About
Volumetric Regimes: material cultures of quantified presence
Edited by Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting)
Volumetric Regimes emerges from Possible Bodies, a collaborative project on the intersection between artistic and academic research. The project was initiated in 2016 to explore the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities of so-called "bodies" in the context of 3D computation. Possible Bodies developed alongside an inventory of cases [1] and resulted in texts, workshops, visual essays and performances. This book would bring together diverse materials from an ongoing conversation between artists, software developers and theorists working with the techniques and technologies of detecting, tracking, printing, modelling and rendering.
As a field oriented towards the technocratic realm of modern technosciences, 3D computation or measuring of volume has historically unfolded under the regimes of optimisation, normalisation and world order. Such volumetrics are understood here as "the probable" behavior of 3D, which is actively being (re)produced and accentuated by digital hypercomputing. The legacies and projections of industrial development leave traces of an imaginery that tells the story of a lively tension between the probable and the possible. Volumetric Regimes explores the technical, technological, operational, procedural and infrastructural elements that provide with a widening of the possible in contemporary volumetrics.
This book will experiment with various formats of writing, publishing and interlocuting. It consists of guided tours, peer-reviewed academic texts, speculative fiction, pamphlets, bug reports, visual essays, performance scripts and inventory items. It will be iteratively written, edited, designed and discussed on a publicly accessible Wiki. Volumetric Regimes pays special attention to design and typography, in correspondence with the project's sensibility to Free Culture and the politics of the way language, forms and shapes are rendered. The polygonal nature of the subject matter necessitated inventive research methods that could widen the spectrum of how Volumetric Regimes can be studied. The publication therefore will provide a substantial contribution to thinking in this field, but also demonstrate the potential of disciplinarily uncalibrated but rigorous research.
The book will be organised in five chapters, each containing differently formatted materials. Each chapter starts with a commissioned contribution which addresses the material-discursive entanglements that emerge from the crossing of quite differentiated worldlings. Contributors include: Ramon Amaro, Maria Dada, Helen Pritchard, Nicolas Malevé.
