LiDAR on the Rocks

LiDAR on the rocks

The Underground Division (Helen V. Pritchard, Jara Rocha, and Femke Snelting)

LiDAR on the rocks was a hands-on collective investigation into the micro, meso and macro political consequences of earth scanning practices. Together with a group of participants we looked into what undergrounds are rendered when using techniques such as Terrestrial Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR), magnetic resonance, UltraSound, and Computer Tomography (CT). The session introduced the Initial Areas of Study (IAS) of The Extended Trans*feminist Rendering Programme:

• connected subsurfaces
• stories of the undergrounds (sub-terranean science-fiction)
• subsurface politics and its constellations

Surrounded by fake rocks in Finsbury Park, we used green string and yellow stickers to manually construct point clouds and experiment with Point of View (POV). We tried to render intersecting positions and shifted from individual to collective pareidolia (seeing worlds inside other worlds), while reading selected text fragments by N.K. Jemesin, Kathryn Yusoff, Elizabeth Povinelli, Karen Barad and Denise Fereira Da Silva. The session ended near a 1m3 area of grass that we had marked for imagined digging and a crooked DIWO metal detector that provoked participants to consider plural rendering of the underground.

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Reader: LiDAR_reader.pdf

Notes

This workshop took place at the Citizen Sci-Fi fair organized by Furtherfield in Finsbury Park (London) on August 10th, 2019. The workshop introduced The Extended Trans*Feminist Rendering Program.