Introduction

Introduction

What is going on with 3D!? This question, simultaneously modest and enormous, triggered the collaborative research trajectory that is compiled in this book. Asking about what is up with 3D was provoked by our intuitive concern about the way 3D computing seems to quite routinely render racist, sexist, ableist, speciest and ageist worlds. To ask this question becomes especially urgent when 3D is applied in border-patrol devices, for climate prediction modeling, in advanced biomedical imaging or throughout the gamify-all approach of industries from education to logistics. The proliferating technologies, infrastructures and techniques of 3D tracking, modeling and scanning are everywhere.

Asking "What is going on with 3D?!" meant to fabricate many more questions: Why is '3D' now used as a synonym for 'volume-metrics'. Or: how did the metric of volume became naturalized as '3D'? How are volumes calculated, accounted for and represented? What is it exactly that makes 3D a field of study and praxis? Is the three-dimensional technoscientific organization of spaces, bodies or objects only about volume, or rather about the particular modes in which volume is culturally mobilized? How, then, are computational volumes occupying the world? What forms of power come along with 3D? How are the x, y, z axes established as linear carriers or variables of volume, by whom and why? If we take 3D as a noun, it can be defined as the quality of being three-dimensional. But what if we follow the intuition of asking about 'what is going on' and take 3D as an action, as an operation with implications for the way we can world otherwise? How can we at the same time use, problematize and engage with the cultures of volume-processing that converge under the paradigm of 3D?

One important question we almost overlooked: what is volume, actually!? Let's start by saying that volume is a naturalized construction, a representation of mass and by extension of matter, by means of calculation. The concept of volume is therefore inextricably connected to particular ways of measuring dimensional worlds. All the cases and situations compiled in this book depart from this important shift: volume is not a given, but rather an outcome, and volumetrics is the set of techniques to fabricate such outcome.

As a field oriented towards the technocratic realm of modern technosciences, 3D computation has historically unfolded under "the probable" regimes of optimization, normalization and world order. In that sense, volumetrics is involved in sustaining the all too probable behavior of 3D, which is actively being (re)produced and accentuated by digital hyper-computation. The legacies and projections of industrial development leave traces of an imaginary that tell the story of a lively tension between the probable and the possible. Volumetric Regimes explores the operational, discursive and procedural elements to try to widen "the possible" in contemporary volumetrics. 

Volumetric Regimes emerges from Possible Bodies, a collaborative project on the intersection between artistic and academic research and developed alongside an inventory of cases and resulted in texts, workshops, visual essays and performances. We initiated the project to explore the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities of so-called bodies in the context of 3D computation. By "bodies" we mean individual somatic corpo-realities but also the so-called body of the earth. The inquiry into 3D-geocomputation is explored together with Helen V. Pritchard in The Underground Division. This book brings together diverse materials from a rich and ongoing conversation between artists, software developers and theorists on the political, aesthetic and relational regimes in which volumes are calculated.

Material cultures

This book claims to be an inquiry into the material cultures of volumetrics. We did not settle for one specific area of knowledge, but rather stayed with the complexity of intricate stories that in one way or another involve a metrics of volume. The study of material cultures has a long tail which connects several disciplines such as archaeology, ethnography to design, which each bring their own methodological nuances and specific devices. Volumetric Regimes sympathizes with this multi-fold research sensibility that is necessary to think-with-matter. The framework of material cultures provides us with an arsenal of tools and vocabularies that allow us to interlocute with scholars that have a background in for example Feminist New Materialisms, Science and Technology Studies or Cultural Studies. In exchange, we might introduce and think with Volumetrics into their disciplinary fields.

To study the material cultures of volumetrics necessitates a double-binded approach. The first bind is about the material culture of volume. We need to speak about the volume that so-called bodies occupy in space from the material perspective of what they are made of, the actual conditions of their material presence and the implications of what space they occupy, or not. But we also need to speak about the material arrangements of metrics, the whole ecology of tools that participates in measuring operations. The second bind is therefore about the technopolitical aspects of knowledge production by measuring matter and measured matter itself; in other words: the material culture of metrics.

The material culture of volume-metrics and it's internal double bind implies an understanding of technosocial relations as always in the making, both shaping and being shaped under the conditions of cultural formations. Being sensitive to matter therefore also involves a critical accountability towards the exclusions, reproductions and limitations that such formations execute. We decided to approach its complexity with a handful of cases and an explicitly political attitude.

The way matter matters has a direct affect on how something becomes a structural and structured regime, or rather how it becomes an ongoing contingent amalgamation of forces. There is no doubt that metrics can be considered to be a cultural realm of its own, but what about the possibility of volume itself as a cultural field, infused by an apparatus of axioms and assumptions that despite their rigid affirmations are not referring to a pre-existent reality but actually render one? In this book, we spend some quality time with the idea that volume as it is popularly understood, is a product of a specific evolution of material culture. We want to activate a public conversation, asking: How is power distributed in a world that is worlded by axes, planes, dimensions and coordinates, too often and too soon crystallizing abstractions in a path towards naturalizing what presences count where, and for whom?

Volumetric regimes

We started this introduction by saying that volume is an outcome, not a given. Mass can (but does not have to) be measured by culturally set operations like the calculation of its depth, or of its density. The resulting volumes of such measurement operations can be differentiated by using cultural or scientific assumptions such as limit, segment or surface. The specific ways that volumetrics happen, and the modes that made them crystallize in axes and axioms are the ones that we are trying to trace back and forth, to identify how they ended up arranging a whole regime of thought and praxis.

The contemporary regime of volumetrics, meaning the enviro-socio-technical politics that emerge with and around the measurement and generation of 3D presences, is a regime full of bugs. Not neutral, and also not innocent at all, this regime is wrapped up in the interrelated legacies and ideologies of neoliberalism, patriarchal colonial commercial capitalism, tied with the oligopolies of authoritarian innovation and technoscientific mono-cultures (proprietary hardware and software industries) and intertwined with the cultural regimes of mathematics, image processing but also xxx vocabularies. In feminist techno-science, the relation between (human) bodies and technologies has had lots of attention, from (eh the cyborg manifesto?) to more recent new materialist renderings of phenomena and apparatuses. In the field of software studies xxxx the entanglements between hegemonic regimes and software devices have been discussed, while others have been critiquing the ways that measuring or metrics align with racial capitalism. Thinking about volume is merely present in relation to the interaction of human bodies with machinic agents, with the built environment and operative logics. (this need checking, I am not sure we can go so fast and need to say the right things here :-/)

What we have been looking for in these works, and not always found, is the kind of diffuse rigor needed for transformative politics. We realized that diffusiveness is a condition of non-binarism, of not settling, of being responsible in constant change. Such diffusiveness can be found in the picking of the study cases, in the used terminology, in the amateur approach to tools, in the uncertainty towards supposedly ontological entities, in the sudden scale jumps and in the scattered rhythms of study.

We started to wonder what contingent values we might provide ourselves with as a way to fire up the worldling of differential tech. Besides the interlocutions with the artists, activists and thinkers that have contributed to this book, the work of Syed M. Ali and David Golumbia has been useful for us in separating computation from computationalism, and to understand that while computation is obviously sedimenting and continuing colonial damages, it is not necessarily how it needs to be. We've gone back to Paul Preciado who taught us about the political fiction of so-called bodies, which he refers to as a somathèque, a bodily accumulation of archival data that keeps producing and reproducing the truths of power. We found inspiring unfoldings of the deep implicancies of computation and geological volumes in Kathryn Yusoff's and Elizabeth Povinelli's work, who insist on brave unpackings of Modern regimes all-the-way. We felt xxxx by the interlocutions with the deeply situated work of Seda Guerses, operating on the discipline of computation from the inside. The energy of queer thinkers and artists Zach Blas and more recently Loren Britton and Helen Pritchard in For CS was critical for xxxx 

The shift to understanding volume as an outcome of sociotechnical operations, is what helps us activate the critical revision of the regimes of volumetry. If volume does not exist without volumetrics, then technopolitical struggle means to scrutinize how metrics could be (re)designed, otherwise implemented, differently practiced, (de)bugged and interpreted.

Quantified presence

Volumetric Regimes are responsible for the massive quantification of presences in computed space-times. Such responsibility is in fact multiple, due to the process of manipulation that quantifying presences applies upon presence itself as an ontological concern. The fact that something can exist and be accountable in a virtual place, or that something present in a physical space can then re-appear (be re-presented) in differently mediated conditions, or not at all, is technically produced through supposedly neutral, necessary, efficient gestures such as incisions, lines of separation, layers of segmentation and acts of discretization. The agency of these operations is more often than not erased after the fact, providing a nauseating sense of innocence.

The project of Volumetric Regimes is to think with and towards computing-otherwise rather than to side with the uncomputable or to count on that which escapes calculation. 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. The spaces created by the tension between matter and its quantification provide with a creative arena for the diversification of options in the praxis of 3D computation. Qualitative procedures like intense dialoguing, hands-on experiments, participant observation, speculative design and indeterminate protocols help us understand the possible research attitudes with a quantify-all mono-culture, not succumbing to its own per-established analytics. 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?

a matter of representation, and what is made present situatedness. being accountable for the messiness of all techniques that deal with the thickness of a complex world. not against the cut, but about being response-able with discretion and not making the final finite discretion. accounting-accountability. 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 Neumann about her use of the '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."

here a note on the specific form of quantification that is datafication + crisis of presence

Aligning ourselves with the tradition of feminist techno-sciences, Volumetric Regimes stays with the complexity of looking for ways to widen the possible (the possible methods, practices, agencies etc) of computation, demanding complexity while queering the rigidity of their fixing of items, discrete and finite entities in too fast moves towards truth and neutrality.

In this publication we try with all means necessary to disorient the assumption of xxx discreteness and claim for qualitative presence in 3d computation realms. In that sense, Volumetric Regimes could be considered as an attempt to do qualitative research on quantitive methods. 

Polyedric research methods

In terms of method, this book benefits from several polyedric forces, that when combined form a prismatic body of disciplinarily uncalibrated, but rigorous research. The study of the complex regimes that rule the worlds of volumes, necessitated a few methodological inventions to widen the spectrum of how volumetrics can be studied, described, problematized and reclaimed. That complexity is generated not only by the different areas in which measuring volumes is done, but also because it is a highly crowded field, populated by institutional, commercial, scientific, sensorial, technological agents. 

One polyedric force is the need for direct action and informed disobedience applied to research processes. We have often referred to our work as "Disobedient action-research", to insist on a mode of research that is motivated by situated, ad-hoc modes of producing and circulating knowledge. Orthodox research involving technology is too often ethically, ontologically, and epistemologically dependent on a path from and towards universalist enlightenment, aiming to eventually technically fixing the world. This violent and homogenizing solutionist attitude stands in the way of a practice that, first of all, needs to attend to the re-articulation and relocation of what must be accounted for, perhaps just by proliferating sensibilities, issues, demands, requests, complaints, entanglements, and/or questions.

A second polyedric force is generated by the playful intersection of artistic and academic research in the collaborative praxis of Possible Bodies. It materializes for example in uncommon writing and the use of made-up terminology, but also in the hands-on engagement with tools, merging high and low tech, learning on the go, while attending to genealogies that arranged them in the here-now. You will find us smuggling techniques for knowledge generation from one domain to another such as contaminating ethnographic descriptions with software stories, mixing poetics with abnormal visual renders, blurring theoretical dissertations with industrial case-studies and so forth.

Trans*feminism is certainly a polyedric force at work, in mutual affection with the others. We refer to the research as such, in order to convoke around that star (*) all intersectional and intra-sectional aspects that are possibly needed. Our trans*feminist lens is sharpened by queer and anti-colonial sensibilities, and oriented towards (but not limited to) trans*generational, trans*media, trans*disciplinary, trans*geopolitical, trans*expertise, and trans*genealogical forms of study. The situated mixing of software studies, media archaeology, artistic research, science and technology studies, critical theory and queer-anticolonial-feminist-antifa-technosciences purposefully counters hierarchies, subalternities, privileges and erasures in disciplinary methods.

The last polyedric force is generated by our politicized attitude towards technological objects. This book was developed on a wiki, designed with Free, Libre and Open Source software (FLOSS) tools and published as Open Access. Without wanting to suggest that FLOSS itself produces the conditions for non-hegemonic imaginations, we are convinced that its persistent commitment to transformation can facilitate radical experiments, and trans*feminist technical prototyping. The software projects we picked for study and experimentation such as Gplates, MakeHuman and Slicer [ref] follow that same logic. It also oriented our DIWO attitude of investigation, preferring low-tech approaches to high-tech phenomena and allowing ourselves to misuse and fail. Here are some of the methods used throughout Volumetric Regimes:

To give an ongoing account of the structural formations conditioning the various cultural artifacts that are co-composed through scanning, tracking and modeling, we settled for inventorying as a central method. The items in the Possible Bodies inventory do not rarefy these artifacts, as would happen through the practice of collecting, or pin them down, as in the practice of cartography, or rigidly stabilize them, as might be a risk through the practice of archiving. Instead, the inventorying is about continuous updates, and keeping items available. The inventory functions as an additional reference system for building stories and vocabularies; items have been used for multiple guided tours, both written and performed. Being aware of its problematic histories of commercial colonialism, the praxis of inventorying needs to also be reoriented towards just and solidary techniques of semiotic-material compilation.

The writing of bug reports is a specific form of disobedient action research which implies a systematic re-learning of the very exercise of writing, as well as a resulting direct interpellation to the developing community, by its own means and channels. Bug reporting, as a form of technical grey literature, makes errors, malfunctions, lacks, or knots legible; second, it reproduces a culture of a public interest in actively taking-part in contemporary technosciences. As a research method, it can be understood as a repoliticization and cross-pollination of one of the key traditional pillars of scientific knowledge production: the publishing of findings.

Technical expertise is not the only knowledge suitable for addressing the technologically produced situations we find ourselves in. The term Clumsy computing describes a mode of relating to technological objects that is sensitive, tentative but unapologetically confident. xxxx

The persistent use of languaging formulas problematizes the limitations of ontological figures. For example the repeated use of "So-called"  for 'bodies' or ‘plants’ 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. Combinatory terms such as "Somatopologies" play a recombinatory game to insist on the implications of one regime onto another. Turning nouns into verbs such as using Circlusion as Circluding is a technology that forces language to operate with different temporary tenses and conjugations, refusing the fixed ontological commulgation that naming implies.

Interlocution has ruled the orientations of this inquiry that was collective by default: by affecting and being affected by communities of concern in different locations, the research process changed perspectives, was infused by diverse vocabularies and sensibilities and jumped scales all along. The conversations brought together in Volumetric Regimes stuck with this principle of developing the research through an affective network of comrades, companions, colleagues and collaborators, based on elasticity and mutual co-constitution.

How this book is organized

Volumetric Regimes experiment with various formats of writing, publishing and interlocuting. It compiles guided tours, peer-reviewed academic texts, speculative fiction, pamphlets, bug reports, visual essays, performance scripts and inventory items. It is organized around five chapters, that each rotate the proliferating technologies, infrastructures and techniques of 3D tracking, modeling and scanning differently. The chapters each start with an invited contribution that addresses the material-discursive entanglements xxxxx

"x, y, z: Dimensional axes of power" is the first chapter takes on the building blocks of 3D: x, y and z. The three Cartesian axes both constrain and orient the chapter, as they do for the space of possibility of the volumetric. It takes serious the implications of a mathematical regime based on parallel and perpendicular lines, and zooms in to the invasive operations of virtual renderings of fleshy matter, but also calls for queer rotations and disobedient trans*feminist angles that can go beyond the rigidness of axiomatic axes within the techno-ecologies of 3D tracking, modeling and scanning. The chapter begins with a contribution by Sina Seifee, who draws in his text “Rigging Demons” from an intimate history with the technical craft-intense practice of special effects animation, to tell us stories of visceral non-mammalian animality between love and vanquish. The chapter continues with a first visit to the Possible Bodies inventory that sets-up the basic suspicions on what is of value in rendered and captured worlds, following the thread of dis-orientation as a way to think through the powerful worldings that are nevertheless produced by volumetrics. “Invasive Imagination and its agential” cut reflects on the regimes of biomedical imaging and the volumetrization of so-called bodies. “The Extended Trans*feminist Rendering Program” discloses plans for an urgent intensive camp to train the arts of scanning differently.

"Somatopologies: On the ongoing rendering of corpo-realities" opens up all the twists in epistemologies and methodologies triggered by Volumetric Regimes in the somatic realm. As a notion, somatopologies converges the not-letting-go of modern patriarchocolonial apparatuses of knowledge production like mathematics or geometry, specifically focusing on an undisciplined study of the paradigm of topology, while re-enagaging with them by exposing how they matter in the world, also of so-called bodies. By opening up the conditions of possibility, soma-topologies is a direct reclaim for other ontologies, ethics, practices and crossings. The chapter opens with "Clumsy Volumetrics" in which Helen V. Pritchard follows Sarah Ahmed's suggestion that 'clumsiness' might form a queer and crip ethics that generates new openings and possibilities. "somatopologies (materials for a movie in the making)" documents a series of installations and performances that mixed different text sources to cut agential slices through technocratic paradigms in order to create hyperbolic incisions that stretch, rotate and bend Euclidean nightmares and Cartesian anxieties, including the transcript of a performance in which these materials were staged. “Circluding” is a visual/textual collaboration with Kym Ward on the potential of a gesture that flips the order of agency without separating inside from outside. In “From topology to typography: a romance of 2.5D”, Sophie Boiron and Pierre Huyghebaert open up a graphic conversation on the almost-volumetrics that precede 3D in digital typography and finally the short text “MakeHuman” and the pamphlet “Information for users” take on the implications of relating to 3D-modelled-humanoids.

The vibrating connections between hyper-realism and invention, re-creation and simulation, generation and parametrization are the inner threads of a chapter titled "Parametric Unknowns: Hypercomputation between the probable and the possible". On it, what's in the world and what is processed by mechanisms of volumetric vision differs only slightly, offering a problematic dizzying effect. The opening of the chapter is in the hands of Nicolas Malevé, who offers a visual ethnography of some of the interiors and bodies that made of computational photography what it became. Not knowing everything yet, the panoramization of intimate atmospheres works as an exercise to study the limits between the flat surfaces of engineering labs and the dense worlds behind their scenes. "The Fragility Of Life" is an excuse to enter into the thick files compiled by designer-researcher Simone N. Niquille on the digital post-production of truth. Somehow in line with that, Maria Dada provides with an overview of how different training and rehearsing are, especially in the gaming industry that makes History. And finally, a long-term conversation with Phil Langley introduces the questions about the making of too fast computational moves while participating in architectural and infrastructural materializations.

"Signs of Clandestine Disorder: The continuous after-math of 3D computationalism" follows the long tail of volumetric techniques, technologies and infrastructures, to get to the politics inscribed in its. The chapter's title pointing to "computationalism", a direct reference to Syed Mustafa Ali's approach to decolonial computing. The other half is a quote from Alphonso Lingis’ Clandestine disorder invokes the non-explicit relationality between elements that constitute computational processes. In that sense, it contrasts directly with the discursive practice of colonial perception that Ramon Amaro described as "self maintaining in its capacity to empirically self-justify." The chapter opens with "Endured instances of relation: an exchange with Romi R. Morrison" in which Morrison reflects on specific types of fixity and fixation that pertain to volumetric regimes, and the radical potential of 'flesh' in data practices, while understanding bodies as co-constructed by their inscriptions, as a becoming-with technology. The script for the workshop Signs of clandestine disorder for the uniformed and codified crowd is a generative proposal to apply the mathematical episteme to lively matters, but without letting go of its potential. In "So-called plants" we return to the inventory to do a vegetal trip through it, observing and describing some operations that affect the vegetal kingdom and volumetrics, in a mutual relationality.

The last chapter is titled "Depths and Densities: Accidented and dissonant spacetimes". It proposes to shift from the scale of the flesh to the scale of the earth. The learnings from the insurgent geology works of authors like Katrhyn Yusoff, triggered many questions about the ways technopolitics cut the vertical and horizontal axis in ways that limit the spectrum of possibilities to a universalist continuation of extractive modes of existence and knowledge production. The contribution by Kym Ward, "Open Boundary Conditions", offers a first approach to her situated intensive study of the crossings between volumetrics and oceanography, from the point of view of the Bidston Observatory in Liverpool. From this vantage point she articulates a critique on technosciences, and provides with an overview of possible affirmative areas of study and engagement. In "A Bugged Report", the filing of bug reports turns out to be an opportune way to react to the embeddedness of anthropocentrism in geomodeling software tools, in a way different to for example technological sovereignty claims. "We Have Always Been Geohackers" continues that thinking and explores the probable continuation of extractive modes of existence and knowledge production in software tools for rendering tectonic plates. The workshop script for exercising an analog lidar apparatus is a proposal to experience these tensions in physical space, and then to discuss them collectively. Finally, the chapter ends up with a fiction titled "Ultrasonic Dreams of Aclinical Renderings" to speculate with hardware on the possibilities for scanning through accidented and dissonant spacetimes.

xxxx 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.