware designed for the prototyping of photo realistic humanoids. It is developed by a community of programmers, artists, and academics interested in 3D modeling of characters.” “Makehuman,” Wikipedia, accessed October 6, 2021, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeHuman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeHuman.].</ref> It is actively developed by a collective of programmers, algorithms, modelers and academics and used by amateur animators to prototype modeling, by natural history museums for creating exhibition displays, by engineers to test multi-camera systems and by game-developers for sketching bespoke characters.<ref name="ftn219">Present and past contributors to MakeHuman: [http://www.makehuman.org/halloffame.php http://www.makehuman.org/halloffame.php] (off-line).</ref> Developers and users evidently work together to define and codify the conditions of presence for virtual bodies in MakeHuman.<ref name="ftn220">“MakeHuman,” Wikipedia, accessed October 6, 2021, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeHuman#References_and_Related_Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeHuman#References_and_Related_Papers]</ref> Since each of the agents in this collective somehow operates under the Modern regime of representation, we find the software full of assumptions about the naturality of perspective-based and linear representations, the essential properties of the species and so forth. Through its curious naming the project evokes the demiurg, dreaming of “making” “humans” to resemble his own image, the deviceful naming is a reminder of how the semiotic-material secrets of life’s flows are strongly linked to the ways software represents or allows so-called bodies to be represented.<ref name="ftn221">The Artec3 3D-scanner is sold to museums, creative labs, forensic institutions and plastic surgery clinics alike. Their collection of use-cases shows how the market of shapes circulates between bodies, cars and prosthesis. “Artec 3D scanning applications,” Artec 3D, accessed October 6, 2021, [http://www.artec3d.com/applications http://www.artec3d.com/applications].</ref> The Modern subject, defined by the freedom to make and decide, is trained to self-construct under the narcissistic fantasy of “correct”, “proper” or “accurate” representations of the self. These virtual bodies matter to us because their persistent representations cause mirror affects and effects on both sides of the screen.<ref name="ftn222">A code comment in modeling_modifiers_desc.json, a file that defines the modifications operated by the sliders, explains that “Proportions of the human features, often subjectively referred to as qualities of beauty (min is unusual, center position is average and max is idealistic proportions).” [https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman] (version 1.0.2). </ref> MakeHuman is “middleware”, a device in the middle: a composition machine that glues the deliriums of the “quantified self” to that of Hollywood imagery, all of it made operational through scientific anthropomorphic data and the graphic tricks of 3D-hyper-real rendering. From software development to character animation, from scientific proof to surveillance, the practices crossing through MakeHuman produce images, imaginations and imaginaries that are part of a concrete and situated cultural assemblage of hetero-patriarchal positivism and humanism. Found in and fed by mainstream mediated representations, these imaginations generally align with the body stereotypes that belong to advanced capitalism and post-colonialist projections. Virtual bodies only look “normal” because they appear to fit into that complex situation.<br />
<br />
=== Un-taming the whole ===<br />
<br />
The signature feature of the MakeHuman interface is a set of horizontal sliders. For a split second, the surprising proposal to list “gender” as a continuous parameter, promises wild combinations. Could it be that MakeHuman is a place for imagining humanoids as subjects in process, as open-ended virtual figures that have not yet materialized? But the uncomfortable and yet familiar presence of physical and cultural properties projected to the same horizontal scale soon shatters that promise. The interface suggests that the technique of simply interpolating parameters labeled “Gender”, “Age”, “Muscle”, “Weight”, “Height”, “Proportions”, “Caucasian”, “African” and “Asian” suffices to make any representation of the human body. The unmarked extremities of the parameters are merely a way to outsource normativity to the user, who can only blindly guess the outcomes of the algorithmic calculations launched by handling the sliders. The tool invites a comparison between “Gender” to “Weight” for example, or to slide into racial classification and “Proportions” through a similar gesture. Subtle and less subtle shifts in both textual and visual language hint at the trouble of maintaining the one-dimensionality of this 3D world-view: “Gender” (not “Sex”) and “Weight” are labeled as singular but “Proportions” is plural; “Age” is not expressed as “Young” nor “Old”, while the last slider proposes three racialized options for mixture. They appear as a matter of fact, right below other parameters, as if equal to the others, proposing racialization as a comparable and objective vector for body formation, represented as finite (and consequently factual) because they are named as a limited set.<ref name="ftn223">humanmodifierclass.py, a file that holds the various software-classes to define body shapes, limits the “EthnicModifier(MacroModifier) class” to three racial parameters, together always making up a complete set: # We assume there to be only 3 ethnic modifiers. self._defaultValue = 1.0/3” [https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman] (version 1.0.2).</ref> We want to signal two things: one, that the persistent technocultural production of race is evidenced by the discretization of design elements such as the proportion of concrete bodyparts, chromatic levels of so-called skin, and racializing labels; and two, that the modeling software itself actively contributes to the maintenance of racism by reproducing representational simplifications and by performing the exclusion of diversity by means of solutionist tool operations.<ref name="ftn224">humanmodifierclass.py, a file that holds the various software-classes to define body shapes, limits the “EthnicModifier(MacroModifier) class” to three racial parameters, together always making up a complete set: # We assume there to be only 3 ethnic modifiers. self._defaultValue = 1.0/3” [https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman] (version 1.0.2).</ref><br />
<br />
Further inspection reveals that even the promise of continuity and separation is based on a trick. The actual math at work reveals an extremely limited topology based on a closed system of interconnected parameters, tightening the space of these bodies through assumptions of what they are supposed to be. This risky structuration is based on reduced humanist categories of “proportionality” and “normality”. Parametric design promises infinite differentiations but renders them into a mere illusion: obviously, not all physical bodies resulting from that combination would look the same, but software can make it happen. The sliders provide a machinic imagination for utilitarianised (supposedly human) compositors, conveniently covering up how they function through a mix of technical and cultural normativities. Aligning what is to be desired with the possible, they evidently mirror the binary systems of the Modern proposal for the world.<ref name="ftn225">In response to a user suggesting to make the sliders more explicit (“It really does not really make any sense for a character to be anything other then 100% male or female, but than again its more appearance based than actual sex.”), developer Manuel Bastioni responds that it is “not easy: For example, weight = 0.5 is not a fixed value. It depends by the age, the gender, the percentage of muscle and fat, and the height. If you are making an adult giant, 8 ft, fully muscular, your 0.5 weight is X. [...] In other words, it’s not linear.” Makehuman, [http://bugtracker.makehumancommunity.org/issues/489 http://bugtracker.makehumancommunity.org/issues/489].</ref> The point is not to “fix” these problems, quite the contrary. We experimented with replacing default values with random numbers, and other ways to intervene with the inner workings of the tool. But only when we started rewriting the interface, we could see it behave differently.<ref name="ftn226">MakeHuman is developed in Python, a programming language that is relatively accessible for non-technical users and does not require compilation after changes to the program are made.</ref> By renaming labels, replacing them with questions and more playful descriptions, by adding and distracting sliders, the interface became a space for narrating through the generative process of making possible bodies.<br />
<br />
A second technique of representation at work is that of geometric modeling or polygon meshes. A mesh consolidates an always-complete collection of vertices, edges, planes and faces in order to define the topology of an individualized shape. Each face of a virtual body is a convex polygon; this is common practice in 3D computer graphics and simplifies the complexity of the calculations needed for rendering. Polygon meshes are deeply indebted to the Cartesian perspective by their need for wholeness. It results in a firm separation of first inside from outside and secondly shape or topology from surface. The particular topology of MakeHuman is informed by a rather awkward sense of chastity.<ref name="ftn227">When the program starts up, a warning message is displayed that “MakeHuman is a character creation suite. It is designed for making anatomically correct humans. Parts of this program may contain nudity. Do you want to proceed?”</ref> With all it’s pride in “anatomical correctness” and high-resolution rendering, it has been decided to place genitals outside the base-body-mesh. The dis-membered body-parts are relegated to a secondary zone of the interface, together with other accessories such as hats and shoes. As a consequence, the additional set of skin-textures included in MakeHuman does not include the genital add-ons so that a change in material makes them stand out, both as a potentiality for otherwise embodied otherness and as evidence of the cultural limitations to represent physical embodiment.<br />
<br />
In MakeHuman, two different technical paradigms (parametric design and mesh-based perspective) are allied together to grow representative bodies that are renormalized within a limited and restricted field of cultivated material conditions, taming the infinite with the tricks of the “natural” and the “horizontal”. It is here that we see Modern algorithms at work: sustaining the virtual by providing certain projections of the world, scaled up to the size of a powerful presence in an untouchable present. But what if the problematic understanding of these bodies being somehow human, and at the same time being made by so-called humans, is only one specific actualization emerging from an infinite array of possibilities contained in the virtual? What if we could understand the virtual as a potential generator of differentiated and differentiating possibilities? This might lead us towards mediations for many other political imaginaries.<ref name="ftn228">The trans*-working field of all mediations is a profanation of sacred and natural bodies (of virtuality and of flesh). It evidences the fact of them being technological constructions.</ref><br />
<br />
=== A potential for imaginations ===<br />
<br />
By staging MakeHuman through a performative spectrum, the software turned into a thinking machine, confirming the latent potential of working through software objects. Sharing our lack of reverence for the overwhelming complexities of digital techniques and technologies of 3D imaging, we collectively uncovered its disclosures and played in its cracks.<ref name="ftn229">Here we refer to Agamben’s proposal for “profanation”: “To profane means to open the possibility of a special form of negligence, which ignores separation or, rather, puts it to a particular use.” Giorgio Agamben, ''Profanations'' (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 73.</ref> We could see the software iterate between past and present cultural paradigms as well as between humans and non-humans. These virtual bodies co-constructed through the imagination of programmers, algorithms and animators call for otherwise embodied others that suspend the mimicking of “nature” to make room for experiences that are not directly lived, but that deeply shape life.<ref name="ftn230">“The ergonomic design of interactive media has left behind the algorithmic ‘stuff’ of computation by burying information processing in the background of perception and embedding it deep within objects.” Luciana Parisi, ''Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space'' (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013).</ref><br />
<br />
Our persistent attention to MakeHuman being in the middle, situated in-between various digital practices of embodiment, somehow makes collaboration between perspectives possible, and pierces its own utilitarian mesh. Through strategies of “de-familiarization” the potentialities of software open up: breaking the surface is a political gesture that becomes generative, providing a topological dynamic that helps us experience the important presence of impurities in matter-culture continuums.<ref name="ftn231">Breaking and piercing the mesh are gestures that in “This topological dynamic reverberates with QFT processes [...] in a process of intra-active becoming, of reconfiguring and trans-forming oneself in the self’s multiple and dispersive sense of it-self where the self is intrinsically a nonself.” Karen Barad, “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings,” ''GLQ'' 21, nos. 2-3 (June 2015): 387-422. </ref> Exploring a software like MakeHuman hints at the possibility of a politics, aesthetics and ethics that is truly generative. It hints at how it is possible to provide us with endless a-Modern mestizo, an escape from representational and agential normativities, software CAN and MUST provide the material conditions for wild combinations or un-suspected renders.<ref name="ftn232">“xperiments in virtuality -explorations of possible trans*formations- are integral to each and every (ongoing) be(coming).” Barad, ''TransMaterialities''. </ref><br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
| First published in: ''Posthuman Glossary''. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (eds). Bloomsbury. 2018. <br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=MakeHuman&diff=2440MakeHuman2021-11-23T06:34:29Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== MakeHuman ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="portrait"><br />
[[file:Makehuman.png|300px|thumb|none|Default settings. Detail of MakeHuman’s main interface (MakeHuman<br>version 1.0.2)]]<br />
</div><br />
<br />
MakeHuman is an Open Source software for modeling 3-dimensional humanoid characters.<ref name="ftn214">Since we wrote this text, The MakeHuman project has forked into [http://makehumancommunity.org/ http://][http://makehumancommunity.org/ makehumancommunity.org] and the original website is off-line. </ref> Thinking with such a concrete software object meant to address specific entanglements of technology, representation and normativity: a potent triangle that MakeHuman sits in the middle of. But MakeHuman does not only deserve our attention due to the technological power of self-representation that it affords. As an Open Source project, it is shaped by the conditions of interrogation and transformability, guaranteed through its license. Like many other F/LOSS projects, MakeHuman is surrounded by a rich constellation of textual objects, expressed through publicly accessible source code, code-comments, bugtrackers, forums and documentation.<ref name="ftn215">Free, Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS) licenses stipulate that users of the software should have the freedom to run the program for any purpose, to study how the program works, to redistribute copies and to improve the program.</ref> This porousness facilitated the shaping of a collective inquiry, activated through experiments, conversations and mediations.<ref name="ftn216">In 2014, the association for art and media Constant organized ''GenderBlending'', a worksession to look at the way 3D-imaging technologies condition social readings and imaginations of gender. The collective inquiry continued with several performative iterations and includes contributions by Rebekka Eisner, Xavier Gorgol, Martino Morandi, Phil Langley and Adva Zakai, [http://genderblending.constantvzw.org/. http://genderblending.constantvzw.org.]</ref> In collaboration with architects, dancers, trans* activists, design students, animators and others, we are turning MakeHuman into a thinking machine, a device to critically think along physical and virtual imaginaries. Software is culture and hence software-making is world-making. It is a means for relationalities, not a crystallized cultural end.<ref name="ftn217">[http://www.makehuman.org/ http://www.makehuman.org] (off-line). </ref><br />
<br />
=== Software: we’ve got a situation here ===<br />
<br />
MakeHuman is “3D computer graphics middleware designed for the prototyping of photo realistic humanoids” and has gained visibility and popularity over time.<ref name="ftn218">“Makehuman is an open source 3D computer graphics software middleware designed for the prototyping of photo realistic humanoids. It is developed by a community of programmers, artists, and academics interested in 3D modeling of characters.” “Makehuman,” Wikipedia, accessed October 6, 2021, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeHuman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeHuman.].</ref> It is actively developed by a collective of programmers, algorithms, modelers and academics and used by amateur animators to prototype modeling, by natural history museums for creating exhibition displays, by engineers to test multi-camera systems and by game-developers for sketching bespoke characters.<ref name="ftn219">Present and past contributors to MakeHuman: [http://www.makehuman.org/halloffame.php http://www.makehuman.org/halloffame.php] (off-line).</ref> Developers and users evidently work together to define and codify the conditions of presence for virtual bodies in MakeHuman.<ref name="ftn220">“MakeHuman,” Wikipedia, accessed October 6, 2021, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeHuman#References_and_Related_Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeHuman#References_and_Related_Papers]</ref> Since each of the agents in this collective somehow operates under the Modern regime of representation, we find the software full of assumptions about the naturality of perspective-based and linear representations, the essential properties of the species and so forth. Through its curious naming the project evokes the demiurg, dreaming of “making” “humans” to resemble his own image, the deviceful naming is a reminder of how the semiotic-material secrets of life’s flows are strongly linked to the ways software represents or allows so-called bodies to be represented.<ref name="ftn221">The Artec3 3D-scanner is sold to museums, creative labs, forensic institutions and plastic surgery clinics alike. Their collection of use-cases shows how the market of shapes circulates between bodies, cars and prosthesis. “Artec 3D scanning applications,” Artec 3D, accessed October 6, 2021, [http://www.artec3d.com/applications http://www.artec3d.com/applications].</ref> The Modern subject, defined by the freedom to make and decide, is trained to self-construct under the narcissistic fantasy of “correct”, “proper” or “accurate” representations of the self. These virtual bodies matter to us because their persistent representations cause mirror affects and effects on both sides of the screen.<ref name="ftn222">A code comment in modeling_modifiers_desc.json, a file that defines the modifications operated by the sliders, explains that “Proportions of the human features, often subjectively referred to as qualities of beauty (min is unusual, center position is average and max is idealistic proportions).” [https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman] (version 1.0.2). </ref> MakeHuman is “middleware”, a device in the middle: a composition machine that glues the deliriums of the “quantified self” to that of Hollywood imagery, all of it made operational through scientific anthropomorphic data and the graphic tricks of 3D-hyper-real rendering. From software development to character animation, from scientific proof to surveillance, the practices crossing through MakeHuman produce images, imaginations and imaginaries that are part of a concrete and situated cultural assemblage of hetero-patriarchal positivism and humanism. Found in and fed by mainstream mediated representations, these imaginations generally align with the body stereotypes that belong to advanced capitalism and post-colonialist projections. Virtual bodies only look “normal” because they appear to fit into that complex situation.<br />
<br />
=== Un-taming the whole ===<br />
<br />
The signature feature of the MakeHuman interface is a set of horizontal sliders. For a split second, the surprising proposal to list “gender” as a continuous parameter, promises wild combinations. Could it be that MakeHuman is a place for imagining humanoids as subjects in process, as open-ended virtual figures that have not yet materialized? But the uncomfortable and yet familiar presence of physical and cultural properties projected to the same horizontal scale soon shatters that promise. The interface suggests that the technique of simply interpolating parameters labeled “Gender”, “Age”, “Muscle”, “Weight”, “Height”, “Proportions”, “Caucasian”, “African” and “Asian” suffices to make any representation of the human body. The unmarked extremities of the parameters are merely a way to outsource normativity to the user, who can only blindly guess the outcomes of the algorithmic calculations launched by handling the sliders. The tool invites a comparison between “Gender” to “Weight” for example, or to slide into racial classification and “Proportions” through a similar gesture. Subtle and less subtle shifts in both textual and visual language hint at the trouble of maintaining the one-dimensionality of this 3D world-view: “Gender” (not “Sex”) and “Weight” are labeled as singular but “Proportions” is plural; “Age” is not expressed as “Young” nor “Old”, while the last slider proposes three racialized options for mixture. They appear as a matter of fact, right below other parameters, as if equal to the others, proposing racialization as a comparable and objective vector for body formation, represented as finite (and consequently factual) because they are named as a limited set.<ref name="ftn223">humanmodifierclass.py, a file that holds the various software-classes to define body shapes, limits the “EthnicModifier(MacroModifier) class” to three racial parameters, together always making up a complete set: # We assume there to be only 3 ethnic modifiers. self._defaultValue = 1.0/3” [https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman] (version 1.0.2).</ref> We want to signal two things: one, that the persistent technocultural production of race is evidenced by the discretization of design elements such as the proportion of concrete bodyparts, chromatic levels of so-called skin, and racializing labels; and two, that the modeling software itself actively contributes to the maintenance of racism by reproducing representational simplifications and by performing the exclusion of diversity by means of solutionist tool operations.<ref name="ftn224">humanmodifierclass.py, a file that holds the various software-classes to define body shapes, limits the “EthnicModifier(MacroModifier) class” to three racial parameters, together always making up a complete set: # We assume there to be only 3 ethnic modifiers. self._defaultValue = 1.0/3” [https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman] (version 1.0.2).</ref><br />
<br />
Further inspection reveals that even the promise of continuity and separation is based on a trick. The actual math at work reveals an extremely limited topology based on a closed system of interconnected parameters, tightening the space of these bodies through assumptions of what they are supposed to be. This risky structuration is based on reduced humanist categories of “proportionality” and “normality”. Parametric design promises infinite differentiations but renders them into a mere illusion: obviously, not all physical bodies resulting from that combination would look the same, but software can make it happen. The sliders provide a machinic imagination for utilitarianised (supposedly human) compositors, conveniently covering up how they function through a mix of technical and cultural normativities. Aligning what is to be desired with the possible, they evidently mirror the binary systems of the Modern proposal for the world.<ref name="ftn225">In response to a user suggesting to make the sliders more explicit (“It really does not really make any sense for a character to be anything other then 100% male or female, but than again its more appearance based than actual sex.”), developer Manuel Bastioni responds that it is “not easy: For example, weight = 0.5 is not a fixed value. It depends by the age, the gender, the percentage of muscle and fat, and the height. If you are making an adult giant, 8 ft, fully muscular, your 0.5 weight is X. [...] In other words, it’s not linear.” Makehuman, [http://bugtracker.makehumancommunity.org/issues/489 http://bugtracker.makehumancommunity.org/issues/489].</ref> The point is not to “fix” these problems, quite the contrary. We experimented with replacing default values with random numbers, and other ways to intervene with the inner workings of the tool. But only when we started rewriting the interface, we could see it behave differently.<ref name="ftn226">MakeHuman is developed in Python, a programming language that is relatively accessible for non-technical users and does not require compilation after changes to the program are made.</ref> By renaming labels, replacing them with questions and more playful descriptions, by adding and distracting sliders, the interface became a space for narrating through the generative process of making possible bodies.<br />
<br />
A second technique of representation at work is that of geometric modeling or polygon meshes. A mesh consolidates an always-complete collection of vertices, edges, planes and faces in order to define the topology of an individualized shape. Each face of a virtual body is a convex polygon; this is common practice in 3D computer graphics and simplifies the complexity of the calculations needed for rendering. Polygon meshes are deeply indebted to the Cartesian perspective by their need for wholeness. It results in a firm separation of first inside from outside and secondly shape or topology from surface. The particular topology of MakeHuman is informed by a rather awkward sense of chastity.<ref name="ftn227">When the program starts up, a warning message is displayed that “MakeHuman is a character creation suite. It is designed for making anatomically correct humans. Parts of this program may contain nudity. Do you want to proceed?”</ref> With all it’s pride in “anatomical correctness” and high-resolution rendering, it has been decided to place genitals outside the base-body-mesh. The dis-membered body-parts are relegated to a secondary zone of the interface, together with other accessories such as hats and shoes. As a consequence, the additional set of skin-textures included in MakeHuman does not include the genital add-ons so that a change in material makes them stand out, both as a potentiality for otherwise embodied otherness and as evidence of the cultural limitations to represent physical embodiment.<br />
<br />
In MakeHuman, two different technical paradigms (parametric design and mesh-based perspective) are allied together to grow representative bodies that are renormalized within a limited and restricted field of cultivated material conditions, taming the infinite with the tricks of the “natural” and the “horizontal”. It is here that we see Modern algorithms at work: sustaining the virtual by providing certain projections of the world, scaled up to the size of a powerful presence in an untouchable present. But what if the problematic understanding of these bodies being somehow human, and at the same time being made by so-called humans, is only one specific actualization emerging from an infinite array of possibilities contained in the virtual? What if we could understand the virtual as a potential generator of differentiated and differentiating possibilities? This might lead us towards mediations for many other political imaginaries.<ref name="ftn228">The trans*-working field of all mediations is a profanation of sacred and natural bodies (of virtuality and of flesh). It evidences the fact of them being technological constructions.</ref><br />
<br />
=== A potential for imaginations ===<br />
<br />
By staging MakeHuman through a performative spectrum, the software turned into a thinking machine, confirming the latent potential of working through software objects. Sharing our lack of reverence for the overwhelming complexities of digital techniques and technologies of 3D imaging, we collectively uncovered its disclosures and played in its cracks.<ref name="ftn229">Here we refer to Agamben’s proposal for “profanation”: “To profane means to open the possibility of a special form of negligence, which ignores separation or, rather, puts it to a particular use.” Giorgio Agamben, ''Profanations'' (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 73.</ref> We could see the software iterate between past and present cultural paradigms as well as between humans and non-humans. These virtual bodies co-constructed through the imagination of programmers, algorithms and animators call for otherwise embodied others that suspend the mimicking of “nature” to make room for experiences that are not directly lived, but that deeply shape life.<ref name="ftn230">“The ergonomic design of interactive media has left behind the algorithmic ‘stuff’ of computation by burying information processing in the background of perception and embedding it deep within objects.” Luciana Parisi, ''Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space'' (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013).</ref><br />
<br />
Our persistent attention to MakeHuman being in the middle, situated in-between various digital practices of embodiment, somehow makes collaboration between perspectives possible, and pierces its own utilitarian mesh. Through strategies of “de-familiarization” the potentialities of software open up: breaking the surface is a political gesture that becomes generative, providing a topological dynamic that helps us experience the important presence of impurities in matter-culture continuums.<ref name="ftn231">Breaking and piercing the mesh are gestures that in “This topological dynamic reverberates with QFT processes [...] in a process of intra-active becoming, of reconfiguring and trans-forming oneself in the self’s multiple and dispersive sense of it-self where the self is intrinsically a nonself.” Karen Barad, “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings,” ''GLQ'' 21, nos. 2-3 (June 2015): 387-422. </ref> Exploring a software like MakeHuman hints at the possibility of a politics, aesthetics and ethics that is truly generative. It hints at how it is possible to provide us with endless a-Modern mestizo, an escape from representational and agential normativities, software CAN and MUST provide the material conditions for wild combinations or un-suspected renders.<ref name="ftn232">“xperiments in virtuality -explorations of possible trans*formations- are integral to each and every (ongoing) be(coming).” Barad, ''TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings''. </ref><br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
| First published in: ''Posthuman Glossary''. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (eds). Bloomsbury. 2018. <br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=MakeHuman&diff=2439MakeHuman2021-11-23T06:31:41Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== MakeHuman ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="portrait"><br />
[[file:Makehuman.png|300px|thumb|none|Default settings. Detail of MakeHuman’s main interface (MakeHuman<br>version 1.0.2)]]<br />
</div><br />
<br />
MakeHuman is an Open Source software for modeling 3-dimensional humanoid characters.<ref name="ftn214">Since we wrote this text, The MakeHuman project has forked into [http://makehumancommunity.org/ http://][http://makehumancommunity.org/ makehumancommunity.org] and the original website is off-line. </ref> Thinking with such a concrete software object meant to address specific entanglements of technology, representation and normativity: a potent triangle that MakeHuman sits in the middle of. But MakeHuman does not only deserve our attention due to the technological power of self-representation that it affords. As an Open Source project, it is shaped by the conditions of interrogation and transformability, guaranteed through its license. Like many other F/LOSS projects, MakeHuman is surrounded by a rich constellation of textual objects, expressed through publicly accessible source code, code-comments, bugtrackers, forums and documentation.<ref name="ftn215">Free, Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS) licenses stipulate that users of the software should have the freedom to run the program for any purpose, to study how the program works, to redistribute copies and to improve the program.</ref> This porousness facilitated the shaping of a collective inquiry, activated through experiments, conversations and mediations.<ref name="ftn216">In 2014, the association for art and media Constant organized ''GenderBlending'', a worksession to look at the way 3D-imaging technologies condition social readings and imaginations of gender. The collective inquiry continued with several performative iterations and includes contributions by Rebekka Eisner, Xavier Gorgol, Martino Morandi, Phil Langley and Adva Zakai, [http://genderblending.constantvzw.org/. http://genderblending.constantvzw.org.]</ref> In collaboration with architects, dancers, trans* activists, design students, animators and others, we are turning MakeHuman into a thinking machine, a device to critically think along physical and virtual imaginaries. Software is culture and hence software-making is world-making. It is a means for relationalities, not a crystallized cultural end.<ref name="ftn217">[http://www.makehuman.org/ http://www.makehuman.org] (off-line). </ref><br />
<br />
=== Software: we’ve got a situation here ===<br />
<br />
MakeHuman is “3D computer graphics middleware designed for the prototyping of photo realistic humanoids” and has gained visibility and popularity over time.<ref name="ftn218">“Makehuman is an open source 3D computer graphics software middleware designed for the prototyping of photo realistic humanoids. It is developed by a community of programmers, artists, and academics interested in 3D modeling of characters.” “Makehuman,” Wikipedia, accessed October 6, 2021, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeHuman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeHuman.].</ref> It is actively developed by a collective of programmers, algorithms, modelers and academics and used by amateur animators to prototype modeling, by natural history museums for creating exhibition displays, by engineers to test multi-camera systems and by game-developers for sketching bespoke characters.<ref name="ftn219">Present and past contributors to MakeHuman: [http://www.makehuman.org/halloffame.php http://www.makehuman.org/halloffame.php] (off-line).</ref> Developers and users evidently work together to define and codify the conditions of presence for virtual bodies in MakeHuman.<ref name="ftn220">“MakeHuman,” Wikipedia, accessed October 6, 2021, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeHuman#References_and_Related_Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeHuman#References_and_Related_Papers]</ref> Since each of the agents in this collective somehow operates under the Modern regime of representation, we find the software full of assumptions about the naturality of perspective-based and linear representations, the essential properties of the species and so forth. Through its curious naming the project evokes the demiurg, dreaming of “making” “humans” to resemble his own image, the deviceful naming is a reminder of how the semiotic-material secrets of life’s flows are strongly linked to the ways software represents or allows so-called bodies to be represented.<ref name="ftn221">The Artec3 3D-scanner is sold to museums, creative labs, forensic institutions and plastic surgery clinics alike. Their collection of use-cases shows how the market of shapes circulates between bodies, cars and prosthesis. “Artec 3D scanning applications,” Artec 3D, accessed October 6, 2021, [http://www.artec3d.com/applications http://www.artec3d.com/applications].</ref> The Modern subject, defined by the freedom to make and decide, is trained to self-construct under the narcissistic fantasy of “correct”, “proper” or “accurate” representations of the self. These virtual bodies matter to us because their persistent representations cause mirror affects and effects on both sides of the screen.<ref name="ftn222">A code comment in modeling_modifiers_desc.json, a file that defines the modifications operated by the sliders, explains that “Proportions of the human features, often subjectively referred to as qualities of beauty (min is unusual, center position is average and max is idealistic proportions).” [https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman] (version 1.0.2). </ref> MakeHuman is “middleware”, a device in the middle: a composition machine that glues the deliriums of the “quantified self” to that of Hollywood imagery, all of it made operational through scientific anthropomorphic data and the graphic tricks of 3D-hyper-real rendering. From software development to character animation, from scientific proof to surveillance, the practices crossing through MakeHuman produce images, imaginations and imaginaries that are part of a concrete and situated cultural assemblage of hetero-patriarchal positivism and humanism. Found in and fed by mainstream mediated representations, these imaginations generally align with the body stereotypes that belong to advanced capitalism and post-colonialist projections. Virtual bodies only look “normal” because they appear to fit into that complex situation.<br />
<br />
=== Un-taming the whole ===<br />
<br />
The signature feature of the MakeHuman interface is a set of horizontal sliders. For a split second, the surprising proposal to list “gender” as a continuous parameter, promises wild combinations. Could it be that MakeHuman is a place for imagining humanoids as subjects in process, as open-ended virtual figures that have not yet materialized? But the uncomfortable and yet familiar presence of physical and cultural properties projected to the same horizontal scale soon shatters that promise. The interface suggests that the technique of simply interpolating parameters labeled “Gender”, “Age”, “Muscle”, “Weight”, “Height”, “Proportions”, “Caucasian”, “African” and “Asian” suffices to make any representation of the human body. The unmarked extremities of the parameters are merely a way to outsource normativity to the user, who can only blindly guess the outcomes of the algorithmic calculations launched by handling the sliders. The tool invites a comparison between “Gender” to “Weight” for example, or to slide into racial classification and “Proportions” through a similar gesture. Subtle and less subtle shifts in both textual and visual language hint at the trouble of maintaining the one-dimensionality of this 3D world-view: “Gender” (not “Sex”) and “Weight” are labeled as singular but “Proportions” is plural; “Age” is not expressed as “Young” nor “Old”, while the last slider proposes three racialized options for mixture. They appear as a matter of fact, right below other parameters, as if equal to the others, proposing racialization as a comparable and objective vector for body formation, represented as finite (and consequently factual) because they are named as a limited set.<ref name="ftn223">humanmodifierclass.py, a file that holds the various software-classes to define body shapes, limits the “EthnicModifier(MacroModifier) class” to three racial parameters, together always making up a complete set: # We assume there to be only 3 ethnic modifiers. self._defaultValue = 1.0/3” [https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman] (version 1.0.2).</ref> We want to signal two things: one, that the persistent technocultural production of race is evidenced by the discretization of design elements such as the proportion of concrete bodyparts, chromatic levels of so-called skin, and racializing labels; and two, that the modeling software itself actively contributes to the maintenance of racism by reproducing representational simplifications and by performing the exclusion of diversity by means of solutionist tool operations.<ref name="ftn224">humanmodifierclass.py, a file that holds the various software-classes to define body shapes, limits the “EthnicModifier(MacroModifier) class” to three racial parameters, together always making up a complete set: # We assume there to be only 3 ethnic modifiers. self._defaultValue = 1.0/3” [https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman] (version 1.0.2).</ref><br />
<br />
Further inspection reveals that even the promise of continuity and separation is based on a trick. The actual math at work reveals an extremely limited topology based on a closed system of interconnected parameters, tightening the space of these bodies through assumptions of what they are supposed to be. This risky structuration is based on reduced humanist categories of “proportionality” and “normality”. Parametric design promises infinite differentiations but renders them into a mere illusion: obviously, not all physical bodies resulting from that combination would look the same, but software can make it happen. The sliders provide a machinic imagination for utilitarianised (supposedly human) compositors, conveniently covering up how they function through a mix of technical and cultural normativities. Aligning what is to be desired with the possible, they evidently mirror the binary systems of the Modern proposal for the world.<ref name="ftn225">In response to a user suggesting to make the sliders more explicit (“It really does not really make any sense for a character to be anything other then 100% male or female, but than again its more appearance based than actual sex.”), developer Manuel Bastioni responds that it is “not easy: For example, weight = 0.5 is not a fixed value. It depends by the age, the gender, the percentage of muscle and fat, and the height. If you are making an adult giant, 8 ft, fully muscular, your 0.5 weight is X. (...) In other words, it’s not linear.” Makehuman, [http://bugtracker.makehumancommunity.org/issues/489 http://bugtracker.makehumancommunity.org/issues/489].</ref> The point is not to “fix” these problems, quite the contrary. We experimented with replacing default values with random numbers, and other ways to intervene with the inner workings of the tool. But only when we started rewriting the interface, we could see it behave differently.<ref name="ftn226">MakeHuman is developed in Python, a programming language that is relatively accessible for non-technical users and does not require compilation after changes to the program are made.</ref> By renaming labels, replacing them with questions and more playful descriptions, by adding and distracting sliders, the interface became a space for narrating through the generative process of making possible bodies.<br />
<br />
A second technique of representation at work is that of geometric modeling or polygon meshes. A mesh consolidates an always-complete collection of vertices, edges, planes and faces in order to define the topology of an individualized shape. Each face of a virtual body is a convex polygon; this is common practice in 3D computer graphics and simplifies the complexity of the calculations needed for rendering. Polygon meshes are deeply indebted to the Cartesian perspective by their need for wholeness. It results in a firm separation of first inside from outside and secondly shape or topology from surface. The particular topology of MakeHuman is informed by a rather awkward sense of chastity.<ref name="ftn227">When the program starts up, a warning message is displayed that “MakeHuman is a character creation suite. It is designed for making anatomically correct humans. Parts of this program may contain nudity. Do you want to proceed?”</ref> With all it’s pride in “anatomical correctness” and high-resolution rendering, it has been decided to place genitals outside the base-body-mesh. The dis-membered body-parts are relegated to a secondary zone of the interface, together with other accessories such as hats and shoes. As a consequence, the additional set of skin-textures included in MakeHuman does not include the genital add-ons so that a change in material makes them stand out, both as a potentiality for otherwise embodied otherness and as evidence of the cultural limitations to represent physical embodiment.<br />
<br />
In MakeHuman, two different technical paradigms (parametric design and mesh-based perspective) are allied together to grow representative bodies that are renormalized within a limited and restricted field of cultivated material conditions, taming the infinite with the tricks of the “natural” and the “horizontal”. It is here that we see Modern algorithms at work: sustaining the virtual by providing certain projections of the world, scaled up to the size of a powerful presence in an untouchable present. But what if the problematic understanding of these bodies being somehow human, and at the same time being made by so-called humans, is only one specific actualization emerging from an infinite array of possibilities contained in the virtual? What if we could understand the virtual as a potential generator of differentiated and differentiating possibilities? This might lead us towards mediations for many other political imaginaries.<ref name="ftn228">The trans*-working field of all mediations is a profanation of sacred and natural bodies (of virtuality and of flesh). It evidences the fact of them being technological constructions.</ref><br />
<br />
=== A potential for imaginations ===<br />
<br />
By staging MakeHuman through a performative spectrum, the software turned into a thinking machine, confirming the latent potential of working through software objects. Sharing our lack of reverence for the overwhelming complexities of digital techniques and technologies of 3D imaging, we collectively uncovered its disclosures and played in its cracks.<ref name="ftn229">Here we refer to Agamben’s proposal for “profanation”: “To profane means to open the possibility of a special form of negligence, which ignores separation or, rather, puts it to a particular use.” Giorgio Agamben, ''Profanations'' (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 73.</ref> We could see the software iterate between past and present cultural paradigms as well as between humans and non-humans. These virtual bodies co-constructed through the imagination of programmers, algorithms and animators call for otherwise embodied others that suspend the mimicking of “nature” to make room for experiences that are not directly lived, but that deeply shape life.<ref name="ftn230">“The ergonomic design of interactive media has left behind the algorithmic ‘stuff’ of computation by burying information processing in the background of perception and embedding it deep within objects.” Luciana Parisi, ''Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space'' (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013).</ref><br />
<br />
Our persistent attention to MakeHuman being in the middle, situated in-between various digital practices of embodiment, somehow makes collaboration between perspectives possible, and pierces its own utilitarian mesh. Through strategies of “de-familiarization” the potentialities of software open up: breaking the surface is a political gesture that becomes generative, providing a topological dynamic that helps us experience the important presence of impurities in matter-culture continuums.<ref name="ftn231">Breaking and piercing the mesh are gestures that in “This topological dynamic reverberates with QFT processes (...) in a process of intra-active becoming, of reconfiguring and trans-forming oneself in the self’s multiple and dispersive sense of it-self where the self is intrinsically a nonself.” Karen Barad, “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings,” ''GLQ'' 1 June 2015; 21 (2-3): 387–422.</ref> Exploring a software like MakeHuman hints at the possibility of a politics, aesthetics and ethics that is truly generative. It hints at how it is possible to provide us with endless a-Modern mestizo, an escape from representational and agential normativities, software CAN and MUST provide the material conditions for wild combinations or un-suspected renders.<ref name="ftn232">“xperiments in virtuality -explorations of possible trans*formations- are integral to each and every (ongoing) be(coming).” Barad, ''TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings''. </ref><br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
| First published in: ''Posthuman Glossary''. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (eds). Bloomsbury. 2018. <br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=MakeHuman&diff=2438MakeHuman2021-11-23T06:26:17Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
== MakeHuman ==<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="portrait"><br />
[[file:Makehuman.png|300px|thumb|none|Default settings. Detail of MakeHuman’s main interface (MakeHuman<br>version 1.0.2)]]<br />
</div><br />
<br />
MakeHuman is an Open Source software for modeling 3-dimensional humanoid characters.<ref name="ftn214">Since we wrote this text, The MakeHuman project has forked into [http://makehumancommunity.org/ http://][http://makehumancommunity.org/ makehumancommunity.org] and the original website is off-line. </ref> Thinking with such a concrete software object meant to address specific entanglements of technology, representation and normativity: a potent triangle that MakeHuman sits in the middle of. But MakeHuman does not only deserve our attention due to the technological power of self-representation that it affords. As an Open Source project, it is shaped by the conditions of interrogation and transformability, guaranteed through its license. Like many other F/LOSS projects, MakeHuman is surrounded by a rich constellation of textual objects, expressed through publicly accessible source code, code-comments, bugtrackers, forums and documentation.<ref name="ftn215">Free, Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS) licenses stipulate that users of the software should have the freedom to run the program for any purpose, to study how the program works, to redistribute copies and to improve the program.</ref> This porousness facilitated the shaping of a collective inquiry, activated through experiments, conversations and mediations.<ref name="ftn216">In 2014, the association for art and media Constant organized ''GenderBlending'', a worksession to look at the way 3D-imaging technologies condition social readings and imaginations of gender. The collective inquiry continued with several performative iterations and includes contributions by Rebekka Eisner, Xavier Gorgol, Martino Morandi, Phil Langley and Adva Zakai. [http://genderblending.constantvzw.org/ http://genderblending.constantvzw.org]</ref> In collaboration with architects, dancers, trans* activists, design students, animators and others, we are turning MakeHuman into a thinking machine, a device to critically think along physical and virtual imaginaries. Software is culture and hence software-making is world-making. It is a means for relationalities, not a crystallized cultural end.<ref name="ftn217">[http://www.makehuman.org/ http://www.makehuman.org] (off-line). </ref><br />
<br />
=== Software: we’ve got a situation here ===<br />
<br />
MakeHuman is “3D computer graphics middleware designed for the prototyping of photo realistic humanoids” and has gained visibility and popularity over time.<ref name="ftn218">“Makehuman is an open source 3D computer graphics software middleware designed for the prototyping of photo realistic humanoids. It is developed by a community of programmers, artists, and academics interested in 3D modeling of characters.” “Makehuman,” Wikipedia, accessed October 6, 2021 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeHuman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeHuman].</ref> It is actively developed by a collective of programmers, algorithms, modelers and academics and used by amateur animators to prototype modeling, by natural history museums for creating exhibition displays, by engineers to test multi-camera systems and by game-developers for sketching bespoke characters.<ref name="ftn219">Present and past contributors to MakeHuman: [http://www.makehuman.org/halloffame.php http://www.makehuman.org/halloffame.php] (off-line).</ref> Developers and users evidently work together to define and codify the conditions of presence for virtual bodies in MakeHuman.<ref name="ftn220">“MakeHuman,” Wikipedia, accessed October 6, 2021, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeHuman#References_and_Related_Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeHuman#References_and_Related_Papers]</ref> Since each of the agents in this collective somehow operates under the Modern regime of representation, we find the software full of assumptions about the naturality of perspective-based and linear representations, the essential properties of the species and so forth. Through its curious naming the project evokes the demiurg, dreaming of “making” “humans” to resemble his own image, the deviceful naming is a reminder of how the semiotic-material secrets of life’s flows are strongly linked to the ways software represents or allows so-called bodies to be represented.<ref name="ftn221">The Artec3 3D-scanner is sold to museums, creative labs, forensic institutions and plastic surgery clinics alike. Their collection of use-cases shows how the market of shapes circulates between bodies, cars and prosthesis. “Artec 3D scanning applications,” Artec 3D, accessed October 6, 2021, [http://www.artec3d.com/applications http://www.artec3d.com/applications].</ref> The Modern subject, defined by the freedom to make and decide, is trained to self-construct under the narcissistic fantasy of “correct”, “proper” or “accurate” representations of the self. These virtual bodies matter to us because their persistent representations cause mirror affects and effects on both sides of the screen.<ref name="ftn222">A code comment in modeling_modifiers_desc.json, a file that defines the modifications operated by the sliders, explains that “Proportions of the human features, often subjectively referred to as qualities of beauty (min is unusual, center position is average and max is idealistic proportions).” [https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman] (version 1.0.2) </ref> MakeHuman is “middleware”, a device in the middle: a composition machine that glues the deliriums of the “quantified self” to that of Hollywood imagery, all of it made operational through scientific anthropomorphic data and the graphic tricks of 3D-hyper-real rendering. From software development to character animation, from scientific proof to surveillance, the practices crossing through MakeHuman produce images, imaginations and imaginaries that are part of a concrete and situated cultural assemblage of hetero-patriarchal positivism and humanism. Found in and fed by mainstream mediated representations, these imaginations generally align with the body stereotypes that belong to advanced capitalism and post-colonialist projections. Virtual bodies only look “normal” because they appear to fit into that complex situation.<br />
<br />
=== Un-taming the whole ===<br />
<br />
The signature feature of the MakeHuman interface is a set of horizontal sliders. For a split second, the surprising proposal to list “gender” as a continuous parameter, promises wild combinations. Could it be that MakeHuman is a place for imagining humanoids as subjects in process, as open-ended virtual figures that have not yet materialized? But the uncomfortable and yet familiar presence of physical and cultural properties projected to the same horizontal scale soon shatters that promise. The interface suggests that the technique of simply interpolating parameters labeled “Gender”, “Age”, “Muscle”, “Weight”, “Height” “Proportions”, “Caucasian” “African” and “Asian” suffices to make any representation of the human body. The unmarked extremities of the parameters are merely a way to outsource normativity to the user, who can only blindly guess the outcomes of the algorithmic calculations launched by handling the sliders. The tool invites a comparison between “Gender” to “Weight” for example, or to slide into racial classification and “Proportions” through a similar gesture. Subtle and less subtle shifts in both textual and visual language hint at the trouble of maintaining the one-dimensionality of this 3D world-view: “Gender” (not “Sex”) and “Weight” are labeled as singular but “Proportions” is plural; “Age” is not expressed as “Young” nor “Old”, while the last slider proposes three racialized options for mixture. They appear as a matter of fact, right below other parameters, as if equal to the others, proposing racialization as a comparable and objective vector for body formation, represented as finite (and consequently factual) because they are named as a limited set.<ref name="ftn223">humanmodifierclass.py, a file that holds the various software-classes to define body shapes, limits the “EthnicModifier(MacroModifier) class” to three racial parameters, together always making up a complete set: # We assume there to be only 3 ethnic modifiers. self._defaultValue = 1.0/3” [https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman] (version 1.0.2)</ref> We want to signal two things: one, that the persistent technocultural production of race is evidenced by the discretization of design elements such as the proportion of concrete bodyparts, chromatic levels of so-called skin, and racializing labels; and two, that the modeling software itself actively contributes to the maintenance of racism by reproducing representational simplifications and by performing the exclusion of diversity by means of solutionist tool operations.<ref name="ftn224">humanmodifierclass.py, a file that holds the various software-classes to define body shapes, limits the “EthnicModifier(MacroModifier) class” to three racial parameters, together always making up a complete set: # We assume there to be only 3 ethnic modifiers. self._defaultValue = 1.0/3” [https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman] (version 1.0.2)</ref><br />
<br />
Further inspection reveals that even the promise of continuity and separation is based on a trick. The actual math at work reveals an extremely limited topology based on a closed system of interconnected parameters, tightening the space of these bodies through assumptions of what they are supposed to be. This risky structuration is based on reduced humanist categories of “proportionality” and “normality”. Parametric design promises infinite differentiations but renders them into a mere illusion: obviously, not all physical bodies resulting from that combination would look the same, but software can make it happen. The sliders provide a machinic imagination for utilitarianised (supposedly human) compositors, conveniently covering up how they function through a mix of technical and cultural normativities. Aligning what is to be desired with the possible, they evidently mirror the binary systems of the Modern proposal for the world.<ref name="ftn225">In response to a user suggesting to make the sliders more explicit (“It really does not really make any sense for a character to be anything other then 100% male or female, but than again its more appearance based than actual sex.”), developer Manuel Bastioni responds that it is “not easy: For example, weight = 0.5 is not a fixed value. It depends by the age, the gender, the percentage of muscle and fat, and the height. If you are making an adult giant, 8 ft, fully muscular, your 0.5 weight is X. (...) In other words, it’s not linear.” Makehuman, [http://bugtracker.makehumancommunity.org/issues/489 http://bugtracker.makehumancommunity.org/issues/489].</ref> The point is not to “fix” these problems, quite the contrary. We experimented with replacing default values with random numbers, and other ways to intervene with the inner workings of the tool. But only when we started rewriting the interface, we could see it behave differently.<ref name="ftn226">MakeHuman is developed in Python, a programming language that is relatively accessible for non-technical users and does not require compilation after changes to the program are made.</ref> By renaming labels, replacing them with questions and more playful descriptions, by adding and distracting sliders, the interface became a space for narrating through the generative process of making possible bodies.<br />
<br />
A second technique of representation at work is that of geometric modeling or polygon meshes. A mesh consolidates an always-complete collection of vertices, edges, planes and faces in order to define the topology of an individualized shape. Each face of a virtual body is a convex polygon; this is common practice in 3D computer graphics and simplifies the complexity of the calculations needed for rendering. Polygon meshes are deeply indebted to the Cartesian perspective by their need for wholeness. It results in a firm separation of first inside from outside and secondly shape or topology from surface. The particular topology of MakeHuman is informed by a rather awkward sense of chastity.<ref name="ftn227">When the program starts up, a warning message is displayed that “MakeHuman is a character creation suite. It is designed for making anatomically correct humans. Parts of this program may contain nudity. Do you want to proceed?”</ref> With all it’s pride in “anatomical correctness” and high-resolution rendering, it has been decided to place genitals outside the base-body-mesh. The dis-membered body-parts are relegated to a secondary zone of the interface, together with other accessories such as hats and shoes. As a consequence, the additional set of skin-textures included in MakeHuman does not include the genital add-ons so that a change in material makes them stand out, both as a potentiality for otherwise embodied otherness and as evidence of the cultural limitations to represent physical embodiment.<br />
<br />
In MakeHuman, two different technical paradigms (parametric design and mesh-based perspective) are allied together to grow representative bodies that are renormalized within a limited and restricted field of cultivated material conditions, taming the infinite with the tricks of the “natural” and the “horizontal.” It is here that we see Modern algorithms at work: sustaining the virtual by providing certain projections of the world, scaled up to the size of a powerful presence in an untouchable present. But what if the problematic understanding of these bodies being somehow human, and at the same time being made by so-called humans, is only one specific actualization emerging from an infinite array of possibilities contained in the virtual? What if we could understand the virtual as a potential generator of differentiated and differentiating possibilities? This might lead us towards mediations for many other political imaginaries.<ref name="ftn228">The trans*-working field of all mediations is a profanation of sacred and natural bodies (of virtuality and of flesh). It evidences the fact of them being technological constructions.</ref><br />
<br />
=== A potential for imaginations ===<br />
<br />
By staging MakeHuman through a performative spectrum, the software turned into a thinking machine, confirming the latent potential of working through software objects. Sharing our lack of reverence for the overwhelming complexities of digital techniques and technologies of 3D imaging, we collectively uncovered its disclosures and played in its cracks.<ref name="ftn229">Here we refer to Agamben’s proposal for “profanation”: “To profane means to open the possibility of a special form of negligence, which ignores separation or, rather, puts it to a particular use.” Giorgio Agamben, ''Profanations'' (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 73.</ref> We could see the software iterate between past and present cultural paradigms as well as between humans and non-humans. These virtual bodies co-constructed through the imagination of programmers, algorithms and animators call for otherwise embodied others that suspend the mimicking of “nature” to make room for experiences that are not directly lived, but that deeply shape life.<ref name="ftn230">“The ergonomic design of interactive media has left behind the algorithmic “stuff” of computation by burying information processing in the background of perception and embedding it deep within objects” Luciana Parisi, ''Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space'' (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013).</ref><br />
<br />
Our persistent attention to MakeHuman being in the middle, situated in-between various digital practices of embodiment, somehow makes collaboration between perspectives possible, and pierces its own utilitarian mesh. Through strategies of “de-familiarization” the potentialities of software open up: breaking the surface is a political gesture that becomes generative, providing a topological dynamic that helps us experience the important presence of impurities in matter-culture continuums.<ref name="ftn231">Breaking and piercing the mesh are gestures that in “This topological dynamic reverberates with QFT processes (...) in a process of intra-active becoming, of reconfiguring and trans-forming oneself in the self’s multiple and dispersive sense of it-self where the self is intrinsically a nonself.” Karen Barad, “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings,” ''GLQ'' 1 June 2015; 21 (2-3): 387–422.</ref> Exploring a software like MakeHuman hints at the possibility of a politics, aesthetics and ethics that is truly generative. It hints at how it is possible to provide us with endless a-Modern mestizo, an escape from representational and agential normativities, software CAN and MUST provide the material conditions for wild combinations or un-suspected renders.<ref name="ftn232">“xperiments in virtuality -explorations of possible trans*formations- are integral to each and every (ongoing) be(coming).” Barad, ''TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings''. </ref><br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
| First published in: ''Posthuman Glossary''. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (eds). Bloomsbury. 2018. <br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Circluding&diff=2437Circluding2021-11-23T06:23:54Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>== Circluding ==<br />
<br />
'''Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies'''<br />
<br />
<br />
'''This guided tour was performed on-line at ''Possible Bodies Rotation II, Imagined Mishearings'' in Hangar (Barcelona, July 2017) and then again at ''Rotation III, Phenomenal 3D'' in Bau (Barcelona, November 2017) with participants cutting and folding the poster reproduced on the following pages.'''<ref>For another take on “circluding”, see Possible Bodies, “Somatopologies (materials for a movie in the making),” in this book.</ref><br />
<br />
<br />
'''Item 005: Hyperbolic Spaces'''<br />
<br />
''Rolling inward enables rolling outward; the shape of life’s motion traces a hyperbolic space, swooping and fluting like the folds of a frilled lettuce, coral reef, or a bit of crocheting.''<ref name="ftn208">Donna J. Haraway, ''Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene'' (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).</ref><br />
<br />
'''Item 028: Circluding''' <br />
<br />
''A new term, one that has been missing for a long time: “circlusion.” It denotes the antonym of penetration. It refers to the same physical process, but from the opposite perspective. Penetration means pushing something –a shaft or a nipple– into something else –a ring or a tube.'' Circlusion means pushing something –a ring or a tube– onto something else –a nipple or a shaft. The ring and the tube are rendered active. ''That’s all there is to it.''<ref name="ftn209">Bini Adamczak, “On Circlusion,” ''Mask Magazine'', 2016, maskmagazine.com.</ref><br />
<br />
'''Item 079: Gut Feminism''' <br />
<br />
''The belly takes shape both from what has been ingested (from the world), from its internal neighbors (liver, diaphragm, intestines, kidney), and from bodily posture. This is an organ uniquely positioned, anatomically, to contain what is worldly, what is idiosyncratic, and what is visceral, and to show how such divisions are always being broken down, remade, metabolized, circulated, intensified, and excreted. It is my concern that we have come to be astute about the body while being ignorant about anatomy and that feminism’s relations to biological data have tended to be skeptical or indifferent rather than speculative, engaged, fascinated, surprised, enthusiastic, amused, or astonished.''<ref name="ftn210">Elizabeth A. Wilson, ''Gut Feminism'' (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 43.</ref><br />
<br />
'''Item 078: Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction'''<br />
<br />
''If you haven’t got something to put it in, food will escape you – even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it’s cold and raining and wouldn’t it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn’t it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? ''A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.<ref name="ftn211">Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in ''Women of Vision: Essays by Women Writing Science Fiction'', ed. Denise Du Pont, (New York: St Martin's Press, 1988).</ref><br />
<br />
'''Item 80: Polyvagal Theory''' <br />
<br />
''The removal of threat is not the same as feeling safe.''<ref name="ftn212">Stephen W. Porges, ''The Polyvagal Theory ''(New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).</ref><br />
<br />
'''Item 81: Local Resolution''' <br />
<br />
''Phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components”. That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations –relations without preexisting relata. The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual “interaction”, which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata) represents a profound conceptual shift.'' It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the “components” of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful. ''A specific intra-action (involving a specific material configuration of the “apparatus of observation”) enacts an agential cut (in contrast to the Cartesian cut –an inherent distinction– between subject and object) effecting a separation between “subject” and “object”. That is, the agential cut enacts a'' local resolution ''within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy.''<ref name="ftn213">Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” ''SIGNS'' (Spring 2003): 815.</ref><br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references /><br />
<br />
<div class="fullpage circluding right"><br />
[[File:Fanziposter.png|thumb|none|500px|<noinclude>Fanziposter (recto), Kym Ward, ''Circluding'' (2017) / [[:File:Fanziposter.pdf|Download PDF (8 MB)]]</noinclude>]]<br />
</div><br />
<br />
<div class="fullpage circluding left"><br />
[[File:Fanziposter_verso.png|thumb|none|500px|<noinclude>Fanziposter (verso), Kym Ward, ''Circluding'' (2017) / [[:File:Fanziposter.pdf|Download PDF (8 MB)]]</noinclude>]]<br />
</div><br />
<br />
<div style="clear: both"></div></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Somatopologies_(materials_for_a_movie_in_the_making)&diff=2436Somatopologies (materials for a movie in the making)2021-11-23T06:19:57Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>== Somatopologies (materials for a movie in the making) ==<br />
<br />
'''Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting)'''<br />
<br />
<br />
'''''Somatopologies'' consists of texts and 3D-renderings with diverse densities, selected from the Possible Bodies Inventory. Each of them wonders from a different perspective about the regimes of truth that converge in volumetric biomedical images. The materials investigate the coalition at work between tomography and topology that aligns math, flesh, computation, bone, anatomic science, tissue and language. When life is made all too probable, what other “bodies” can be imagined? In six sequences, Somatopologies moves through the political fictions of somatic matter. Rolling from outside to inside, from a mediated exteriority to a computed interiority and back, it reconsiders the potential of unsupervised somatic depths and (un-)invaded interiors. Unfolding along situated surfaces, this post-cinematic experiment jumps over the probable outcomes of contemporary informatics, towards the possible otherness of a mundane (after)math. It is a trans*feminist exercise in and of disobedient action-research. It cuts agential slices through technocratic paradigms in order to create hyperbolic incisions that stretch, rotate and bend Euclidean nightmares and Cartesian anxieties.'''<br />
<br />
<div class="page-break"></div><br />
<br />
[[File:01.png|700px|thumb|none|[https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?005 ''Item 005: Hyperbolic Spaces''] + [https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?082 ''Item 082: Ultrasonic Dreams'']]]<br />
<br />
<blockquote>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 that have also been called non-Euclidean geometry.<ref name="ftn202">''Item 005'' is a remix of the Wikipedia entries on: “Euclidian” and “Non-Euclidian math”, inspired by the rendering of Hyperbolic Spaces in Donna J. Haraway, ''Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene'' (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
<div class="page-break"></div><br />
<br />
[[File:02.png|700px|thumb|none|[https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?099 ''Item 099: Porous micro-structures''] + [https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?071 ''Item 071: Visible Woman'']]]<br />
<br />
<blockquote>No one knows her name. Or why she ended up here. On the internet. In classrooms. In laboratories. Cut into thousands of slices. Picked over and probed. Every inch analyzed and inspected by strangers, around the world. She is the most autopsied woman on earth. The world’s one and only Visible Woman has revealed everything for the sake of Modern science. Except ... her identity.<ref name="ftn203">Transcription from “Visible Woman,” American TV-documentary, 1997, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmDrlJtrByY. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmDrlJtrByY.]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
<div class="page-break"></div><br />
<br />
[[File:03.png|700px|thumb|none|[https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?098 ''Item 098: Region Of Interest''] + [https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?028 ''Item 028: Circlusion and/or circluding'']]]<br />
<br />
<blockquote>A new term, one that has been missing for a long time: “circlusion”. It denotes the antonym of penetration. It refers to the same physical process, but from the opposite perspective. Penetration means pushing something –a shaft or a nipple– into something else –a ring or a tube. Circlusion means pushing something –a ring or a tube– onto something else –a nipple or a shaft. The ring and the tube are rendered active. That’s all there is to it.<ref name="ftn204">Bini Adamczak, “On Circlusion” ''Mask Magazine'', 2016, maskmagazine.com. For another take, see Kym Ward feat. Possible Bodies, “Circluding,” in this book.</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
<div class="page-break"></div><br />
<br />
[[File:04.png|700px|thumb|none|[https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?006 ''Item 006: The Right-Hand Rule''] + [https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?098 ''Item 098: Region Of Interest'']]]<br />
<br />
<blockquote>First things first, find your Region Of Interest. [...] It is going to be available in all planes. Yours is not going to look like this, it might look like this: so that it surrounds the entire image. If that is the case, what you are going to do now, is drag in all four sides, so that you have basically isolated your Organ Of Interest. And you are going to do that for all the different planes as well, just so you know that we are going to get exactly what we are asking for.<ref name="ftn205">Transcription from, “Patient CT Mandible Segmentation for 3D Print Tutorial (using ITK-Snap),” 2016, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P44m3MZuv5A. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P44m3MZuv5A.]</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
<div class="page-break"></div><br />
<br />
[[File:05.png|700px|thumb|none|[https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?017 ''Item 017: MakeHuman''] + [https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?082 ''Item 082: Ultrasonic Dreams'']]]<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
Now they all moved together, more-than-human components and machines, experiencing an odd sensation of weightlessness and heaviness at the same time. Limbs stuck to the wall, atoms bristled. Bodies first lost their orientation and then their boundaries, melting into the fast turning tube. Radiating beams fanned out from the middle, slicing through matter radically transforming it with increasing intensity as the strength of circlusion decreased.<ref name="ftn206">See: Possible Bodies (Helen V. Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting), “Ultrasonic Dreams of Aclinical Renderings,” in this book.</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
<div class="page-break"></div><br />
<br />
[[File:06.png|700px|thumb|none|[https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?070 ''Item 070: Anatomical planes''] + [https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/?012 ''Item 012: No Ground'']]]<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Closer, further, higher, lower: the body arranges itself in perspective, but we must attend the differences inherent in that active positioning. The fact that we are dealing with an animation of a moving body implies that the dimension of time is brought into the conversation. Displacement is temporary, with a huge variation in the gradient of time from momentary to persistent.<ref name="ftn207">See: Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “Dis-orientation and its Aftermath,” in this book.</ref><br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
=== Documentation of the installation ===<br />
<br />
<gallery mode="traditional"><br />
Image:Constant_V.jpeg|Installation in the window of Constant, 2017<br />
File:PWFU7727.JPG<br />
File:PWFU7618.JPG<br />
File:PWFU7602.JPG<br />
File:IMG_4805.JPG|School of schools, Istanbul, 2017<br />
File:IMG_4806.JPG<br />
File:IMG_4808.JPG<br />
File:IMG_4807.JPG<br />
File:Possible_Bodies_(Femke_Snelting_and_Jara_Rocha)_Monoskop_XL_2018.jpg|Exhibition Library at Seoul Mediacity Biennial, 2017<br />
File:Dusan_Barok_and_Monoskop_2018_Exhibition_Library_at_Mediacity_Biennale_Seoul_6.large.jpg<br />
File:Dusan_Barok_and_Monoskop_2018_Exhibition_Library_at_Mediacity_Biennale_Seoul_1.large.jpg<br />
</gallery><br />
</noinclude><br />
<div class="page-break"></div><br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
| Initially created as an installation for [http://constantvzw.org/site/Somatopologies.html Constant_V], ''somatopologies'' travelled to [http://aschoolofschools.iksv.org/ 4th Istanbul Design Biennial], the [https://monoskop.org/Exhibition_Library Exhibition Library] at Seoul Mediacity Biennial, LUMA Arles [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J48Fq4k4K0 A School of Schools], [https://www.z33.be/blog/2019/4/11/a-school-of-schools C-Mine Genk] and Goldsmiths, London at [https://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=12597 Volumetric Ecologies]. All materials can be found here (videos, subtitles, installation guides in FR, NL, EN): https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/somatopologies/<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Clumsy_Volumetrics&diff=2435Clumsy Volumetrics2021-11-23T06:14:54Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>== Clumsy Volumetrics ==<br />
<br />
'''Helen V. Pritchard'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Opening the on-line ''Possible Bodies Inventory,'' we encounter an abundance of items —shifting numbered entries of manuals, mathematical concepts, art-projects and micro-CT images of volumetric presences. So-called bodies in the context of hardware for scanning, tracking, capturing and of software tools for data processing and 3D-visualization. Working on-and-with the ''Possible Bodies Inventory'' is an inquiry on the materialization of bodies and spaces, in dizzying relation with volume practices. As discussed throughout this book, the volumetric regime directs what so-called bodies are —and how they are “shaped by the lines they follow”.<ref name="ftn168">Sara Ahmed, ''Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others'' (Duke University Press, 2006), 133.</ref> As Sara Ahmed outlines in her queer phenomenology, orientations matter in how they shape what becomes socially as well as bodily given; that is how bodies materialize and take shape.<ref name="ftn169">Ahmed, ''Queer Phenomenology''</ref> Many items in the ''Possible Bodies Inventory'' evidence how the orientations of 3D practices matter significantly in materializing spaces for bodies that are inhabitable for some, and not others.<ref name="ftn170">See also for example Romi Ron Morrison, “Endured instances of relation, an exchange,” Possible Bodies, “So-called plants,” and Jara Rocha, “Depths and Densities: A Bugged Report,” in this book.</ref> Rocha and Snelting refer to this as the the “very probable colonial, capitalist, hetero-patriarchal, ableist and positivist topology of contemporary volumetrics.”<ref name="ftn171">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “The Industrial Continuum of 3D,” in this book.</ref> Indeed the ''Possible Bodies Inventory'' demonstrates how the inherited histories of colonialism stretch into 3D practices to shape and direct bodies: “colonialism makes the world ‘white’, which is of course a world ‘ready’ for certain kinds of bodies, as a world that puts certain objects within their reach”.<ref name="ftn172">Ahmed, ''Queer Phenomenology'', 87.</ref> This orientation starts within the worldsetting of x = 0, y = 0, z = 0 and spreads out across 3D space; the mesh, the coordinate system, geometry and finally, the world.<ref name="ftn173">Possible Bodies, “Disorientation and its after-math,” in this book.</ref> However, what are the orientations that spread from this computational world-setting to shape spaces? How does it also reinforce what is already made reachable or not, livable or not, from what Louis Althusser calls the zero point of orientation, from which the world unfolds?<ref name="ftn174">Edmund Husserl, “Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution,” Vol. 3. Springer Science & Business Media, 166, cited in Ahmed, ''Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others,'' 8.</ref> As Possible Bodies observe in ''Item 007: Worldsettings for beginners'':<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Using software manuals as probes into computational realities, we traced the concept of “world” in Blender, a powerful Free, Libre and Open Source 3D creation suite. We tried to experience its process of “worlding” by staying on the cusp of “entering” into the software. Keeping a balance between comprehension and confusion, we used the sense of dis-orientation that shifting understandings of the word “world” created, to gauge what happens when such a heady term is lifted from colloquial language to be re-normalized and re-naturalized. If the point of origin changes, the world moves but the body doesn’t.</blockquote><br />
<br />
As Possible Bodies feel-out, in their software critique of 3D graphics software ''Blender'', in volumetric regimes, when worlds are set, the possibilities for bodies are narrowly scripted —computationally pre-determining the objects that stay in reach. And like in the physical world these “orientations become socially given by being repeated over time”.<ref name="ftn175">Ahmed, ''Queer Phenomenology,'' 77.</ref> Indeed, as ''Item 007'' shows, volumetric world-settings are an attempt to fix in place how the world unfolds from a zero-point orientation. An orientation which shapes and is shaped by a certain kind of body as a norm and what Ahmed calls less room to wiggle —“[l]ess wiggle room: less freedom to be; less being to free”.<ref name="ftn176">Sara Ahmed, “Wiggle Room,” ''Feministkilljoys'' (blog), September 28, 2014, [https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/09/28/wiggle-room/ https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/09/28/wiggle-room/].</ref> So, in volumetric regimes —when worlds are ''world-set'' in ways that computationally shape the body to the world, through directions between fixed points, what about the bodies that don’t fit or don’t follow the set directions?<br />
<br />
Ahmed suggests that “clumsiness” might be the way to form a queer and crip ethics to generate new openings and possibilities. Clumsy referring to when we wiggle off the path, are out of time with each other and become in the way of ourselves:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Bodies that wriggle might be crip bodies, as well as a queer bodies; bodies that do not straighten themselves out. The elimination of wriggle might be one form of what Robert McRuer calls “compulsory able-bodied-ness,”<ref name="ftn177">Robert McRuer, “Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability,” Vol. no.9, NYU press.</ref> which is tied to compulsory [cis-gendered] straightness, to being able to follow as closely as you can the line you are supposed to follow.<ref name="ftn178">Ahmed, “Wiggle Room”.</ref></blockquote><br />
<br />
Making the affinity present between queer and crip, Ahmed notes, clumsiness is not always a process which brings us together or attunes us, it can also be the moments –the desiring moments– when we bump into the world. Clumsiness is a powerful political orientation, one in which our ways of relating to, and depending on, each other are reconfigured, promising as McRuer notes, possibilities to “somehow access other worlds and futures”.<ref name="ftn179">McRuer, “Crip Theory,” 208.</ref> By awkwardly reaching towards some of the items at the inventory, can we orient volumetric practices that make wiggle room, deviate from straightness and open up new liberatory paths? Informed by the difficulties of following the paths of queer life and world-declarations, might we form paths of queer desire for bodies? Such desire might pass through tentative processes to de-universalize, de-centralize, de-compose and re-visit tools and practices in order to better understand the conditions of their mutual constitution. Paths made through workarounds, interventions and hacks of volumetric hardwares and softwares that deviate from social-givens.<br />
<br />
Queerness matters because it affects what we can do, where we can go, how we are perceived, and so on. Yet we also know about creative wiggles, wiggling off paths when our bodies don’t fit and the queer wiggle of wiggling in cramped spaces.<ref name="ftn180">Ahmed, ''Queer Phenomenology,'' 77.</ref> Ahmed writes that for queers “it is hard to simply stay on course because love is also what gives us a certain direction” creating orientations of desire that generate new shapes and new impressions.<ref name="ftn181">Ahmed, ''Queer Phenomenology,'' 19.</ref> However, although love might give us a certain direction, it can take a lot of work to switch orientations. Turning towards a queer ethics of clumsiness for volumetrics then might take some work to make room for non-attunement, not seeing this as a loss of possibility but as opening new paths; making accounts of the damages done to bodies who stray from the world-settings of volumetric regimes; and unfolding new ways which bodies shape and are shaped by calculations.<br />
<br />
As the disobedient action research of ''Item 007'' demonstrates, in computer graphics and other geometry-related data processing, calculations are based on Cartesian coordinates, consisting of three different dimensional axis: x, y and z. In 3D-modelling, this is what is referred to as “the world”.<ref name="ftn182">See: Possible Bodies, “Disorientation and its after-math,” in this book.</ref> The point of origin literally figures as the beginning of the local or global computational context that a 3D object functions. But what is this world that is set and how does it shape or is shaped by so-called bodies? In a discussion of facial reconstruction by forensic science, Vicki Kirby, drawing on Bruno Latour‘s work on scientific reference, suggests we would be wrong to assume that the relationships conjured in 3D modelling are simply an illusion or mirror.<ref name="ftn183">Vicki Kirby, ''Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large'' (Duke University Press, 2013), 78.</ref> Instead, Kirby demonstrates that there is a relationship between 3D models and the physical world, what she calls communicative intimacies and peculiar correspondences, that are conjured between a 3D modelled face and the data gathered from a fragment of a skull.<ref name="ftn184">Kirby, ''Quantum Anthropologies'', 26.</ref> That is to say there is often some resonance between data collected in one site and modelled or visualized in another, which opens up the possibility for agency in 3D. Forensic science practices are based on techniques that pre-date computers, but that are refined by the use of ultrasound data from living people, computed tomography (CT scans), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs) and Kirby shows how:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>data taken from one temporal and spatial location can contain information about another; a fragment of skull is also a sign of the whole, just as an individual skull seems to be a specific expression of a universal faciality. In other words, there is no simple presence versus absence in these examples.<ref name="ftn185">Kirby, ''Quantum Anthropologies'', 26.</ref></blockquote><br />
<br />
Kirby proposes (following Latour) that this is because the world, as a more-than-human assembly, has the capacity to produce nodes of reference, or evidence, that effectively correspond.<ref name="ftn186">Kirby, ''Quantum Anthropologies'', 81.</ref> That is, ''the world is present'' in 3D scans and models. Kirby suggests this means we need then to consider the possibility of the peculiar correspondence between the physical world and 3D models not as loss, or reduction of nature/world but as its playful affirmation.<ref name="ftn187">Kirby, ''Quantum Anthropologies'', 20.</ref> This recognition ''does'' open up the powerful possibility for a 3D practice which is understood as inhabited by the liveliness of the world. However what Kirby ''does not'' acknowledge is that because the world ''is'' present in 3D practices, they are also already materially oriented towards social givens of what faces (or forests) are. This is particularly poignant in the model of an “evolutionary” body type facial reconstruction documented in ''Item 086: The Truthful Hairy Hominid.'' The item shows us documentation from an excursion to the basement of the Natural Sciences Museum in Brussels, highlighting the dependence of 3D practices of facial reconstruction on scientific racism. This is also evidenced in the research of Abigail Nieves Delgado, who through a series of semi-structured interviews with experts in facial reconstruction, shows how “when reconstructing a face, experts carry out a particular way of seeing [...] that interprets visible differences in bodies as racial differences”.<ref name="ftn188">Abigail Nieves Delgado, “The Problematic Use of Race in Facial Reconstruction”, ''Science as Culture'' 29, no. 4, (2020): 568. </ref> She suggests that this analysis highlights that facial reconstructions should be understood as objects that allow us to trace past and present pathways of racial thinking in science. Delgado shows how the scientists and modellers she interviewed see skull shapes as part of specific narratives about purity, mixture, nation and race, narratives that reiterate the violence of scientific racism. Delgado argues that “by looking at facial reconstruction, we also learn that to stop reproducing race means to stop seeing [and modelling] in racial terms”<ref name="ftn189">Nieves Delgado, “The Problematic Use of Race in Facial Reconstruction”.</ref> —a way of seeing based on racialized categories that have become embedded within scientific practices as neutral. This normative seeing is held in place by 3D volumetrics and facial reconstruction practice. So, whilst we might recognize that the world is present in 3D models and this opens up possibilities for encountering the liveliness of the world, we also need to recognize these same models are informed by the inherited histories of the sciences in which they operate.<br />
<br />
Alongside the violent directive softwares and hardwares of the industrial continuum of volumetric regimes, the ''Possible Bodies Inventory'' also holds and sorts propositions that hold the liveliness of the world, its shaping capacities and find ways to remake volumetrics, destabilizing the inherited histories of colonialism, ableism and racism within the sciences that inform 3D practices. The queer and crip volumes are full of the pleasure, tenderness and excitement of opening worlds. Hacked scanners, misused models, lumpy bodies all create glimmering deviations, which rotate as alternative volumetrics. These inventory items generate the proposal of working with other references within 3D modelling, held in tension with the technical aspects of 3D modelling. Or as Snelting discusses:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>we might use awkwardness to move beyond thinking about software in terms of control using awkwardness as a strategy to cause interference, to create pivotal moments between falling and moving, an awkward in-between that makes space for thinking without stopping us to act.<ref name="ftn190">Femke Snelting, “Awkward Gestures,” in ''The Mag.Net Reader 3: Processual Publishing: Actual gestures'', eds. Alessandro Ludovico and Nat Muller (London: OpenMute Press, 2008).</ref></blockquote><br />
<br />
This pleasurable, loving, reorientating between falling and moving in the ''Possible Bodies Inventory'' includes inventory items that make present volumes generated by human and more-than-human bodies such as scanner, flowers, plants, trees, human gestures, minerals and anatomy. Working on and with these inventory items is alike to what Jas Rault and T. L. Cowan describe as entering into a collective deep queer processing— “the possibilities for understanding process as a sexy, sometimes agonized but always committed, method, an orientation towards unruly information”.<ref name="ftn191">Jas Rault and T.L Cowan, “Heavy Processing for Digital Materials (More Than A Feeling): Part I: Lesbian Processing”, 2020, [http://www.drecollab.org/heavy-processing/ http://www.drecollab.org/heavy-processing/][http://www.drecollab.org/heavy-processing/.]</ref><br />
<br />
One of these orientations towards unruly information is ''Item 035: Difficult Forests'' by Sina Seifee, ''Difficult Forests'' turns us to moving coordinates, colors and what Seifee describes as ''Memoirs''.<ref name="ftn192">See: Sina Seifee, “Rigging Demons,” in this book.</ref>&nbsp;In 2013 Seifee travelled to the Amazon region in Colombia with the Kinect as a recording device. The Kinect was hacked to work as a kind of LiDAR to create a series of digital memoirs spelled out as systematic screen glitches, technological relationships and life histories:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The representation of the journey —itself as complex problematic event— together with the horde of visual artifacts tell a set of interfacial stories with my co-travellers. This project addresses the splicing of direct and tactile human perception of reality with another reality, one that is mediated and technical. It is an aesthetic dream, dream of isomorphism between the discursive object and the visible object in the Amazonian forests.<ref name="ftn193">Sina Seifee, “Difficult Forests,” 2016, [http://www.sinaseifee.com/DifficultForests.html http://www.sinaseifee.com/DifficultForests.html].</ref></blockquote><br />
<br />
''Difficult Forests'' generates queer traces of desire, the images and text creating different routes to get to this point or to that point. Here deviating in the forest resets stability and make new co-ordinates of points between so-called bodies —they wiggle from the 0,0,0 of worldsetting. Seifee discusses how sometimes the Kinect is held by him, sometimes by his companion or the 3 year old with them. Destabilizing the imaginary of the lone able-bodied cis male scientist who scans the forest under difficult conditions, the different paths become queer intergenerational “multiple world-declarations”.<ref name="ftn194">Possible Bodies, “Disorientation and its after-math”.</ref> Using the hacked Kinect to generate measurements from a zero point that is never still, ''Item 035''&nbsp;opens up the possibility for the movement between points to be queered, to be reinhabited and change course, whilst not letting go of the possibilities of volumetric knowledge&nbsp;production. The Kinect extends the reach of the body, whose bodies reach and the forest. Seifee documents this extension of reach in the images and text, recording how the body becomes-with the difficult forest as it takes in that which is “not” it. What Ahmed describes as the “the acquisition of new capacities and directions —becoming, in other words, “not” simply what I am “not” but what I can “have” and “do”. The “not me” is incorporated into the body, extending its reach”.<ref name="ftn195">Ahmed, ''Queer Phenomenology,'' 91.</ref> These more-than-human capacities and directions shape forest, scanner and body. As Seifee notes, “The forest recorded and screen captured while walking in a “directly lived” space —in sweat, heat, fatigue and mosquito bite”.<ref name="ftn196">Sina Seifee, “Amazon Talk,” FULL SATURATION in Kunstpavillon München, 2014, [https://seifee.com/post/138661817448/amazon-talk https://seifee.com/post/138661817448/amazon-talk].</ref> The result is a corrupted Kinect scan of the forest, where the mapped surfaces of leaves float around a body without stable ground, as the forest unfolds. It asks us to consider the practice of 3D scanning as a practice of memoir in which the world is made present as a shaping that unfolds through surface encounters (rather than linear methods of collection).<br />
<br />
In these memoirs ''Difficult Forests'' seems marked with details that are the “indelible and complex entanglements of nature/culture”.<ref name="ftn197">Myra J. Hird, “Feminist Engagements with Matter,” ''Feminist Studies'' 35, no. 2 (2009): 329-47.</ref> The memoirs of ''Difficult Forests'', are more-than-human and dazzling with the reticulant agency of the forest. As Seifee notes, “the Amazon rainforest still resists to remain a radical nonhuman surrounding on the surface of the earth”.<ref name="ftn198">Seifee, “Amazon Talk.”</ref> The memoirs problematize the overlapping surface and jungle, yet the result is not a visual without reference —both scientific and affective. The images correspond to a set of measured points and the forest is still present in a felt shaping way. We witness the dense and lively agency of the forest and the human-machine scanners in this unstable scan. ''Difficult Forests'' reminds us that there is a possibility to conjure a looser translation between local and global coordinates one that stays with the openings 3D offers but also proposes new ways of seeing with 3D. It reorients the translation between the local and global&nbsp;(data) that emerges from 3D scanning in inventive ways —making room for deviations from set paths between points and bodies that emerge as different shapes.<br />
<br />
[[File:Difficultforest.jpg|thumb|none|700px|Sina Seifee, ''Difficult Forests'', 2013]]<br />
<br />
Scanning differently is also explored in ''Item 33'', Pascale Barret’s work ''This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''.<ref name="ftn199">Another take on this item can be found in Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “So-called plants,” in this book.</ref> ''Item 33'' is a flowering bush made present as a 3D printed object through unconventional uses of scanning devices, point clouds and surface meshes. If we tenderly hold ''Item 33'' in our hands, we can feel out the unfinished 3D printed edges and uncontainable volumes. The awkward lumpy mass of scanned leaves and 3D printing support structures enacts a clumsy wiggling from what has become an accepted path of 3D practices —in which objects are often presented as smoothed-off naturalized accounts or miniaturizations. Whilst still drawing lines between points, this inventory item proposes to us the possibilities for working with practices in ways that inhabit space-time of bodies-plants-scanners in a much different way. In contrast to the practice of 3D modelling which aims to capture data to recreate or reflect fixed bodies in fixed “nature”, such as the 1:1 copy of a flower or leaf, this work allows an orientation in a world that is in excess of the scanner and is not made of straight lines or entities with hard boundaries. Rather than using the scanner as apparatus of colonial capture ''Item 33'' advocates for what Jessica Lehman calls the need to recognize volume beyond volumetrics. As Lehman outlines, “[v]olumes are irreducible to and in excess of the apparatuses of their capture, whether big science or state power”.<ref name="ftn200">Jessica S. Lehman, “Volumes beyond Volumetrics: A Response to Simon Dalby’s “The Geopolitics of Climate Change,” ''Political Geography'' no. 37 (2013): 51–52.</ref> A materiality that is more-than just resistant to or compliant with volumetrics. Indeed, the amalgamated movements of scanner, bodies and the plants that are shown within the 3D print make explicit the more-than-human and reticulant materiality of volume, a volume which does make present the world but is also in excess of scientific reference. An orientation towards other ways of understanding the materialization of data, practice, movement, bodies, and scanning. A volumetric practice that might provide (situated, temporary) truths about lives.<br />
<br />
Both the degenerate Kinect scans of ''Difficult Forests'' and the knobbly 3D print of Barret’s encounter of the blossoming bush are “volumizations” of how moving towards and getting close to objects with computation is difficult yet also shapes us —difficulty shapes us. The items makes-felt what Lauren Berlant describes as the unbearability of being oriented by objects:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The critical object is unbearable much like the object of love is: too present, distant, enigmatic, banal, sublime, alluring and aversive; too much and too little to take in, and yet, one discovers all this only after it’s been taken in, however partially, always partially, and yet overwhelmingly even at the smallest points of genuine contact.<ref name="ftn201">Lauren Berlant, “Conversation: Lauren Berlant with Dana Luciano,” ''Social Text Journal'' online (2013), [https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/conversation-lauren-berlant-with-dana-luciano. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/conversation-lauren-berlant-with-dana-luciano.]</ref></blockquote><br />
<br />
Indeed, the directing capacities of many items within the inventory bring attention to the impossibility of resolving ambivalence in our knowledge practices.<br />
<br />
The ''Possible Bodies Inventory'' is a proposal to consider computation as a shaping force on bodies as well as shaped by those bodies —but importantly as this tour has shown the room for bodies to shape volumetrics may be constrained by inherited histories and social givens. These inventory items open new paths by their wiggle work orientating away from the inherited constraints, rethinking what it means to compute volumes —generating queer and crip ethics to orient practices. As inventory items ''Difficult Forests ''and ''This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'' hint, 3D practices such as scanning might make possible smallest points of genuine contact with the materiality of the world, without demanding a stabilizing resolution or normative relations''.'' These two items propose a type of pleasurable queer processing, a clumsy computing that works against the muscular straight lines and modes of reduction for efficiency within volumetric practices. Making-possible the presence of the world without overstabilizing paths or resolving the difficulty of contact. Generating volumes that work-with rather than against the body in motion —queer wiggles that move us towards other bodies, objects and political transformations even in tight, hard to reach spaces.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Blossom.jpg|thumb|none|700px|Pascale Barret, ''This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'', 2017]]<br />
<br />
<div class="page-break"></div><br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Clumsy_Volumetrics&diff=2433Clumsy Volumetrics2021-11-23T06:07:16Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>== Clumsy Volumetrics ==<br />
<br />
'''Helen V. Pritchard'''<br />
<br />
<br />
Opening the on-line ''Possible Bodies Inventory,'' we encounter an abundance of items —shifting numbered entries of manuals, mathematical concepts, art-projects and micro-CT images of volumetric presences. So-called bodies in the context of hardware for scanning, tracking, capturing and of software tools for data processing and 3D-visualization. Working on-and-with the ''Possible Bodies Inventory'' is an inquiry on the materialization of bodies and spaces, in dizzying relation with volume practices. As discussed throughout this book, the volumetric regime directs what so-called bodies are —and how they are “shaped by the lines they follow”.<ref name="ftn168">Sara Ahmed, ''Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others'' (Duke University Press, 2006), 133.</ref> As Sara Ahmed outlines in her queer phenomenology, orientations matter in how they shape what becomes socially as well as bodily given; that is how bodies materialize and take shape.<ref name="ftn169">Ahmed, ''Queer Phenomenology''</ref> Many items in the ''Possible Bodies Inventory'' evidence how the orientations of 3D practices matter significantly in materializing spaces for bodies that are inhabitable for some, and not others.<ref name="ftn170">See also for example Romi Ron Morrison, “Endured instances of relation, an exchange,” Possible Bodies, “So-called plants,” and Jara Rocha, “Depths and Densities: A Bugged Report,” in this book.</ref> Rocha and Snelting refer to this as the the “very probable colonial, capitalist, hetero-patriarchal, ableist and positivist topology of contemporary volumetrics.”<ref name="ftn171">Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting, “The Industrial Continuum of 3D,” in this book.</ref> Indeed the ''Possible Bodies Inventory'' demonstrates how the inherited histories of colonialism stretch into 3D practices to shape and direct bodies: “colonialism makes the world ‘white’, which is of course a world ‘ready’ for certain kinds of bodies, as a world that puts certain objects within their reach”.<ref name="ftn172">Ahmed, ''Queer Phenomenology'', 87.</ref> This orientation starts within the worldsetting of x = 0, y = 0, z = 0 and spreads out across 3D space; the mesh, the coordinate system, geometry and finally, the world.<ref name="ftn173">Possible Bodies, “Disorientation and its after-math,” in this book.</ref> However, what are the orientations that spread from this computational world-setting to shape spaces? How does it also reinforce what is already made reachable or not, livable or not, from what Louis Althusser calls the zero point of orientation, from which the world unfolds?<ref name="ftn174">Edmund Husserl, “Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution,” Vol. 3. Springer Science & Business Media, 166, cited in Ahmed, ''Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others,'' 8.</ref> As Possible Bodies observe in ''Item 007: Worldsettings for beginners'':<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Using software manuals as probes into computational realities, we traced the concept of “world” in Blender, a powerful Free, Libre and Open Source 3D creation suite. We tried to experience its process of “worlding” by staying on the cusp of “entering” into the software. Keeping a balance between comprehension and confusion, we used the sense of dis-orientation that shifting understandings of the word “world” created, to gauge what happens when such a heady term is lifted from colloquial language to be re-normalized and re-naturalized. If the point of origin changes, the world moves but the body doesn’t.</blockquote><br />
<br />
As Possible Bodies feel-out, in their software critique of 3D graphics software ''Blender'', in volumetric regimes, when worlds are set, the possibilities for bodies are narrowly scripted —computationally pre-determining the objects that stay in reach. And like in the physical world these “orientations become socially given by being repeated over time”.<ref name="ftn175">Ahmed, ''Queer Phenomenology,'' 77.</ref> Indeed, as ''Item 007'' shows, volumetric world-settings are an attempt to fix in place how the world unfolds from a zero-point orientation. An orientation which shapes and is shaped by a certain kind of body as a norm and what Ahmed calls less room to wiggle —“[l]ess wiggle room: less freedom to be; less being to free”.<ref name="ftn176">Sara Ahmed, “Wiggle Room,” ''Feministkilljoys'' (blog), September 28, 2014, [https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/09/28/wiggle-room/ https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/09/28/wiggle-room/].</ref> So, in volumetric regimes —when worlds are ''world-set'' in ways that computationally shape the body to the world, through directions between fixed points, what about the bodies that don’t fit or don’t follow the set directions?<br />
<br />
Ahmed suggests that “clumsiness” might be the way to form a queer and crip ethics to generate new openings and possibilities. Clumsy referring to when we wiggle off the path, are out of time with each other and become in the way of ourselves:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Bodies that wriggle might be crip bodies, as well as a queer bodies; bodies that do not straighten themselves out. The elimination of wriggle might be one form of what Robert McRuer calls “compulsory able-bodied-ness,”<ref name="ftn177">Robert McRuer, “Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability,” Vol. 9. NYU press.</ref> which is tied to compulsory [cis-gendered] straightness, to being able to follow as closely as you can the line you are supposed to follow.<ref name="ftn178">Ahmed, “Wiggle Room”.</ref></blockquote><br />
<br />
Making the affinity present between queer and crip, Ahmed notes, clumsiness is not always a process which brings us together or attunes us, it can also be the moments –the desiring moments– when we bump into the world. Clumsiness is a powerful political orientation, one in which our ways of relating to, and depending on, each other are reconfigured, promising as McRuer notes, possibilities to “somehow access other worlds and futures”.<ref name="ftn179">McRuer, “Crip Theory,” 208.</ref> By awkwardly reaching towards some of the items at the inventory, can we orient volumetric practices that make wiggle room, deviate from straightness and open up new liberatory paths? Informed by the difficulties of following the paths of queer life and world-declarations, might we form paths of queer desire for bodies? Such desire might pass through tentative processes to de-universalize, de-centralize, de-compose and re-visit tools and practices in order to better understand the conditions of their mutual constitution. Paths made through workarounds, interventions and hacks of volumetric hardwares and softwares that deviate from social-givens.<br />
<br />
Queerness matters because it affects what we can do, where we can go, how we are perceived, and so on. Yet we also know about creative wiggles, wiggling off paths when our bodies don’t fit and the queer wiggle of wiggling in cramped spaces.<ref name="ftn180">Ahmed, ''Queer Phenomenology,'' 77.</ref> Ahmed writes that for queers “it is hard to simply stay on course because love is also what gives us a certain direction” creating orientations of desire that generate new shapes and new impressions.<ref name="ftn181">Ahmed, ''Queer Phenomenology,'' 19.</ref> However, although love might give us a certain direction, it can take a lot of work to switch orientations. Turning towards a queer ethics of clumsiness for volumetrics then might take some work to make room for non-attunement, not seeing this as a loss of possibility but as opening new paths; making accounts of the damages done to bodies who stray from the world-settings of volumetric regimes; and unfolding new ways which bodies shape and are shaped by calculations.<br />
<br />
As the disobedient action research of ''Item 007'' demonstrates, in computer graphics and other geometry-related data processing, calculations are based on Cartesian coordinates, consisting of three different dimensional axis: x, y and z. In 3D-modelling, this is what is referred to as “the world”.<ref name="ftn182">See: Possible Bodies, “Disorientation and its after-math,” in this book.</ref> The point of origin literally figures as the beginning of the local or global computational context that a 3D object functions. But what is this world that is set and how does it shape or is shaped by so-called bodies? In a discussion of facial reconstruction by forensic science, Vicki Kirby, drawing on Bruno Latour‘s work on scientific reference, suggests we would be wrong to assume that the relationships conjured in 3D modelling are simply an illusion or mirror.<ref name="ftn183">Vicki Kirby, ''Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large'' (Duke University Press, 2013), 78.</ref> Instead, Kirby demonstrates that there is a relationship between 3D models and the physical world, what she calls communicative intimacies and peculiar correspondences, that are conjured between a 3D modelled face and the data gathered from a fragment of a skull.<ref name="ftn184">Kirby, ''Quantum Anthropologies'', 26.</ref> That is to say there is often some resonance between data collected in one site and modelled or visualized in another, which opens up the possibility for agency in 3D. Forensic science practices are based on techniques that pre-date computers, but that are refined by the use of ultrasound data from living people, computed tomography (CT scans), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs) and Kirby shows how:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>data taken from one temporal and spatial location can contain information about another; a fragment of skull is also a sign of the whole, just as an individual skull seems to be a specific expression of a universal faciality. In other words, there is no simple presence versus absence in these examples.<ref name="ftn185">Kirby, ''Quantum Anthropologies'', 26.</ref></blockquote><br />
<br />
Kirby proposes (following Latour) that this is because the world, as a more-than-human assembly, has the capacity to produce nodes of reference, or evidence, that effectively correspond.<ref name="ftn186">Kirby, ''Quantum Anthropologies'', 81.</ref> That is, ''the world is present'' in 3D scans and models. Kirby suggests this means we need then to consider the possibility of the peculiar correspondence between the physical world and 3D models not as loss, or reduction of nature/world but as its playful affirmation.<ref name="ftn187">Kirby, ''Quantum Anthropologies'', 20.</ref> This recognition ''does'' open up the powerful possibility for a 3D practice which is understood as inhabited by the liveliness of the world. However what Kirby ''does not'' acknowledge is that because the world ''is'' present in 3D practices, they are also already materially oriented towards social givens of what faces (or forests) are. This is particularly poignant in the model of an “evolutionary” body type facial reconstruction documented in ''Item 086: The Truthful Hairy Hominid.'' The item shows us documentation from an excursion to the basement of the Natural Sciences Museum in Brussels, highlighting the dependence of 3D practices of facial reconstruction on scientific racism. This is also evidenced in the research of Abigail Nieves Delgado, who through a series of semi-structured interviews with experts in facial reconstruction, shows how “when reconstructing a face, experts carry out a particular way of seeing [...] that interprets visible differences in bodies as racial differences”.<ref name="ftn188">Abigail Nieves Delgado, “The Problematic Use of Race in Facial Reconstruction,” ''Science as Culture'' 29,4, (2020): 568. </ref> She suggests that this analysis highlights that facial reconstructions should be understood as objects that allow us to trace past and present pathways of racial thinking in science. Delgado shows how the scientists and modellers she interviewed see skull shapes as part of specific narratives about purity, mixture, nation and race, narratives that reiterate the violence of scientific racism. Delgado argues that “by looking at facial reconstruction, we also learn that to stop reproducing race means to stop seeing [and modelling] in racial terms”<ref name="ftn189">Nieves Delgado, “The Problematic Use of Race in Facial Reconstruction”.</ref> —a way of seeing based on racialized categories that have become embedded within scientific practices as neutral. This normative seeing is held in place by 3D volumetrics and facial reconstruction practice. So, whilst we might recognize that the world is present in 3D models and this opens up possibilities for encountering the liveliness of the world, we also need to recognize these same models are informed by the inherited histories of the sciences in which they operate.<br />
<br />
Alongside the violent directive softwares and hardwares of the industrial continuum of volumetric regimes, the ''Possible Bodies Inventory'' also holds and sorts propositions that hold the liveliness of the world, its shaping capacities and find ways to remake volumetrics, destabilizing the inherited histories of colonialism, ableism and racism within the sciences that inform 3D practices. The queer and crip volumes are full of the pleasure, tenderness and excitement of opening worlds. Hacked scanners, misused models, lumpy bodies all create glimmering deviations, which rotate as alternative volumetrics. These inventory items generate the proposal of working with other references within 3D modelling, held in tension with the technical aspects of 3D modelling. Or as Snelting discusses:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>we might use awkwardness to move beyond thinking about software in terms of control using awkwardness as a strategy to cause interference, to create pivotal moments between falling and moving, an awkward in-between that makes space for thinking without stopping us to act.<ref name="ftn190">Femke Snelting, “Awkward Gestures,” in ''The Mag.Net Reader 3: Processual Publishing. Actual Gestures'', eds. Alessandro Ludovico and Nat Muller (London: OpenMute Press, 2008).</ref></blockquote><br />
<br />
This pleasurable, loving, reorientating between falling and moving in the ''Possible Bodies Inventory'' includes inventory items that make present volumes generated by human and more-than-human bodies such as scanner, flowers, plants, trees, human gestures, minerals and anatomy. Working on and with these inventory items is alike to what Jas Rault and T.L. Cowan describe as entering into a collective deep queer processing— “the possibilities for understanding process as a sexy, sometimes agonized but always committed, method, an orientation towards unruly information”.<ref name="ftn191">Jas Rault and T.L Cowan, “Heavy Processing for Digital Materials (More Than A Feeling): Part I: Lesbian Processing”, 2020, [http://www.drecollab.org/heavy-processing/ http://www.drecollab.org/heavy-processing/][http://www.drecollab.org/heavy-processing/ .].</ref><br />
<br />
One of these orientations towards unruly information is ''Item 035: Difficult Forests'' by Sina Seifee, ''Difficult Forests'' turns us to moving coordinates, colors and what Seifee describes as ''Memoirs''.<ref name="ftn192">See: Sina Seifee, “Rigging Demons,” in this book.</ref>&nbsp;In 2013 Seifee travelled to the Amazon region in Colombia with the Kinect as a recording device. The Kinect was hacked to work as a kind of LiDAR to create a series of digital memoirs spelled out as systematic screen glitches, technological relationships and life histories:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The representation of the journey —itself as complex problematic event— together with the horde of visual artifacts tell a set of interfacial stories with my co-travellers. This project addresses the splicing of direct and tactile human perception of reality with another reality, one that is mediated and technical. It is an aesthetic dream, dream of isomorphism between the discursive object and the visible object in the Amazonian forests.<ref name="ftn193">Sina Seifee, “Difficult Forests,” 2016, [http://www.sinaseifee.com/DifficultForests.html http://www.sinaseifee.com/DifficultForests.html].</ref></blockquote><br />
<br />
''Difficult Forests'' generates queer traces of desire, the images and text creating different routes to get to this point or to that point. Here deviating in the forest resets stability and make new co-ordinates of points between so-called bodies —they wiggle from the 0,0,0 of worldsetting. Seifee discusses how sometimes the Kinect is held by him, sometimes by his companion or the 3 year old with them. Destabilizing the imaginary of the lone able-bodied cis male scientist who scans the forest under difficult conditions, the different paths become queer intergenerational “multiple world-declarations”.<ref name="ftn194">Possible Bodies, “Disorientation and its after-math”.</ref> Using the hacked Kinect to generate measurements from a zero point that is never still, ''Item 035''&nbsp;opens up the possibility for the movement between points to be queered, to be reinhabited and change course, whilst not letting go of the possibilities of volumetric knowledge&nbsp;production. The Kinect extends the reach of the body, whose bodies reach and the forest. Seifee documents this extension of reach in the images and text, recording how the body becomes-with the difficult forest as it takes in that which is “not” it. What Ahmed describes as the “the acquisition of new capacities and directions —becoming, in other words, “not” simply what I am “not” but what I can “have” and “do”. The “not me” is incorporated into the body, extending its reach”.<ref name="ftn195">Ahmed, ''Queer Phenomenology,'' 91.</ref> These more-than-human capacities and directions shape forest, scanner and body. As Seifee notes, “The forest recorded and screen captured while walking in a “directly lived” space —in sweat, heat, fatigue and mosquito bite”.<ref name="ftn196">Sina Seifee, “Amazon Talk,” FULL SATURATION in Kunstpavillon München, 2014, [https://seifee.com/post/138661817448/amazon-talk https://seifee.com/post/138661817448/amazon-talk].</ref> The result is a corrupted Kinect scan of the forest, where the mapped surfaces of leaves float around a body without stable ground, as the forest unfolds. It asks us to consider the practice of 3D scanning as a practice of memoir in which the world is made present as a shaping that unfolds through surface encounters (rather than linear methods of collection).<br />
<br />
In these memoirs ''Difficult Forests'' seems marked with details that are the “indelible and complex entanglements of nature/culture”.<ref name="ftn197">Myra J. Hird, “Feminist Engagements with Matter,” ''Feminist Studies'' 35,2 (2009): 329-47.</ref> The memoirs of ''Difficult Forests'', are more-than-human and dazzling with the reticulant agency of the forest. As Seifee notes, “the Amazon rainforest still resists to remain a radical nonhuman surrounding on the surface of the earth”.<ref name="ftn198">Seifee, “Amazon Talk”.</ref> The memoirs problematize the overlapping surface and jungle, yet the result is not a visual without reference —both scientific and affective. The images correspond to a set of measured points and the forest is still present in a felt shaping way. We witness the dense and lively agency of the forest and the human-machine scanners in this unstable scan. ''Difficult Forests'' reminds us that there is a possibility to conjure a looser translation between local and global coordinates one that stays with the openings 3D offers but also proposes new ways of seeing with 3D. It reorients the translation between the local and global&nbsp;(data) that emerges from 3D scanning in inventive ways —making room for deviations from set paths between points and bodies that emerge as different shapes.<br />
<br />
[[File:Difficultforest.jpg|thumb|none|700px|Sina Seifee, ''Difficult forests'' (2013)]]<br />
<br />
Scanning differently is also explored in ''Item 33'', Pascale Barret’s work ''This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom''.<ref name="ftn199">Another take on this item can be found in Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting, “So-called plants,” in this book.</ref> ''Item 33'' is a flowering bush made present as a 3D printed object through unconventional uses of scanning devices, point clouds and surface meshes. If we tenderly hold Item 33 in our hands, we can feel out the unfinished 3D printed edges and uncontainable volumes. The awkward lumpy mass of scanned leaves and 3D printing support structures enacts a clumsy wiggling from what has become an accepted path of 3D practices —in which objects are often presented as smoothed-off naturalized accounts or miniaturizations. Whilst still drawing lines between points, this inventory item proposes to us the possibilities for working with practices in ways that inhabit space-time of bodies-plants-scanners in a much different way. In contrast to the practice of 3D modelling which aims to capture data to recreate or reflect fixed bodies in fixed “nature”, such as the 1:1 copy of a flower or leaf, this work allows an orientation in a world that is in excess of the scanner and is not made of straight lines or entities with hard boundaries. Rather than using the scanner as apparatus of colonial capture ''Item 33'' advocates for what Jessica Lehman calls the need to recognize volume beyond volumetrics. As Lehman outlines “[v]olumes are irreducible to and in excess of the apparatuses of their capture, whether big science or state power”.<ref name="ftn200">Jessica S. Lehman, “Volumes beyond Volumetrics: A Response to Simon Dalby’s “The Geopolitics of Climate Change,” ''Political Geography'' no. 37 (2013): 51–52.</ref> A materiality that is more-than just resistant to or compliant with volumetrics. Indeed, the amalgamated movements of scanner, bodies and the plants that are shown within the 3D print make explicit the more-than-human and reticulant materiality of volume, a volume which does make present the world but is also in excess of scientific reference. An orientation towards other ways of understanding the materialization of data, practice, movement, bodies, and scanning. A volumetric practice that might provide (situated, temporary) truths about lives.<br />
<br />
Both the degenerate Kinect scans of ''Difficult Forest'' and the knobbly 3D print of Barret’s encounter of the blossoming bush are “volumizations” of how moving towards and getting close to objects with computation is difficult yet also shapes us —difficulty shapes us. The items makes-felt what Lauren Berlant describes as the unbearability of being oriented by objects:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The critical object is unbearable much like the object of love is: too present, distant, enigmatic, banal, sublime, alluring and aversive; too much and too little to take in, and yet, one discovers all this only after it’s been taken in, however partially, always partially, and yet overwhelmingly even at the smallest points of genuine contact.<ref name="ftn201">Lauren Berlant, “Conversation: Lauren Berlant with Dana Luciano,” ''Social Text Journal'' online (2013), [https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/conversation-lauren-berlant-with-dana-luciano https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/conversation-lauren-berlant-with-dana-luciano]</ref></blockquote><br />
<br />
Indeed, the directing capacities of many items within the inventory bring attention to the impossibility of resolving ambivalence in our knowledge practices.<br />
<br />
The ''Possible Bodies Inventory'' is a proposal to consider computation as a shaping force on bodies as well as shaped by those bodies —but importantly as this tour has shown the room for bodies to shape volumetrics may be constrained by inherited histories and social givens. These inventory items open new paths by their wiggle work orientating away from the inherited constraints, rethinking what it means to compute volumes —generating queer and crip ethics to orient practices. As inventory items ''Difficult Forests ''and ''This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'' hint, 3D practices such as scanning might make possible smallest points of genuine contact with the materiality of the world, without demanding a stabilizing resolution or normative relations''.'' These two items propose a type of pleasurable queer processing, a clumsy computing that works against the muscular straight lines and modes of reduction for efficiency within volumetric practices. Making-possible the presence of the world without overstabilizing paths or resolving the difficulty of contact. Generating volumes that work-with rather than against the body in motion —queer wiggles that move us towards other bodies, objects and political transformations even in tight, hard to reach spaces.<br />
<br />
[[Image:Blossom.jpg|thumb|none|700px|Pascale Barret, ''This obscure side of sweetness is waiting to blossom'' (2017)]]<br />
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=== Notes ===<br />
<references/></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=We_hardly_encounter_anything_that_didn%E2%80%99t_really_matter&diff=2432We hardly encounter anything that didn’t really matter2021-11-23T05:58:35Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
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== We hardly encounter anything that didn’t really matter ==<br />
<br />
'''Phil Langley in conversation with Possible Bodies'''<br />
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<br />
'''As an architect and computational designer, Phil Langley develops critical approaches to technology and software for architectural practice and spatial design. Our first conversation started from a shared inquiry into MakeHuman,'''<ref name="ftn162">See: Possible Bodies, “MakeHuman,” in this book.</ref>''' the Open Source software project for modeling 3-dimensional humanoid characters.'''<br />
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'''In the margins of the yearly Libre Graphics meeting in Toronto, we spoke about the way that materiality gets encoded into software, about parametric versus generative approaches, and the symbiotic relationship between algorithms that run simulations and the structure of that algorithm itself. “I think there is a blindness in understanding that the nature of the algorithm effects the nature of the model… The model that you see on your screen is not the model that is actually analyzed.”'''<ref name="ftn163">See: “Phil Langly in conversation with Possible Bodies, Comprehensive Features,” [https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Comprehensive_Features https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Comprehensive_Features].</ref><br />
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'''Six years later, we ask him about his work for the London-based architecture and engineering firm Bryden Woods where he is now responsible for a team that might handle computational design in quite a different way.'''<br />
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=== A very small ecosystem ===<br />
<br />
'''Phil Langley''': For the Creative Technologies team that I set up in my company, we hired twenty people doing computational design and they all come from very similar backgrounds: architectural engineering plus a postgraduate or a master’s degree in “computational design”. We all have similar skills and are from a narrow selection of academic institutions. It is a very small ecosystem.<br />
<br />
I followed a course around 2007 that is similar to what people do now. There’s some of the technology that moves on for sure, but you’re still learning the same kind of algorithms that were there in the 1950s or sixties or seventies. They were already old when I was doing them. You’re still learning some parametrics, some generative design, generative algorithms, genetic algorithms, neural networks and cellular automatisms, it is absolutely a classic curriculum. Same texts, same books, same references. A real echo chamber.<br />
<br />
One of the things I hated when I studied was the lack of diversity of thoughts, of criticality around these topics. And also the fact that there’s only a very narrow cross-section of society involved in creating these kinds of techniques. If you ever mentioned the fact that some of these algorithmic approaches came from military research, the response was: “So what?”. It wasn’t even that they said that they already knew that. They were just like “Nothing to say about that, how can that possibly be relevant?”<br />
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=== How can you say it actually works? ===<br />
<br />
'''PL''': When building the team, I was very conscious about not stepping straight into the use of generative design technologies, because we certainly haven’t matured enough to start the conversation about how careful you have to be when using those techniques. We are working with quite complex situations and so we can’t have a complex algorithm yet because we have too much to understand about the problem itself.<br />
<br />
We started with a much more parametric and procedural design approach, that was much more... I wouldn’t say basic... but lots of people in the team got quite frustrated at the beginning because they said, we ''can'' use this technique, why don’t we just use this? It’s only this year that we started using any kind of generative design algorithms at all. It was forced on us actually, by some external pressures. Some clients demanded it because it becomes very fashionable and they insisted that we did it. The challenges or the problems or the kind of slippage is how to try and build something that uses those techniques, but to do it consciously. And we are not always successful achieving that, by the way.<br />
<br />
The biggest thing we were able to achieve is the transparency of the process because normally everything that you pile up to build one of those systems, gets lost. Because it is always about the performance of it, that is what everybody wants to show. They don’t want to tell you how they built it up bit by bit. People just want to show a neural network doing something really cool, and they don’t really want to tell you how they encoded all of the logic and how they selected the data. There are just thousands of decisions to make all the way through about what you include, what you don’t include, how you privilege things and not privilege other things.<br />
<br />
At some point, you carefully smooth all of the elements or you de-noise that process so much… You simplify the rules and you simplify the input context, you simplify everything to make it work, and then how can you say that it actually works? Just because it executes and doesn’t crash, is that really the definition of functionality, what sort of truth does it tell you? What answers does it give you?<br />
<br />
You make people try to understand what it does and you make people talk about it, to be explicit about each of those choices they make, all those rules, inputs, logics, geometry or data, what they do to turn that into a system. Every one of those decisions you make defines the n-dimensional space of possibilities. And if you take some very complicated input and you can’t handle it in your process and you simplify so much, you’ve already given a shape to what it could possibly emerge as. So one of the things we ended up doing is spending a lot of time on that and we discuss each micro step. Why are we doing it like this? It wasn’t always easy for everyone because they didn’t want to think about documenting all the steps.<br />
<br />
Yesterday we had a two hour conversation about mesh interpolation and the start of the conversation was a data flow diagram, and one of the boxes just said something like: “We’re just going to press this button and then it turns into a mesh”. And I said: “Woah, wait a minute!” some people thought “What do you mean, it’s just a feature, it’s just an algorithm. It’s just in the software, we can just do it.” And I said, “No way.” That’s even before you get towards building something that acts on that model. I think that’s what we got out of it actually, by not starting with the most let’s say sophisticated approach, it has allowed us to have more time to reflect on what fueled the process.<br />
<br />
=== Decisions have to be made ===<br />
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'''Possible Bodies''': Do you think that transparency can produce a kind of control? Or that ‘understanding’ is somehow possible?<br />
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'''PL''': It depends what you mean by control, I would say.<br />
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It is not necessarily that you do this in order to increase the efficacy of the process or to ensure you get better results. You don’t do it in order to understand all of the interactions because you cannot do that, not really. You can have a simpler algorithmic process, you can have an idea of how it’s operating, there is some truth in that, in the transparency, but you lose that quite quickly as the complexity grows, it’s more to say that you re-balance the idea that you want to see an outcome you like, and therefore then claim that it works. I want to be able to be explicit about everything that I know all the way long. In the end that’s all you have. By making explicit that you have made all these steps, you make clear that decisions have to be made. That at every point you’re intervening in something, and it will have an effect. Almost every one of these things has an effect to a greater or lesser extent and we hardly encounter anything that didn’t really matter. Not even if it was a bug. If it wasn’t really affecting the system, it’s probably because it was a bug in the process rather than anything else.<br />
<br />
I think that transparency is not about gaining control of a process in itself, it’s about being honest with the fact that you’re creating something with a generative adversarial network (GAN) or a neural network, whatever it is. That it doesn’t just come from TensorFlow,<ref name="ftn164">TensorFlow is “An end-to-end open source machine learning platform” used for both research and production at Google. [https://www.tensorflow.org/ https://www.tensorflow.org/].</ref> fully made and put into your hand and you just press play.<br />
<br />
=== Getting lost in nice little problems ===<br />
'''PL''': The point I was trying to make to everyone on the team was, well, if you simplify the mesh so much in order that it’s smooth and so you can handle it in the next process, what kind of reliance can you have on the output?<br />
<br />
I’ll tell you about a project that’s sort of quite boring. We are developing an automated process for cable rooting for signaling systems in tunnels. We basically take a point cloud survey of a tunnel and we’re trying to route this cable between obstacles. The tunnel is very small, there is no space, and obviously there’s already a signaling system there. So there are cables everywhere and you can’t take them out while you install the new ones, you have to find a pathway. Normally this would be done manually. Overnight people would go down in the tunnel and spray paint the wall and then photograph it and then come back to the office and try and draw it. So we’re trying do this digitally and automate it in some way. There’s some engineering rules of the cables, that have to be a certain diameter. You can’t just bend them in any direction... it was a really nice geometric problem. The tunnel is a double curvature, and you have these point-clouds ... there were loads of quite nice little problems and you can get lost in it.<br />
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'''PB''': It doesn’t sound like a boring project?<br />
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'''PL''': No it’s absolutely not boring, it’s just funny. None of us have worked in rail before. No one has ever worked in these contexts. We just turned up and went: “Why’d you do it like that?”<br />
<br />
Once you finally get your mesh of the tunnel, what you’re trying to do is subdivide that mesh into geometry again, another nice problem. A grid subdivision or triangles or hexagons, my personal favorite. And then you’re trying to work out, which one of these grid subdivisions contains already a signal box, a cable or another obstruction basically? What sort of degree of freedom do I have to navigate through this? Taking a very detailed sub-millimeter accuracy point-cloud, that you’re reducing into a subdivision of squares, simplifying it right down. And then you turn it into an evaluation. And then you have a path-finding algorithm that tries to join all the bits together within the engineering rules, within how you bend the cable. And you can imagine that by the time you get to start mesh subdivision, if you process that input to death, it’s going to be absolutely meaningless. It will work in the sense that it will run and it will look quite cool, but what do I do with it?<br />
<br />
=== I try to talk about language with everybody ===<br />
<br />
'''PL''': I try to talk a little bit about language with everybody. I’m trying not to overburden everybody with all of my predilections. I can’t really impose anything on them. Language is a big thing, like explaining Genetic Algorithms with phrases like , “So this is the population that would kill everybody, that’s like unsuitable or invalid.” For example if you use a multi objective Genetic Algorithm, you might try to keep an entire set of all solutions or ''configurations'', as we would call them, that you create through all of the generations of the process. The scientific language for this is “population”. That’s how you have to talk. You might say, “I have a population of fifty generations of the algorithm. Five thousand individuals would be created throughout the whole process. And in each generation you’re only “breeding” or combining a certain set and you discard the others.” You leave them behind, that’s quite common. And we had a long talk about whether or not we should keep all of the things that were created and the discussion was going on like, “But some of them were just like rubbish. They’re just stupid. We should just kill them, no one needs to see them again.” And I’m like, “well I don’t know, I quite like to keep everybody!”<br />
<br />
Of course all you’re really doing is optimizing, tending towards something that’s better and you lose the possibility of chance and miss something. There’s a massive bit of randomness in it and you have a whole set of controls about how much randomness you allow through the generational processes and so I have this massive metaphor and it comes with huge, problematic language around genetics and all that kind of stuff that is encoded with even more problematic language, without any criticality, into the algorithmic process. And then someone is telling me “I’ve got a slider that says increase the randomness on that”. So it’s full of all those things, which I find very challenging.<br />
<br />
But if you ever could strip away from the language and all of the kinds of problems, you look at it in purely just what it does, it’s still interesting as a process and it can be useful, but the problem is not what the algorithm does. It’s what culturally those algorithms have come to represent in people’s imagination.<br />
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=== The Hairy Hominid effect ===<br />
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'''PB''': We would like to bring up the Truthful Hairy Hominid here.<ref name="ftn165">“Item 086: The Truthful Hairy Hominid,” ''The Possible Bodies Inventory,'' 2014.</ref> The figure emerged when looking over the shoulder of a designer using a combination of modeling softwares to update the representation of human species for the “Gallery of Humankind”. They were working on one concrete specimen and the designer was modeling their hair, that was then going to be placed on the skin. And someone in our group asked the designer, “How do you know when to stop? How many hairs do you put on that face, on that body?” And then the designer explained that there’s a scientific committee of the museum that handed him some books, that had some information that was scientifically verified, but that all the rest was basically an invention. So he said that it’s more or less this amount of hair or this color, this density of hair. And this is what we kept with us: When this representation is finished, when the model is done and brought from the basement to the gallery of the museum, that representation becomes the evidence of truth, of scientific truth.<ref name="ftn166">Another aspect of the ''Hairy Hominid effect'' appears in our conversation with Simone C Niquille, “The Fragility of Life,” in this chapter. </ref><br />
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'''PL''': It acts like as a stabilization of all of those thoughts, scientific or not, and by making it in that way, it formalizes them and becomes unchallengeable.<br />
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'''PB''': The sudden arrival of an invented representation of hominids on the floor of a natural science museum, this functional invention, this efficacy, is turned into scientific truth. This is what we call “The Hairy Hominid effect”. Maybe you have some stories related to this effect, on the intervention of what counts or what is accountable, what counts? Or is the tunnel already one?<br />
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'''PL''': Well, the technology of the tunnel project maybe is, and how we’re using this stuff.<br />
<br />
A point-cloud contains millions and millions of data-points from surveys, like in LiDAR scanning, it’s still really novel to use them in our industry, even though the technology has been around for years.<ref name="ftn167">LiDAR is an acronym of “light detection and ranging” or “laser imaging, detection, and ranging”.</ref> I would say the reason it still gets pushed as a thing is because it has become a massive market for proprietary software companies who say: “Hey, look, you have this really cool map, this really cool point cloud, wouldn’t it be cool if you could actually use it in a meaningful way?” And everybody goes, “yes!”, because these files are each four and a half gigabytes, you need a three thousand pound laptop to open it and it’s not even a mesh, you can’t really do anything with it, it just looks kind of cool. So the software companies go: “Don’t worry about it. We’ll sell you thousands of pounds worth of software, which will process this for you into a mesh”. But no one really is thinking about, well… how do you really process that?<br />
<br />
A point-cloud is just as a collection of random points. You can understand that it is a tunnel or a school or a church by looking at it, but when you try and get in there and measure, if you’re really trying to measure a point cloud ... what point do you choose to measure? And whilst they say the precision is like plus or minus zero point five millimeters... well, if that was true, why have we got so much noise?<br />
<br />
=== The only thing that’s real are the data points ===<br />
<br />
'''PL''': One of the things that everybody that everybody thinks is useful, is to do object classification on a point-cloud, to find out what’s a pipe, what’s a light, what’s a desk, what’s a chair. To isolate only those points that you see and then put them on a separate layer in the model and isolate all those things by category. The way that that’s mostly done right now, even in expensive proprietary software, is manually. So somebody sits there and puts a digital lasso around a bunch of points. But then how many of the points, when did you stop, how did you choose how to stop? Imagine, processing ten kilometer of tunnel manually...<br />
<br />
'''PB''': It’s nicer to go around with spray paint then.<br />
<br />
'''PL''': Definitely. <br />
<br />
The most extensive object classification techniques come from autonomous vehicles now, that’s the biggest thing. These data-sets are very commonly shared and they do enough to say, “This is probably a car or this is a sign that probably says this” but everything is guesswork. Just because a computer can just about recognize some things, it is not vision. I always think that computer vision is the wrong term. They should have called it computer perception.<br />
<br />
There is a conflation between the uses of computer perception for object classification, around what even'' is'' an object and anyway, who really cares whether it’s this type or this, what’s it all for? Conflating object classification with point-cloud technology as a supposedly perfect representation, is actually useless because you can’t identify the objects that you need and anyway, it has all these gaps, because it can’t see through things and then there is a series of methods, to turn that into truth, you de-noise by only sampling one in every three points… You do all of these things to turn it into something that is ‘true’. That’s really what it is like. It’s a conflation of what’s real while the only thing that’s real are the data points, because well, it did capture those points.<br />
<br />
=== A potential for possibilities ===<br />
<br />
'''PB''': When we spoke in Toronto six years ago, you defended generative procedures against parametric approaches, which disguise the ''probable'' as ''possible''. Did something change in your relation to the generative and it’s potentially transformative potential?<br />
<br />
'''PL''': I think it became more complex for me, when you actually have to do it in real life. I still think that there’s huge risks in both approaches and at the time I probably thought that the reward is not worth the risk in parametric approaches. If you can be good at the generative thing, that’s riskier, it’s much easier to be bad at it, but the potential for possibilities is much higher.<br />
<br />
What is more clear now is that these are general processes that you have to encounter, because everybody else is doing it, the bad ones are doing it. And I think it’s a territory that I’m not prepared to give up, that I don’t want to encounter these topics on their terms. I don’t consider the manifestations, those that we don’t like in lots of different ways, to be the only way to use this technology. I don’t consider them to be the intellectual owners of it either. I am not prepared to walk away from these techniques. I want to challenge what they are in some way.<br />
<br />
Over the last few years of building things for people, and working with clients, and having to build while we were also trying to build a group of people to work together, you realize that the parametric or procedural approaches give you an opportunity to focus on what is necessary, to clarify the decision-making in all these choices you make. It is more useful in that sense. I was probably quite surprised how little people really wanted to think about those things in generative processes. So we had to start a little bit more simple.<br />
<br />
You have to really think first of all, what is it you’re going to make? Is it okay to make it? There’s a lower limit almost of what’s okay to make in a parametric tool because changes are really hard, because you lock in so many rules and relationships. The model can be just as complicated in a generative process, but you need to have a kind of fixed idea of what the relationships represent within your model, within your process. Whereas in generative processes, because of the very nature of the levels of abstraction, which cause problems, there are also opportunities. So without changing the code, you can just say, well, this thing actually is talking about something completely different. If you understand the math of it, you can assign a different name to that variable in your own mind, right? You don’t even need to change the code.<br />
<br />
With a parametric approach you’re never going to get out of the fact that it is about a building of a certain type, you can never escape that. And we built parametric tools to design housing schemes or schools as well as some other infrastructure things, data centers even, and that is kind of okay, because the rules are not controversial when you think about schools for example. And you’re probably thinking, hang on a minute, Phil, these can be controversial, but in the context of our problem definition, they were unchallengeable by anybody, they came from the government.<br />
<br />
=== Showing the real consequences ===<br />
<br />
'''PL''': Parametric approaches make problems in the rules and processes visible. I think that’s a huge thing. Because of the kind of projects we are building, we are given a very hard set of rules that no one is allowed to challenge. So you try and encode them into a parametric system and it won’t work basically.<br />
<br />
In the transport infrastructure projects we were doing, there are rule changes with safety, like distance between certain things. And we could show what the real consequences would be. And that this was not going to achieve the kind of safety outcome that they were looking for. Sometimes you’re just making it very clear what it was that they thought that they were asking for. You told us to do it like this, this is what it gives you, I don’t think that’s what you intended.<br />
<br />
We never allowed the computer to solve those problems in any of the things we’ve built. It just tells you, just so you know, that did not work, that option. And that’s very controversial, people often don’t really like that. They’re always asking us to constrain them. “Why do you let the system make a mistake?”<br />
<br />
=== Sometimes it is not better than nothing ===<br />
<br />
'''PB''': When we speak to people that work with volumetric systems, whether on the level of large scale databases for plants, or for making biomedical systems … when we push back on their assumption that this is reality, they will say, “Of course the point-cloud is not a reality. Of course the algorithm cannot represent population or desire.” But then when the system needs to work, it is apparently easy to let go of what that means. The need to make it work, erases the possibility for critique.<br />
<br />
'''PL''': One of the common responses I see is something like, “Yeah, but it is better than nothing.” Or that is at least part of the story. They have a very Modernist idea that you run this linear trajectory towards complete know-how or knowledge or whatever and that these systems are incomplete rather than imperfect and that if you have a bit more time, you’ll get there. But where we are now, it’s still better than then. So why not use it?<br />
<br />
In the construction sector you constantly encounter these unlucky wanna-be Silicon Valley tech billionaires, who will just say like, “But you just do it with a computer. Just do it with an algorithm!” They’ve fallen for that capitalist idea that technology will always work in the end. It ''must'' work. And whenever I present my work in conferences, I always talk about my team, what people are in the team, how we built it in some way. To the point that actually lot’s of people get bored of it. Other people when they talk about these kinds of techniques will say “We’ve got this bright kid he’s got a PhD from wherever. He’s brilliant. He just sits in the corner. He’s just brilliant.” And of course, it’s always a guy as well. They instrumentalize these people, as the device to execute their dream, which is that the computer will do everything. There’s still this kind of a massively Modernist idea that it’s just a matter of time until we get to that.<br />
<br />
Sometimes a point-cloud is ''not'' better than nothing because it gives you a whole other problem to deal with, another idea of reality to process. And by the time you get into something that’s usable, it has tricked you into thinking that it’s real. And that’s true about the algorithms as well. You’re wrestling with very complicated processes and by the time you think that you kind of control it, it just controlled you, it made you change your idea of the problem. You simplify your own problem in order that you can have a process act on it. And if you’re not conscious about how you’re simplifying your problem in order to allow these things to act on it, if you’re not transparent about that, if you don’t acknowledge it, then you have a very difficult relationship with your work.<br />
<br />
=== Supposed scientific reality ===<br />
<br />
'''PL''': We use genetic algorithms on a couple of projects now and the client in one project was just not interested in what methods we were using. They did not want us to tell them, they did not care. They wanted us to show what it does and then talk about that, which is kind of okay. It’s anyway, not their job. The second client was absolutely not like that at all, they were looking for a full explanation of everything that we did. And our explanation did not satisfy them because it didn’t fit with their dream of what a genetic process does.<br />
<br />
We were fighting this perception that as soon as you use this technique, why doesn’t it work out of the box? And then we’re building this thing over a matter of weeks and it was super impressive how far we got, but he still told us, I don’t understand why this isn’t finished. But it took the US military fifty years to make any of this. Give me a break!<br />
<br />
'''PB''': The tale of genetics comes with its own promise, the promise of a closed circuit. I don’t know if you follow any of the critiques on genetics from microchimerism or epigenetics, basically anything that brings complexity. They ask: what are the material conditions in which that process actually takes place? It’s of course never going to work perfectly.<br />
<br />
'''PL''': The myth-making comes with the weight of all other kinds of science and therefore implies that this thing should work. Neural networks have this as well, because of, again, this storytelling about the science of it and I think the challenge for those generative processes is exactly in their link to supposed scientific realities and the sort of one-to-one mapping between incomplete science, or unsatisfactory science, into another incomplete unsatisfactorily discipline, without question. You can end up in pretty spooky place with something like a Genetic Algorithm that is abstracted from biochemistry, arguing in a sort of eugenic way.<br />
<br />
=== You can only build one building ===<br />
<br />
'''PL''': I think inherent in all of this science is the idea that there is a right answer, a singular right answer. I think that’s what optimization means. For the sort of stuff we build, we never say, “This is the best way of doing it.” The last mile of the process has to be a human that either finishes it, fills in the gaps or chooses from the selection that is provided. We never ever give one answer.<br />
<br />
I think someone in my world would say, “But Phil, we’re trying to build a building, so obviously we can only build one of them?” This is not quite what I mean, I think there’s an idea within all of the scientific constructs of the second half of the twentieth century where computer vision and perception, computer intelligence, whatever you want to call it, and genetics, they’re the two biggest things. Within both of those fields, there’s the idea that we will know, that we will at some point find out a truth about ourselves as humans and about ourselves plus machines. And we will make machines that look like us and then tell ourselves that because the machine performs like this, we are like those machines. I think it’s a tendency which is just super Modernist.<br />
<br />
They want a laser line to get to the best answer, the right answer. But in order to get to that, the thing that troubles me probably most of all, and this is true in all of these systems whether parametric or genetic, is the way in which the system assumes a degree of homogeneity.<br />
<br />
=== It does not really matter that it is ultimately constrained ===<br />
<br />
'''PL''': I think with these generative algorithmic processes, people don’t accept constraint either discursively or even scientifically. At most they would talk about the moment of constraint being beyond the horizon of usefulness. At some point, it doesn’t create every possible combination. Lots of people think that it can create every option that you could ever think of. Other people would say that it is not infinite, but it goes beyond the boundary of what you would call, ‘the useful extent of your solution space’, which is the kind of terminology they use. I think that there’s a myth that exists, that through a generative process, you can have whatever you want. And I have been in meetings where we showed clients something that we’ve done and they say, “Oh, so you just generated all possible options.” But that’s not quite what we did last week!<br />
<br />
There’s still that sort of myth-making around genetic algorithms, there’s an illusion there. And I think there’s a refusal to acknowledge that the boundary of that solution space is set not really by the process of generation. It’s set at the beginning, by the way in which you define the stuff that you act on, through your algorithmic process. I think that’s true of parametrics as well, it’s just that it’s more obviously to improve metrics. Like, here’s a thing that affects this thing. And whether you complexify the relationships between those parameters, it doesn’t really matter, it’s still kind of conceptually very easy to understand. No matter how complex you make the relations between those parameters, you can still get your head around it. Whereas the generative process is a black box to a certain extent, no one really knows, and the constraint is always going to be on the horizon of useful possibilities. So it doesn’t really matter that it is ultimately constrained. <br />
<br />
=== We’re not behaving like trained software developers ===<br />
<br />
'''PL''': By now we have about twenty people on our team and they’re almost all architects.<br />
<br />
When I do a presentation in a professional context, I have a slide that says, “We’re not software developers, but we do make software.” And then I try to talk about how the fact that we’re not trained as software developers, means that we think about things in different ways. We don’t behave like them. We don’t have these normative behaviors from software engineering in terms of either what we create or in the way in which we create things. And as we grow, we make more things that you could describe as software, rather than toolkits or workflows.<br />
<br />
After one of these events, someone came up to me and said, “Thank you, that was a very interesting talk. And then she asked, “So who does your software development? To whom do you outsource the development?” It was completely alien to this person that our industry could be responsible for the creation of software itself. We are merely the recipients of product satisfaction.<br />
<br />
Architects are not learning enough about computation technology either practically or critically, because we’ve been kind of infantilized to be the recipient discipline.<br />
<br />
=== Not everyone can take part ===<br />
<br />
'''PB''': We noticed a redistribution of responsibilities and also a redistribution of subjectivity, which seems to be reduced to a binary choice between either developer or user.<br />
<br />
'''PL''': I think that’s true. It feels like we’re back in the early nineties actually. When computational technology emerged into everyday life, it was largely unknown or was unknowable at the time to the receiving audience, to the consumers. There was a separation, an us and them, and even talking about a terrible version of Windows or Word or something, people were still understanding it as something that came from this place over there. Over the last two or three decades, those two things are brought together, and it feels much more horizontal; anybody can be a programmer. And now we’re back at the place where we realize that not everybody can be part of creating these things at all.<br />
<br />
Governments have this idea that we’ll all be programmers at some point. But no, we won’t, that’s absolutely not true! Not everybody’s going to learn. So one of the things I try to specifically hold on is that we need to bring computational technology to our industry, rather than have it created by somebody else and then imposed on us.<br />
<br />
The goal is not to learn how to be all a software company or a tech company.<br />
<br />
=== If something will work, why not use it? ===<br />
'''PB''': We are troubled by the way 3D techniques and technologies travel from one discipline to another. It feels almost impossible to stop and ask “hey, what decisions are being made here?” So we wanted to ask you about your experience with the intense circulation of knowledge, techniques, devices and tools in volumetric practice.<br />
<br />
'''PL''': It is something that I see every day, in our industry, and in our practice. We have quite a few arguments about the use of image recognition or facial recognition technologies for example.<br />
<br />
When technologies translate into another discipline, into another job almost, you don’t just lose the ability to critique it, but it actually enhances its status by that move. When you reuse some existing technology, people think you must be so clever to re-apply it in a new context. In the UK there are tons of examples of R&D government funding that would encourage you to use established existing techniques and technologies from other sectors and reapply them in design and construction. They don’t want you to reinvent something and they certainly don’t want you to challenge anything. You’re part of the process of validating it and you’re validated by it. And similarly, the people of the originating discipline get to say, “Look how widely used the thing we created is”, and then it becomes a reinforcement of those disciplines. I think that it’s a huge problem for anyone’s ability to build critical practices towards these technologies.<br />
<br />
That moment of transition from one field to another creates the magic, right? A technology apparently appears out of nowhere, lands fully formed almost without friction and without history. It lacks history in the academic sense, the scientific process and indeed, also lacks the labor of all of the bodies, the people that it took to make it, no one cares anymore at that point.<br />
<br />
What I’ve seen in the last five years is that proprietary software companies are pushing things like face recognition and object classification into Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), into desktop software. Something like a GAN or whatever is not a button and not a product; it is a TensorFlow routine or a bunch of Python scripts that you get off GitHub.<br />
<br />
There’s a myth-making around this, that makes you feel like you’re still engaged in the kind of practice of creating the technique. But you’re not, you’re just consuming it. It’s ready-made there for you. Because it sits on GitHub, you feel like a real coder, right? I think the recipient context becomes infantilized because you’re not encouraged to actually create it yourself.<br />
<br />
You’re presented with something that will work, so why not use it? But this means you also consume all of their thinking all of their ways of looking at the world.<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
<noinclude><br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
|-<br />
| The first part of this conversation took place in 2015, in Toronto: ''Phil Langley in conversation with Possible Bodies, [[Comprehensive_Features]]''<br />
|}<br />
</noinclude></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Rehearsal_as_the_%E2%80%98Other%E2%80%99_to_Hypercomputation&diff=2431Rehearsal as the ‘Other’ to Hypercomputation2021-11-23T05:52:17Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>== Rehearsal as the ‘Other’ to Hypercomputation ==<br />
<br />
'''Maria Dada'''<br />
<br />
<br />
The next few paragraphs outline the effects of the simulation paradigm on the sense of errantry in the postcolonial condition in places like Lebanon. Through an examination of two games about the Beirut war, that differ in their approach, the text examines the possibilities of opening up a space for the Other in the gap between simulation as rehearsal versus that of training.<br />
<br />
History is apparently no longer sufficient to uphold the dominance of the western viewpoint. It must be overcome, but despite the prevalence of critical tools such as discourse analysis, genealogy archaeology and other methods that attempt to dismantle the totalitarian universal structure of history, it is simulation that appears to disassemble it, only to take its place. However, to overcome history through simulation is to root the colonized into a past of prediction, efficiency and closed repetition. Simulation studies people and places like Beirut and their wars as strategy, in order to lock them into a position that is not indigenous to their way of being, that of errantry.<br />
<br />
Édouard Glissant describes errantry as “rooted movement” in a sense that it’s a desire to go against the root where the root is the historical beginnings and universalization of the western point of view.<ref name="ftn1">Édouard Glissant. ''Poetics of Relation'' (University of Michigan Press, 1997).</ref> The history of the West has always been tied to fixed states of nationality, an idea that has been exported to the colonized nations like Lebanon, that have come to aspire to similar univocal rootedness. The idea of errantry, which Glissant believes to be native to the colonized, is a fluid subjectivity that sits between the notion of identity and movement.<br />
<br />
In other words, what this text will put forward, is that simulation closes in on the possibilities of what Glissant describes as a poetics, creating a continuous longing for the lost but defunct and deconstructed stories of origins and history that are tied to the west. In order to foreclose on the pasts war like the one of Beirut in 1982, simulation engines use remote sensing and computer-generated images to build model worlds in order to programmatically train on different scenarios, from different perspectives across different surfaces of the earth. Simulation becomes a device to train actions and access history in a world of greater perceived uncertainly, automation, deregulation and the supposed “need” for risk management.<br />
<br />
I need not reiterate the pages and pages written on the prominence of economics-based calculation and prediction of events that have taken over from poetry, storytelling and meaning; the decreasing importance of a stable and single point of view which is being supplemented (and often replaced) by multiple perspectives, overlapping windows, distorted flight lines, and divergent vanishing points. Farewell to History which should have long been replaced by genealogy, archaeology, discourse analysis and the evolutionary vibrations of matter, geology and exploding events, exploding long before history, contingency and accidents bubbling beneath the crust. A loss that is felt even more prominently these days with the constant interruption of screen face-to-face conversations by glitches, echoes, ventilation hum, or simply by headaches and sore eyes.<br />
<br />
The representational scalar vocabularies of narrative storytelling are no longer good enough to describe the complex temporality and spatiality of the world. One that appears to be a composite matter of deep time water undersea, rocks, stones, forests, the body feminine, the marginalized, the repressed, the unconscious, and the algorithms. Global infrastructures, computer generated images, data behaviorism, all of the aspects of the new geo-political and economic interdependencies that make up our world. Simulation and tactical gameplay have come to replace historical folktales. History as a fictional linear progression that continuously follows on from event to event, that has a form of unity, western rootedness and continuity, is no longer perceived as sufficient enough to describe the diverse multitude of our current reality. History is the discourse of the powerful; it’s the discourse of totalitarianism, of hegemony, which must be critiqued and questioned. Unfortunately these critical methods forever remain buried behind the thrust and efficacy of modeling volumetric unknowns.<br />
<br />
Simulation is the new method of certainty, which borrows its art from cybernetics, particle physics and statistical mechanics. It has come to replace history, to break up its hold on reality, by presenting the past through multiplying perspectives. However, simulation comes in two flavors, that of ''rehearsal'' and of ''training''. The latter is always seemingly co-opted and incorporated into volumetric regimes of the probable closing in on all the possibilities that could open up when history dissolves. The chaotic weather systems of social, political, animate and post-colonial perspectives, under the current regimes of volumetric terror, or simulation as training are tamed, suffocated in predictive echo chambers, from contingency and accident to calculated probabilities.<br />
<br />
However, not all tactical gameplay is designed the same, simulations can appear as rehearsal on the one hand and training on the other. An example of simulation-as-training as opposed to rehearsal is the way that crewless vessels or autonomous cargo ships are trained through various volumetric exercises and modeling. To understand the possibilities of traversing the sea in the shortest amount of time, with the least amount of trouble. The experiments of the sea of past and beyond are no longer there. An autonomous ship does not sail for exploration, however problematic that term is, when considering colonial encounters. Even the colonial ships that wanted to discover and conquer, left a little bit of space for contingency, for the accident. The cargo autonomous ships, however, leave no room or margin for error. They must train for all scenarios regardless of their position. And if these ships encounter a scenario that is not part of the training package, then they no longer know what to do. A failure in this sense is not an opportunity for discovery, a failure is complete deadlock. The training of volumetric regimes is a future speculative exercise for closing up the future for minimizing error and risk. Furthermore, the difference between the rehearsal of the first-person taking command of the simulation engine on the one hand and the rehearsal of the autonomous machine learning system that is acting as an opponent on the other, is that simulators mould, through training, the corpus of living beings to the machine, while the autonomous system extracts the bodily presence from the rehearsal process. It’s not training the body anymore it’s training of data archived, extracted.<br />
<br />
With the number of simulations trialed at the moment, it’s almost as if we’ve entered some form of “Training Paradigm”, that is if we could ever again believe in the phenomena of paradigms or epochs. From marketing campaigns to political campaigns training on consumer or voter temperament, to competing models simulating virus paths, vaccine efficacy and the rate at which black and ethnics minorities are likely to get infected due to frontline jobs they are forced into by structural racism. Train the timeline, train for the unlikely scenario, learn the drill and prepare for the victor. Prepare the seven speeches only to read out the one that seems most fitting when you know the results. To train, a preparation for pointless anticipated activities. <br />
<br />
The term “re-hearse” combines the Latin (re) with the old French ''herse'', meaning harrow or a large rake used to turn the earth or ground, as in to reground or to take the ground again, to rake it again until all possible grounds have been considered.<ref name="ftn2">* Rehearse. (n.d.). Retrieved from [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rehearse https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rehearse]</ref> A distinction, however, should be made between rehearsal and training. If rehearsal is the repetition that maintains the openness of the rehearsed piece, a repetition that produces difference each time the piece is rehearsed, then training is the moment of closure in the process of rehearsal, when contingency is purposefully erased. What training does as every performer knows is that it destroys the spontaneity of the moment, “The performer, therefore, could not rehearse such music but rather “trained” for it like a martial art, developing ways of acting upon contingency.”<ref name="ftn3">* Simon Yuill, “All Problems of Notation Will Be Solved By the Masses,” in ''Mute ''Vol 2, No. 8, 2008 https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/all-problems-notation-will-be-solved-masses.</ref><br />
<br />
Training is in this sense different from the practice of rehearsal, which is a gesture of putting something into action, from the theory into practice. To train for something is to consider and attempt to foreclose all possible futures by unearthing various possible grounds for any future. When one trains they repeat an action in an attempt to erase the possibility for the accident, or erase the possibility of any kind of error. Training for a sport, for example, tends to optimize all the muscles towards a very specific and closed, aim that leaves no room for the accident. The accident in sport is always an injury.<br />
<br />
<div class="quote"><br />
GAME RULES PAGE 1: On June 13th, 1982, paratroopers and armour of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) rolled to the edge of Beirut, joining forces with their Phalange Christian allies. They never got much farther. The Palestine Liberation Organisation’s attempt to organises a regular army had failed, but so had Israel’s drive to exterminate it. This was a classic confrontation of modern diplomacy, where political pressure allowed a tiny force to fend off a giant. Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad simulates the siege of Beirut, and its victory conditions recreate the diplomatic hindrances of that struggle.<ref name="ftn4">“Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad,” ''Strategy and Tactics'', 1989.</ref></div><br />
<br />
<br />
[[File:Beirut 82.jpg|thumb]]<br />
<br />
The above excerpt is taken from the 1989 edition of ''Strategy and Tactics'' magazine which was founded in 1966 by a US Air Force Staff Sergeant named Chris Wagner. The point of the magazine, or “war fanzine”, was to produce more complex and therefore more realistic tactics in wargaming. The magazine had elements of a recreational wargaming magazine but as it was written by military political analysts and defense consultants who were keen to create something close enough to military wargaming. In 1969 James F. Dunnigan, a political analyst, formed Simulations Publications, Inc., a publishing house created specifically to publish the magazine.<ref name="ftn5">S. Appelcline, ''Designers & dragons''. Silver Springs, MD: Evil Hat Productions, 2013.</ref><br />
<br />
The excerpt is the first paragraph of the game rule page that explains the rules of ''Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad'', a game based on ''The Siege of Beirut'', one of the most defining events of the Lebanese Civil War. The siege took place in the summer of 1982 when the United Nation ceasefire between the Palestinian Liberation Army (PLO), who in the early 1970s made Lebanon its base of operations, and the Israeli army. After the siege the PLO were forced out of Beirut and the rest of Lebanon. ''Strategy and Tactics'' was one of the first wargaming magazines to include a wargame within its pages.<br />
<br />
The main difference between so-called recreational wargames such as ''Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad'', however realistic and complex they intend to be, and military wargames, is that the former is usually regarded as a historical depiction of war. The training on tactics and strategies is replaying the events of a distant past. Wargaming has long performed World Wars I and II and the Napoleonic Wars as an act of remembrance and an interest of historians. Recreational games generally take creative liberties, by adding fictional elements, to make the game more enjoyable, more playable. For instance, scenarios would often be differently simplified in order to prioritize gameplay over event accuracy. However, ''Strategy and Tactics'' as a magazine that sits between tactical history and military strategy prides itself on being more realistic than other wargaming magazines.<br />
<br />
<div class="quote"><br />
GAME RULES PAGE 5, 6.0 CIVILIAN CASUALITIES: The CRT (rule 4.22) shows if an attack might cause Civilian Casualties, and what to multiply the result by. However, these casualties still only occur under certain conditions. IDF units or artillery points must participate in the attach and the PLO must be defending a Refugee Camp or City hexagon. Otherwise, ignore Civilian Casualties.<ref name="ftn6">“Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad,” Strategy and Tactics.</ref><br />
</div><br />
<br />
[[File:Pieces.jpg|thumb]] [[File:Strategy and Tactics.jpg|thumb]]<br />
<br />
Wargaming is a descriptive and predictive apparatus that goes beyond the magazines and technologies of its implementation. When playing a game such as ''Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad'' on the map insert placed in the centerfold of the publication, the gamer moves the Phalange army troops, as cardboard cut-outs of a right-wing Maronite party in Lebanon founded in 1936 by Pierre Gemayel, across the map. Such a move is a re-enactment of a particular procedure that relates to a complex system which reproduces what to some are painful historical events in relation to other possible futures, possible or probable futures that will never be. The combat is replaced with abstraction, supply and demand dynamics and other military considerations of algorithmic and numerically founded sets of possible outcomes all made random, a flipping of events at the throw of a die. ''Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad'' is interesting not for its own sake but for in the manner in which it represents knowledge or history as a combination of both rehearsal and training, as simulation, or as Haron Farocki describes, “life trained as a sport”.<ref name="ftn7">Thomas Elsaesser, “Simulation and the Labour of Invisibility: Harun Farocki’s Life Manuals,” ''Animation'' 12, no. 3 (November 2017): 214–29.</ref> ''Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad'' is not only a simulation: it is one of the most nuanced and complex examples found in any medium. As a game it has eight pages of rules which explain actions, moves and procedures for circa one hundred game pieces and tokens around a 50cm by 40cm battle ground map of Beirut. It allows for a physically as well as conceptually extreme level of gameplay.<br />
<br />
More than this, software gaming, from its inception, was quick to take interest in wargaming, which is different from games with military themes. Wargames were quick to translate to the screen and themes of Beirut 82 were no exception. The difference being that simulation now attempts to model all of the weapons, vehicles and aircrafts that were involved in the siege for show. Digital Combat Simulator’s UH-1H Huey mission entitled Beirut 82 is an exemplar of the wargaming simulation offering a first-person experience of what it’s like to be an American built Israeli helicopter flying over Beirut in 1982. The DCS website describes it as:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Digital Combat Simulator World (DCS World) 2.5 is a free-to-play digital battlefield game. Our dream is to offer the most authentic and realistic simulation of military aircraft, tanks, ground vehicles and ships possible… DCS: UH-1H Huey features an incredible level of modelling depth that reproducers the look, feel, and sound of this legendary helicopter with exquisite detail and accuracy. Developed in close partnership with actual UH-1H operators and experts, the DCS Huey provides the most dynamic and true to life conventional helicopter experience available on the PC. The UH-1 Huey is one of the most iconic and recognisable helicopters in the world. Having served extensively as a transport and armed combat support helicopter in the Vietnam War, the Huey continues to perform a wide variety of military and civilian missions around the world today.<ref name="ftn8">''Digital Combat Simulator World'' (n.d.), retrieved from [https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/products/world/. https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/products/world/.]</ref></blockquote><br />
<br />
Here the simulation is less interested in the historical strategies that play out a future otherwise. The volumetrics of the UH-1H Huey are there to both produce a so-called “modeling depth” in order to train the gamer to fly the helicopter over the terrain Beirut. The “modeling depth” of the Huey relates to a calculated time of the clock, not a temporality of sorts, but rather a time in the milliseconds, for instance, that it takes to fly the aircraft for calculations sake: calculation for calculations sake.<br />
<br />
“Modeling depth” also relates to the attention to visual and volumetric detail in the construction of the aircraft itself, to resolution. Depth here considers only pixel resolution of the type of visual dimension that captures the aircraft in a hyper computational state. It means very little to the people on the ground, viewing it as it shells its missiles, or captures prisoners who are their family members on the ground. In effect none of the events of Beirut 82 are captured in this simulation, not even the tactics and facts of history.<br />
<br />
So, while in ''Strategy and Tactics'', and the Beirut 82 replaying there is the probable and possible future that can be played and played again, even if it will never be realized. There is an opening for discussion of the past. In that sense, the past is being rehearsed as if it could have been otherwise. The tactical re-playing of past in that sense becomes a mode of open discussion within the game. Historical recollection can no longer be a simple story, narrative or folklore. Historical recollection has to include tactical exercises, a replaying, a repetition, a habit, a form of inhabiting the past which keeps its own tactical memories; the memory or schema of a victory that's played as tactical exercise. With the DCS: UH-1H Huey, however, the body of the gamer trains to fly the helicopter where the training is performed at the individual level siloed in the aircraft shooting down at the landscape, practicing nothing but flight skills and good aim.<br />
<br />
[[File:Troops.jpg|thumb]]<br />
<br />
Only in the openings between the tactical gameplay can there be remnants or conversations about an “Other” to hypercomputation. The slight opening in ''Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad'', within the gameplay allows for a possible outside of the probable. However, it does so in a manner that never gets cemented into writing, into a root that can be acted against, in a manner that aligns with what Glissant defined as “errantry”. We do not yet know the general movement of errantry, “the desire to go against the root”, the indigenous being of the colonized in relation to simulation, whether training or rehearsal.<ref name="ftn9">Glissant, ''Poetics of Relation.''</ref> Even if ''Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad'' permits a type of gameplay it remains a pointlessly ephemeral, fleeting moment that passes away as the game ends but leaves behind nothing but loss. It leaves the question open; How can the “training” convert into “rehearsal”?<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Rehearsal_as_the_%E2%80%98Other%E2%80%99_to_Hypercomputation&diff=2429Rehearsal as the ‘Other’ to Hypercomputation2021-11-23T05:44:22Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>== Rehearsal as the ‘Other’ to Hypercomputation ==<br />
<br />
'''Maria Dada'''<br />
<br />
<br />
The next few paragraphs outline the effects of the simulation paradigm on the sense of errantry in the postcolonial condition in places like Lebanon. Through an examination of two games about the Beirut war, that differ in their approach, the text examines the possibilities of opening up a space for the Other in the gap between simulation as rehearsal versus that of training.<br />
<br />
History is apparently no longer sufficient to uphold the dominance of the western viewpoint. It must be overcome, but despite the prevalence of critical tools such as discourse analysis, genealogy archaeology and other methods that attempt to dismantle the totalitarian universal structure of history, it is simulation that appears to disassemble it, only to take its place. However, to overcome history through simulation is to root the colonized into a past of prediction, efficiency and closed repetition. Simulation studies people and places like Beirut and their wars as strategy, in order to lock them into a position that is not indigenous to their way of being, that of errantry.<br />
<br />
Édouard Glissant describes errantry as “rooted movement” in a sense that it’s a desire to go against the root where the root is the historical beginnings and universalization of the western point of view.<ref name="ftn1">Édouard Glissant. ''Poetics of Relation'' (University of Michigan Press, 1997).</ref> The history of the West has always been tied to fixed states of nationality, an idea that has been exported to the colonized nations like Lebanon, that have come to aspire to similar univocal rootedness. The idea of errantry, which Glissant believes to be native to the colonized, is a fluid subjectivity that sits between the notion of identity and movement.<br />
<br />
In other words, what this text will put forward, is that simulation closes in on the possibilities of what Glissant describes as a poetics, creating a continuous longing for the lost but defunct and deconstructed stories of origins and history that are tied to the west. In order to foreclose on the pasts war like the one of Beirut in 1982, simulation engines use remote sensing and computer-generated images to build model worlds in order to programmatically train on different scenarios, from different perspectives across different surfaces of the earth. Simulation becomes a device to train actions and access history in a world of greater perceived uncertainly, automation, deregulation and the supposed “need” for risk management.<br />
<br />
I need not reiterate the pages and pages written on the prominence of economics-based calculation and prediction of events that have taken over from poetry, storytelling and meaning; the decreasing importance of a stable and single point of view which is being supplemented (and often replaced) by multiple perspectives, overlapping windows, distorted flight lines, and divergent vanishing points. Farewell to History which should have long been replaced by genealogy, archaeology, discourse analysis and the evolutionary vibrations of matter, geology and exploding events, exploding long before history, contingency and accidents bubbling beneath the crust. A loss that is felt even more prominently these days with the constant interruption of screen face-to-face conversations by glitches, echoes, ventilation hum, or simply by headaches and sore eyes.<br />
<br />
The representational scalar vocabularies of narrative storytelling are no longer good enough to describe the complex temporality and spatiality of the world. One that appears to be a composite matter of deep time water undersea, rocks, stones, forests, the body feminine, the marginalized, the repressed, the unconscious, and the algorithms. Global infrastructures, computer generated images, data behaviorism, all of the aspects of the new geo-political and economic interdependencies that make up our world. Simulation and tactical gameplay have come to replace historical folktales. History as a fictional linear progression that continuously follows on from event to event, that has a form of unity, western rootedness and continuity, is no longer perceived as sufficient enough to describe the diverse multitude of our current reality. History is the discourse of the powerful; it’s the discourse of totalitarianism, of hegemony, which must be critiqued and questioned. Unfortunately these critical methods forever remain buried behind the thrust and efficacy of modeling volumetric unknowns.<br />
<br />
Simulation is the new method of certainty, which borrows its art from cybernetics, particle physics and statistical mechanics. It has come to replace history, to break up its hold on reality, by presenting the past through multiplying perspectives. However, simulation comes in two flavors, that of ''rehearsal'' and of ''training''. The latter is always seemingly co-opted and incorporated into volumetric regimes of the probable closing in on all the possibilities that could open up when history dissolves. The chaotic weather systems of social, political, animate and post-colonial perspectives, under the current regimes of volumetric terror, or simulation as training are tamed, suffocated in predictive echo chambers, from contingency and accident to calculated probabilities.<br />
<br />
However, not all tactical gameplay is designed the same, simulations can appear as rehearsal on the one hand and training on the other. An example of simulation-as-training as opposed to rehearsal is the way that crewless vessels or autonomous cargo ships are trained through various volumetric exercises and modeling. To understand the possibilities of traversing the sea in the shortest amount of time, with the least amount of trouble. The experiments of the sea of past and beyond are no longer there. An autonomous ship does not sail for exploration, however problematic that term is, when considering colonial encounters. Even the colonial ships that wanted to discover and conquer, left a little bit of space for contingency, for the accident. The cargo autonomous ships, however, leave no room or margin for error. They must train for all scenarios regardless of their position. And if these ships encounter a scenario that is not part of the training package, then they no longer know what to do. A failure in this sense is not an opportunity for discovery, a failure is complete deadlock. The training of volumetric regimes is a future speculative exercise for closing up the future for minimizing error and risk. Furthermore, the difference between the rehearsal of the first-person taking command of the simulation engine on the one hand and the rehearsal of the autonomous machine learning system that is acting as an opponent on the other, is that simulators mould, through training, the corpus of living beings to the machine, while the autonomous system extracts the bodily presence from the rehearsal process. It’s not training the body anymore it’s training of data archived, extracted.<br />
<br />
With the number of simulations trialed at the moment, it’s almost as if we’ve entered some form of “Training Paradigm”, that is if we could ever again believe in the phenomena of paradigms or epochs. From marketing campaigns to political campaigns training on consumer or voter temperament, to competing models simulating virus paths, vaccine efficacy and the rate at which black and ethnics minorities are likely to get infected due to frontline jobs they are forced into by structural racism. Train the timeline, train for the unlikely scenario, learn the drill and prepare for the victor. Prepare the seven speeches only to read out the one that seems most fitting when you know the results. To train, a preparation for pointless anticipated activities. <br />
<br />
The term “re-hearse” combines the Latin (re) with the old French ''herse'', meaning harrow or a large rake used to turn the earth or ground, as in to reground or to take the ground again, to rake it again until all possible grounds have been considered.<ref name="ftn2">* Rehearse. (n.d.). Retrieved from [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rehearse https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rehearse]</ref> A distinction, however, should be made between rehearsal and training. If rehearsal is the repetition that maintains the openness of the rehearsed piece, a repetition that produces difference each time the piece is rehearsed, then training is the moment of closure in the process of rehearsal, when contingency is purposefully erased. What training does as every performer knows is that it destroys the spontaneity of the moment, “The performer, therefore, could not rehearse such music but rather “trained” for it like a martial art, developing ways of acting upon contingency.”<ref name="ftn3">* Simon Yuill, “All Problems of Notation Will Be Solved By the Masses,” in ''Mute ''Vol 2, No. 8, 2008 https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/all-problems-notation-will-be-solved-masses</ref><br />
<br />
Training is in this sense different from the practice of rehearsal, which is a gesture of putting something into action, from the theory into practice. To train for something is to consider and attempt to foreclose all possible futures by unearthing various possible grounds for any future. When one trains they repeat an action in an attempt to erase the possibility for the accident, or erase the possibility of any kind of error. Training for a sport, for example, tends to optimize all the muscles towards a very specific and closed, aim that leaves no room for the accident. The accident in sport is always an injury.<br />
<br />
<div class="quote"><br />
GAME RULES PAGE 1: “On June 13th, 1982, paratroopers and armour of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) rolled to the edge of Beirut, joining forces with their Phalange Christian allies. They never got much farther. The Palestine Liberation Organisation’s attempt to organises a regular army had failed, but so had Israel’s drive to exterminate it. This was a classic confrontation of modern diplomacy, where political pressure allowed a tiny force to fend off a giant. Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad simulates the siege of Beirut, and its victory conditions recreate the diplomatic hindrances of that struggle.”</div><ref name="ftn4">“Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad,” Strategy and Tactics, 1989.</ref><br />
<br />
<br />
[[File:Beirut 82.jpg|thumb]]<br />
<br />
The above excerpt is taken from the 1989 edition of ''Strategy and Tactics'' magazine which was founded in 1966 by a US Air Force Staff Sergeant named Chris Wagner. The point of the magazine, or “war fanzine”, was to produce more complex and therefore more realistic tactics in wargaming. The magazine had elements of a recreational wargaming magazine but as it was written by military political analysts and defense consultants who were keen to create something close enough to military wargaming. In 1969 James F. Dunnigan, a political analyst, formed Simulations Publications, Inc., a publishing house created specifically to publish the magazine.<ref name="ftn5">S. Appelcline, ''Designers & dragons''. Silver Springs, MD: Evil Hat Productions, 2013.</ref><br />
<br />
The excerpt is the first paragraph of the game rule page that explains the rules of ''Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad'', a game based on ''The Siege of Beirut'', one of the most defining events of the Lebanese Civil War. The siege took place in the summer of 1982 when the United Nation ceasefire between the Palestinian Liberation Army (PLO), who in the early 1970s made Lebanon its base of operations, and the Israeli army. After the siege the PLO were forced out of Beirut and the rest of Lebanon. ''Strategy and Tactics'' was one of the first wargaming magazines to include a wargame within its pages.<br />
<br />
The main difference between so-called recreational wargames such as ''Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad'', however realistic and complex they intend to be, and military wargames, is that the former is usually regarded as a historical depiction of war. The training on tactics and strategies is replaying the events of a distant past. Wargaming has long performed World Wars I and II and the Napoleonic Wars as an act of remembrance and an interest of historians. Recreational games generally take creative liberties, by adding fictional elements, to make the game more enjoyable, more playable. For instance, scenarios would often be differently simplified in order to prioritize gameplay over event accuracy. However, ''Strategy and Tactics'' as a magazine that sits between tactical history and military strategy prides itself on being more realistic than other wargaming magazines.<br />
<br />
<div class="quote"><br />
GAME RULES PAGE 5: 6.0 CIVILIAN CASUALITIES “The CRT (rule 4.22) shows if an attack might cause Civilian Casualties, and what to multiply the result by. However, these casualties still only occur under certain conditions. IDF units or artillery points must participate in the attach and the PLO must be defending a Refugee Camp or City hexagon. Otherwise, ignore Civilian Casualties.”<ref name="ftn6">“Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad,” Strategy and Tactics.</ref><br />
</div><br />
<br />
[[File:Pieces.jpg|thumb]] [[File:Strategy and Tactics.jpg|thumb]]<br />
<br />
Wargaming is a descriptive and predictive apparatus that goes beyond the magazines and technologies of its implementation. When playing a game such as ''Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad'' on the map insert placed in the centerfold of the publication, the gamer moves the Phalange army troops, as cardboard cut-outs of a right-wing Maronite party in Lebanon founded in 1936 by Pierre Gemayel, across the map. Such a move is a re-enactment of a particular procedure that relates to a complex system which reproduces what to some are painful historical events in relation to other possible futures, possible or probable futures that will never be. The combat is replaced with abstraction, supply and demand dynamics and other military considerations of algorithmic and numerically founded sets of possible outcomes all made random, a flipping of events at the throw of a die. ''Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad'' is interesting not for its own sake but for in the manner in which it represents knowledge or history as a combination of both rehearsal and training, as simulation, or as Haron Farocki describes, “life trained as a sport”.<ref name="ftn7">Thomas Elsaesser, “Simulation and the Labour of Invisibility: Harun Farocki’s Life Manuals,” ''Animation'' 12, no. 3 (November 2017): 214–29.</ref> ''Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad'' is not only a simulation: it is one of the most nuanced and complex examples found in any medium. As a game it has eight pages of rules which explain actions, moves and procedures for circa one hundred game pieces and tokens around a 50cm by 40cm battle ground map of Beirut. It allows for a physically as well as conceptually extreme level of gameplay.<br />
<br />
More than this, software gaming, from its inception, was quick to take interest in wargaming, which is different from games with military themes. Wargames were quick to translate to the screen and themes of Beirut 82 were no exception. The difference being that simulation now attempts to model all of the weapons, vehicles and aircrafts that were involved in the siege for show. Digital Combat Simulator’s UH-1H Huey mission entitled Beirut 82 is an exemplar of the wargaming simulation offering a first-person experience of what it’s like to be an American built Israeli helicopter flying over Beirut in 1982. The DCS website describes it as:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Digital Combat Simulator World (DCS World) 2.5 is a free-to-play digital battlefield game. Our dream is to offer the most authentic and realistic simulation of military aircraft, tanks, ground vehicles and ships possible… DCS: UH-1H Huey features an incredible level of modelling depth that reproducers the look, feel, and sound of this legendary helicopter with exquisite detail and accuracy. Developed in close partnership with actual UH-1H operators and experts, the DCS Huey provides the most dynamic and true to life conventional helicopter experience available on the PC. The UH-1 Huey is one of the most iconic and recognisable helicopters in the world. Having served extensively as a transport and armed combat support helicopter in the Vietnam War, the Huey continues to perform a wide variety of military and civilian missions around the world today.<ref name="ftn8">Digital Combat Simulator World'' (n.d.), retrieved from [https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/products/world/ https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/products/world/]</ref></blockquote><br />
<br />
Here the simulation is less interested in the historical strategies that play out a future otherwise. The volumetrics of the UH-1H Huey are there to both produce a so-called “modeling depth” in order to train the gamer to fly the helicopter over the terrain Beirut. The “modeling depth” of the Huey relates to a calculated time of the clock, not a temporality of sorts, but rather a time in the milliseconds, for instance, that it takes to fly the aircraft for calculations sake: calculation for calculations sake.<br />
<br />
“Modeling depth” also relates to the attention to visual and volumetric detail in the construction of the aircraft itself, to resolution. Depth here considers only pixel resolution of the type of visual dimension that captures the aircraft in a hyper computational state. It means very little to the people on the ground, viewing it as it shells its missiles, or captures prisoners who are their family members on the ground. In effect none of the events of Beirut 82 are captured in this simulation, not even the tactics and facts of history.<br />
<br />
So, while in ''Strategy and Tactics'', and the Beirut 82 replaying there is the probable and possible future that can be played and played again, even if it will never be realized. There is an opening for discussion of the past. In that sense, the past is being rehearsed as if it could have been otherwise. The tactical re-playing of past in that sense becomes a mode of open discussion within the game. Historical recollection can no longer be a simple story, narrative or folklore. Historical recollection has to include tactical exercises, a replaying, a repetition, a habit, a form of inhabiting the past which keeps its own tactical memories; the memory or schema of a victory that's played as tactical exercise. With the DCS: UH-1H Huey, however, the body of the gamer trains to fly the helicopter where the training is performed at the individual level siloed in the aircraft shooting down at the landscape, practicing nothing but flight skills and good aim.<br />
<br />
[[File:Troops.jpg|thumb]]<br />
<br />
Only in the openings between the tactical gameplay can there be remnants or conversations about an “Other” to hypercomputation. The slight opening in ''Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad'', within the gameplay allows for a possible outside of the probable. However, it does so in a manner that never gets cemented into writing, into a root that can be acted against, in a manner that aligns with what Glissant defined as “errantry”. We do not yet know the general movement of errantry, “the desire to go against the root”, the indigenous being of the colonized in relation to simulation, whether training or rehearsal.<ref name="ftn9">Glissant, ''Poetics of Relation.''</ref> Even if ''Beirut ’82: Arab Stalingrad'' permits a type of gameplay it remains a pointlessly ephemeral, fleeting moment that passes away as the game ends but leaves behind nothing but loss. It leaves the question open; How can the “training” convert into “rehearsal”?<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
<references/></div>127.0.0.1https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=The_Fragility_of_Life&diff=2428The Fragility of Life2021-11-23T05:41:00Z<p>127.0.0.1: </p>
<hr />
<div>== The Fragility of Life ==<br />
<br />
'''Simone C Niquille in conversation with Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting'''<br />
<br />
<br />
'''This text was edited from a conversation, recorded after the screening of process material for Niquille’s film ''The Fragility of Life'', which was shown at the Possible Bodies residency in Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart (May 2017).'''<br />
<br />
[[File:Fol thefragilityoflife-2.jpeg|thumb|none|600px|Simone C Niquille, ''The Fragility of Life'', 2017, filmstill]]<br />
<br />
'''Jara Rocha''': In the process of developing the Possible Bodies trajectory, one of the excursions we made was to the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science’s reproduction workshop in Brussels, where they were working on 3D-reproductions of Hominids. Another visitor asked: “How do you know how many hairs a monkey like this should have?” The person working on the 3D reproduction replied, “It is not a monkey.”<ref name="ftn144">Another aspect of the ''Hairy Hominid effect'' appears in our conversation with Phil Langley, “We hardly encounter anything that didn’t matter,” in this chapter.</ref> You could see that he had an empathetic connection to the on-screen-model he was working on, being of the same species. I would like to ask you about norms and embedded norms in software. Talking about objective truth and parametric representation and the like, in this example you refer to, there is a huge norm that worries me, that of species, of unquestioned humanness. When we talk about “bodies”, we can push certain limits because of the hegemony of the species. In legal court, the norm is anthropocentric, but when it comes to representation…<br />
<br />
'''Femke Snelting''': This is the subject of “Kritios They”?<br />
<br />
'''Simone C Niquille''': Kritios They is a character in ''The Fragility of Life'', a result of the research project ''The Contents''. While ''The Contents'' is based on the assumption that we as humans possess and create content, living in our daily networked space of appearance that is used for or against us, I became interested in the corporeal fragility exposed and created through this data, or that the data itself possesses. In the film, the decimation scene questions this quite bluntly: when does a form stop being human, when do we lose empathy towards the representation? Merely reducing the 3D mesh’s resolution, decreasing its information density, can affect the viewer’s empathy. Suddenly the mesh might no longer be perceived as human, and is revealed as a simple geometric construct: A plain surface onto which any and all interpretation can be projected. The contemporary accelerating frenzy of collecting as much data as possible on one single individual to achieve maximum transparency and construct a “fleshed out” profile is a fragile endeavor. More information does not necessarily lead to a more defined image. In the case of Kritios They, I was interested in character creation software and the parameters embedded in its interfaces. The parameters come with limitations: an arm can only be this long, skin color is represented within a specified spectrum, and so on. How were these decisions made and these parameters determined? Looking at design history and the field’s striving to create a standardized body to better cater to the human form, I found similarities of intent and problematics.<br />
<br />
Anthropometric efforts ranging from Da Vinci’s ''Vitruvian Man'', to Corbusier’s ''Modulor'', to Alphonse Bertillon’s ''Signaletic Instructions'' and invention of the mug shot, to Henry Dreyfuss’s ''Humanscale''… What these projects share is an attempt to translate the human body into numbers. Be it for the sake of comparison, efficiency, policing…<br />
<br />
In a Washington Post article from 1999<ref name="ftn145">William M. Arkin, “When Seeing and Hearing Isn’t Believing,” ''Washington Post'', February, 1999, [https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?next_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fwp-srv%2Fnational%2Fdotmil%2Farkin020199.htm https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?next_url=https%3a%2f%2fwww.washingtonpost.com%2fwp-srv%2fnational%2fdotmil%2farkin020199.htm].</ref> on newly developed voice mimicking technology, Daniel T. Kuehl, the chairman of the Information Operations department at the National Defense University in Washington (the military’s school for information warfare) is quoted as saying: “Once you can take any kind of information and reduce it into ones and zeroes, you can do some pretty interesting things.”<br />
<br />
[[File:04 bertillon identification system.jpg|thumb|none|600px|Alphonse Bertillon, Anthropometric data sheet and Identification Card, 1896]]<br />
<br />
[[File:03 henry dreyfuss humanscale.jpg|thumb|none|600px|Humanscale 7b: Seated at Work Selector, Henry Dreyfuss Associates, MIT Press, 1981, http://collection.cooperhewitt.org/objects/51689299]]<br />
<br />
To create the “Kritios They” character I used a program called Fuse.<ref name="ftn146">Jeanette Mathews, “An Update on Adobe Fuse as Adobe Moves to the Future of 3D & AR Development,” September 13, 2019, [https://www.adobe.com/products/fuse.html# https://www.adobe.com/products/fuse.html].</ref> It was recently acquired by Adobe and is in the process of being integrated into their Creative Cloud services. It originated as assembly-based 3D modeling research carried out at Stanford University. The Fuse interface segments the body into Frankenstein-like parts to be assembled by the user. However, the seemingly restriction free Lego-character-design interface is littered with limitations. Not all body parts mix as well as others; some create uncanny folds and seams when assembled. The torso has to be a certain length and the legs positioned in a certain way and when I try to adapt these elements the automatic rigging process doesn’t work because the mesh won’t be recognized as a body.<br />
<br />
A lot of these processes and workflows demand content that is very specific to their definition of the human form in order to function. As a result, they don’t account for anything that diverges from that norm, establishing a parametric truth that is biased and discriminatory. This raises the question of what that norm is and how, by whom and for whom it has been defined.<br />
<br />
'''FS''': Could you say something about the notion of “parametric truth” that you use?<br />
<br />
'''SN''': Realizing the existence of a built-in anthropometric standard in such software, I started looking at use cases of motion capture and 3D scanning in areas other than entertainment - applications that demand an objectivity. I was particularly interested in crime and accident reconstruction animations that are produced as visual evidence or in court support material. Traditionally this support material would consist of photographs, diagrams and objects. More recently this sometimes includes forensic animations commissioned by either party. The animations are produced with various software and tools, sometimes including motion capture and/or 3D scanning technologies.<br />
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These animations are created post-fact; a varying amalgam of witness testimonies, crime scene survey data, police and medical reports etc. Effectively creating a ”version of”, rather than an objective illustration. One highly problematic instance was an animation intended as a piece of evidence in the trial of George Zimmerman on the charge of second-degree murder on account of the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012. Zimmerman’s defense commissioned an animation to attest his actions as self defense. Among the online documentation of the trial is a roughly two-hour long video of Zimmerman’s attorney questioning the animator on his process. Within these two hours of questioning, the defense attorney is attempting to demonstrate the animations’ objectivity by minutely scrutinizing the creation process. It is revealed that a motion capture suit was used to capture the character’s animations, to digitally re-enact Zimmerman and Martin. The animator states that he was the one wearing the motion capture suit portraying both Zimmerman as well as Martin. If this weren’t already enough to debunk an objectivity claim, the attorney asks: “How does the computer know that it is recording a body?” Upon which the animator responds: “You place the sixteen sensors on the body and then on screen you see the body move in accordance.” But what is on screen is merely a representation of the data transmitted by 16 sensors, not a body.<br />
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A misplaced or wrongly calibrated sensor would yield an entirely different animation. And further, the anthropometric measurements of the two subjects were added in post production, after the animation data had been recorded from the animator’s re-enactment. In this case the animation was thankfully not allowed as a piece of evidence, but it nevertheless was allowed to be screened during the trial. The difference from showing video in court is, seeing something play out visually, in a medium that we are used to consume. It takes root in a different part of your memory than a verbal acount and renders one version more visible than others. Even with part of the animation based on data collected at the crime scene, a part of the reproduction will remain approximation and assumption.<br />
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[[File:09 newsdirect.png|thumb|none|600px|3D animation by Reuter’s owned News Direct “Transform your News with 3D Graphics”, “FBI investigates George Zimmerman for shooting of Florida teen, Trayvon Martin”, ''News Direct'', 2012]]<br />
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This is visible in the visual choices of the animation, for example. Most parts are modeled with minimal detail (I assume to communicate objectivity). “There were no superfluous aesthetic choices made.” However, some elements receive very selective and intentional detailing. The crime scene’s grassy ground is depicted as a flat plane with an added photographic texture of grass rather than 3D grass produced with particle hair. On the other hand, Zimmerman and Martin’s skin color is clearly accentuated as well as the hoodie worn by Trayvon Martin, a crucial piece of the defense’s case. The hoodie was instrumentalized as evidence of violent intentions during the trial, where it was claimed that if Martin had not worn the hood up he would not have been perceived as a threat by Zimmerman. To model these elements at varying subjective resolution was a deliberate choice. It could have depicted raw armatures instead of textured figures, for example. The animation was designed to focus on specific elements; shifting that focus would produce differing versions.<br />
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'''FS''': This is something that fascinates me, the different levels of detailing that occur in the high octane world of 3D. Where some elements receive an enormous amount of attention and other elements, such as the skeleton or the genitals, almost none.<br />
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'''SN''': Yes, like the sixteen sensors representing a body…<br />
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'''FS''': Where do you locate these different levels of resolution?<br />
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'''SN''': Within the CGI [computer-generated imagery] community, modelers are obsessed by creating 3D renders in the highest possible resolution as a technical as well as artistic accomplishment, but also as a form of muscle flexing of computing power. Detail is not merely a question of the render quality, but equally importantly it can be the realism achieved; a tear on a cheek, a thin film of sweat on the skin. On forums you come across discussions on something called subsurface scattering,<ref name="ftn147">“Subsurface Scattering,” ''Blender 2.93 Reference Manual'', accessed July 1, 2020, [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/shader_nodes/shader/sss.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/shader_nodes/shader/sss.html].</ref> which is used to simulate blood vessels under the skin to make it look more realistic, to add weight and life to the hollow 3D mesh. However, the discussions tend to focus on pristine young white skin, oblivious to diversity.<br />
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'''JR''': This raises the notion of the “epistemic object”. The matter you manipulated brings a question to a specific table, but it cannot be on every table: it cannot be on the “techies” table ''and'' on the designers table. However, under certain conditions, with a specific language and political agenda and so on, ''The Contents'' raises certain issues and serves as a starting point for a conversation or facilitates an argument for a conversation. This is where I find your work extremely interesting. I consider what you make objects around which to formulate a thought, for thinking about specific crossroads. They can as such be considered a part of “disobedient action-research”, as epistemic objects in the sense that they make me think, help me wonder about political urgencies, techno-ecological systems and the decisions that went into them.<br />
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'''SN''': That’s specifically what two scenes in the film experiment with: the sleeping shadow and the decimating mug shot. They depend on the viewer’s expectations. The most beautiful reaction to the decimating mug shot scene has been: “Why does it suddenly look so scary?”<br />
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The viewer has an expectation in the image that is slowly taken away, quite literally, by lowering the resolution. Similar with the sleeping scene: What appears as a sleeping figure filmed through frosted glass unveils itself by changing the camera angle. The new perspective reveals another reality. What I am trying to figure out now is how the images operate in different spaces. Probably there isn’t one single application, but they can be in ''The Fragility of Life'' as well as in a music video or an ergonomic simulation, for example, and travel through different media and contexts. I am interested in how these images exist in these different spaces.<br />
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'''FS''': We see that these renderings, not only yours but in general, are very volatile in their ability to transgress applications, on the large scale of movements ranging from Hollywood to medical, to gaming, to military. But it seems that, seeing your work, this transgression can also function on different levels.<br />
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'''SN''': These different industries share software and tools, which are after all developed within their crossroads. Creating images that attempt to transgress levels of application is a way for me to reverse the tangent, and question the tools of production.<br />
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Is the image produced differently if the tool is the same or is its application different? If 3D modeling software created by the gaming industry were used to create forensic animations, possibly incarcerating people, what are the parameters under which that software operates? This is a vital question affecting real lives.<br />
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'''JR''': Can you please introduce us to Mr. #0082a?<br />
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'''SN''': In attempting to find answers to some of the questions on the Fuse character creator software’s parameters I came across a research project initiated by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory from the late 1990s and early 2000s called “CAESAR” [Civilian American and European Surface Anthropometry Resource].<br />
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<nowiki>#0082a</nowiki> is a whole body scan mesh from the CAESAR database,<ref name="ftn148">Products based on this database are commercialized by SAE International, [http://store.sae.org/caesar/ http://store.sae.org]. </ref> presumably the 82nd scanned subject in position a. The CAESAR project’s aim was to create a new anthropometric surface database of body measurements for the Air Force’s cockpit and uniform design. The new database was necessary to represent the contemporary U.S. military staff. Previous measurements were outdated as the U.S. population had grown more diverse since the last measurement standards had been registered. This large-scale project consisted of scanning about 2000 bodies in the United States, Italy and the Netherlands. A dedicated team travelled to various cities within these countries outfitted with the first whole body scanner developed specifically for this purpose by a company called Cyberware. This is how I initially found out about the CAESAR database, by trying to find information on the Cyberware scanner.<br />
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[[File:Simone1.jpg|thumb|none|600px|Leonard Nimoy is one of the first actors to get scanned and be replicated digitally in ''Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home'' […] Image: Cinefex 29, 02/1987]]<br />
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I found a video somewhere deep within YouTube, it was this very strange and wonderful video of a 3D figure dancing on a NIST [U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology] logo. The figure looked like an early 3D scan that had been crudely animated. I got in touch with the YouTube user and through a Skype conversation learned about his involvement in the CAESAR project through his work at NIST. Because of his own personal fascination with 3D animation he made the video I initially found by animating one of the CAESAR scans, #0082a, with an early version of Poser.<br />
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[[File:06 imgf0016.png|thumb|none|600px|06 CAESAR database used as training set in the research towards a parametric three-dimensional body model for animation. “Method for providing a threedimensional body model,” Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V., 2015]]<br />
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Cyberware<ref name="ftn149">“Cyberware,” Wikipedia, accessed July 1, 2020, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberware].</ref> has its origins in the entertainment industry. They scanned Leonard Nimoy, who portrays Spock in the Star Trek series, for the famous dream sequence in the 1986 movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Nimoy’s head scan is among the first 3D scans… The trajectory of the Cyberware company is part of a curious pattern: it originated in Hollywood as a head scanner, advanced to a whole body scanner for the military, and completed the entertainment-military-industrial cycle by returning to the entertainment industry for whole-body scanning applications.<br />
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CAESAR, as far as I know, is one of the biggest databases available of scanned body meshes and anthropometric data to this day. I assume, therefore it keeps on being used — recycled — for research in need of humanoid 3D meshes.<br />
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While looking into the history of the character creator software Fuse I sifted through 3D mesh segmentation research, which later informed the assembly modeling research at Stanford that became Fuse. #0082 was among twenty CAESAR scans used in a database assembled specifically for this segmentation research and thus ultimately played a role in setting the parameters for Fuse. A very limited amount of training data, that in the case of Fuse ended up becoming a widely distributed commercial software. At least at this point the training data should be reviewed… It felt like a whole ecology of past and future 3D anthropometric standards revealed itself through this one mesh.<br />
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=== Notes ===<br />
<references /></div>127.0.0.1