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The Underground Division
Contents
Kingdom dysphoria
Concept and content description
File:Image1.pngKingdom dysphoria is a proposal to assume Elizabeth Povinelli’s invitation to take a breath and unravel the statement that ‘clearly, x humans are more important than y rocks.’[1] The Underground Division wants to hold on to her provocation and ask about inhuman materialities and how they matter [in] the world. Recognising that the geological is not-not biological and that its renderings are unstable, we propose to study bio-geo imaginings, by exploring the softwares and hardwares that the inhuman intervenes on, and build new glossaries on the go.The Underground Division is an unruly team of trans*feminist technoscientists and parahumanists, an action-research collective that investigates technologies of subsurface rendering and its imaginations/fantasies/promises as an artistic practice. It is dug by Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting with many other others. As a follow-up on Possible Bodies’ research on the co-construction of so-called bodies and 3D paradigms, we felt it was necessary to attend to the body-of-the-earth as the framework for a study on similar sensibilities but different spacetimes. Because software making is world making, the Underground Division bugs contemporary regimes of volumetrics that are applied to extractivist, computational and geologic damages. This research will eventually culminate in the Trans*Feminist Rendering Programme[2], a hands-on situation for device making, tool problematizing and “holing in gaug”[3].We would like to consider the residency as a situation to inquire into the moment in which the biopolitics based on life and nonlife is being reformed. Working from the understanding of biology ‘as a field of discourse beyond the living world itself’[4], we want to actively engage with the spacetime of continuities between the bios, geos and mythos as apparatuses of knowledge production and world production.To start, we propose to look back at the 19th century, the moment when the microscopic gaze and miniaturization practices were introduced within Western Science and society , and to unravel their relation to the separation between geo and bio. During this period, the new access to the microscope outside the science lab, and its availability to non-scientists, generated a practice of looking at tiny things. As people learned to see themselves surrounded by the micro, this access to the world propelled the invention of classification and standards of taxonomic/kingdom separations, which silently informed and became embedded within organizations of life. As this was in some ways a violence enabled by the 19th century version of DIY BIO, we think it is important to understand its continuations in contemporary bioart, biohacking and (free) software development. It was also a historical period of immense information sharing via bio-informatics, which has many affinities with technoscientific practices in the 21st Century that define the separation life and nonlife, and who gets to ‘have a life’. Hidden in plain sight, the timescale of the geo did not fit the taxonomic efforts of modern fixations, and as we learned with Elizabeth Povinelli and Kathryn Yusoff, the very ontologies and politics embedded in the geos are those of colonial exploitation of bodies and resources.
At a macro scale, the geos calls for an attention to matter that is almost still, that inform about the latent damages on the planet. And perhaps at a meso scale, that of the mundane studying with at-hand devices, the mythos needs to be unwritten and rewritten. As speciest, racist and ableist forces switch scales too smoothly, we convoke methods for a trans*feminist friction to fight what could be named “kingdom dysphoria”[5]. Kingdom dysphoria is yet another condition that calls for trans*feminist studying and practice, for letting go of technoscientific binarisms and to problematize exteriorities that are provoked by the cuts of modern apparatuses.During the residency we propose to engage with scanning practices across scales. We will move between electron scanning microscope practices to meso and macro applications of LIDAR (remote sensing). We want to think of scanning as a mode of time travelling through organic compounds which make visibe/stabilize for a moment a computational escape velocity that might switch between so-called kingdoms and beyond (from the vegetal to the animal to the mineral). In this way, we can start building a shared understanding of the mutual affections and transitions of the living and the inert matter at the micro scale. It can mean to construct our own scanners, or to deconstruct existing ones. We would also like to concretely experiment with bio computing on rock formations. This work would continue earlier inquiries in the practices touched upon during a visit to IRB in Barcelona. We would like to continue our work with tectonic plate modelling in dialogue with computational technologies for bio-engineering, in an attempt to see what it would mean to switch scales and domains with a queer and anti-colonial politics.The research and experiments conducted during the biofrictions residency are part of building a curriculum for a Trans*feminist Rendering Programme (T*RFP), which we are planning for the summer of 2021. The programme is being developed to take care of the production, reproduction and interpretation of DIWO scanning devices and scanning practices within the field of a-clinical, underground and cosmic imaging such as magnetic resonance (MR), UltraSound (US) and Computer Tomography (CT). The intense training sessions are organized around autonomous, ecologically sustainable municipalities. The programme benefits the scanning equipment themselves, as well as the local amateur operators who interact witha-clinical renderings and speculations. For the unsupervised professionals, certification provides possibilities, Optical Character Recognition, the potential for machine recruitment, increased learning power and electricity tokens. For the programme participants, prefigurative organizing certification for MR, US and CT. The Program offers its help to readily identify competent scanner mentors in participant communities.The Underground Division would like to use the residency to test vocabularies, methods and resources for the T*FRP. For this reason we would want to work with local groups concerned by the implicancies of Kingdom dysphoria such as Pechblenda, IRB and other biological and geological research facilities. This means we will process our research through workshops, interactive talks and conversations and format our findings as modules for the T*FR programme.== Technical requirements ==
We would like make use of specialised machinery (development lab, welders, etc.) for device development and research but also are interested in experimenting with rocks in the wetlab. For the development of DIY-scanning devices, we are also are interested in a collaboration with people that have expertise in hardware and software. During the residency, we would need to have access to a meeting room for collaborative work, to set up a temporary library and small workshops and encounters with different agents.
Timeline
We imagine the residency to spread over four weeks in January and February 2021 and dedicate each week to a specific part of the research. Each week we will rotate our research according to a different vector.We know the decision of the research location is up to the committee, but due to personal conditions and dependencies but also for reasons of continuing networks we have already built, we would very much prefer our residency to take place in Barcelona.Activities we will engage in: visits (to local rock formations, computational biology research facilities), interviews (artists, activists, technoscientists, software developers), collective readings (internal to Underground Division and also public), workshops, hardware and software research, image research, material explorations.Week 1: Rotation one: Scale (micro, meso, macro)Week 2: Rotation two: Bio/geo/myth
Week 3: Rotation three: Hardware/softwareWeek 4: Rotation four: Vocabularies + temporalities= Curriculum Vitae =
Research rotationsCollective Inventorying: May 2017, Stuttgart (Schloss Solitude)Imagined Mishearings: July 2017, Barcelona (Hangar)Phenomenal 3D: November 2017, Barcelona (BAU, Fuga)Somatopologies, January → July 2018, Brussels (apass, Constant)
Exhibitions, lectures, workshops, projectsExtended Trans*Feminist Rendering Programme “The Underground Division”, Future Fair, Furtherfield (London, 2019)
Volumetric Ecologies: Environment, Bodies and Mediated Worlds conference and demo, Goldsmiths University of London (2019)
Somatopologies [installation]. Constant, Brussels (2018) + 4th Istanbul Design Biennial (2018) + A School of Schools, C-Mine Genk (2019) + Apprendre par le design (2019), Luma Arles
Possible Bodies: Bugreporting talk and workshop. Festival Gelatina (Madrid, 2019)
Depths and Densities [workshop], Transmediale Berlin (2019)
x,y,z [performance], Femtek, Bilbao (2018)
Signs of Clandestine Disorder in the Uniformed and Coded Crowds [pedagogical meeting], 480+20, Escuela Perturbable, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2018)
El reparto de lo tecnológico: estética y naturoculturas en el turbocapitalismo [seminar], Universidad de la República + Casa Mario, Montevideo, Uruguay (2018)
소마토폴로지 [installation], Seoul Mediacity Biennale / Monoskop, Seoul (2018)
Somatopologies [performance], How to Relate, UDK, Berlin (2018)
Possible Bodies [presentation], Coded Matter, Amsterdam (2018)
MakeHuman [workshop], Technical University of Passau (2018)
Boundaries do not sit still: dissection and segmentation in biomedical imaging [workshop], Trans//border: Les enseignements de Nathalie Magnan, Marseille (2018)
Continuous corpo-realities <-> diagramming probabilities and possibilities! [workshop], University of Sussex (2018)
El continuum de Possible Bodies [talk], Escola Massana, Barcelona (2017)
Boundaries do not sit still [lecture], Materiality of the Invisible, JVE Maastricht (2017)
Publications
Pritchard, H., Snelting, F. and Rocha, J., "We Have Always Been Geohackers" at "How to Relate: " at Universität der Künste Berlin (forthcoming)
Rocha, J. and Snelting, F., "La imaginación invasiva y sus cortes agenciales". Utopía. Revista de Crítica Cultural (Abril-Junio 2019)
Possible Bodies feat. Helen Pritchard (2018). “Ultrasonic dreams of aclinical renderings.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 13. 10.5399/uo/ada.2018.13.7 |
Snelting, F. and Rocha, J. (2018) MakeHuman in Braidotti, R. and Hlatajova, M. (eds), The Posthuman Glossary (London: Bloomsbury Academic)Rocha, J. and Snelting, F. (2017) The Possible Bodies Inventory: dis-orientation and its aftermath in "Cuerpos Poliédricos", Inmaterial Journal vol. 2, num. 3 (Barcelona: Bau College of Design)
Recent Projects
1. ROCK REPO
Installation as part of the exhibition BodyBuilding at Tetem, Enschede, NL (opening in February 2020). The ROCK REPO consists of seven new videoworks. https://www.hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Events/p/BodyBuilding, https://tetem.nl/event/bodybuilding/
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2. The Trans*Feminist Rendering Program
LIDAR workshop at Finsbury Park’s Future Fair in London, commissioned by Furtherfield (2019).https://www.furtherfield.org/future-fair/ + https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/rendering/
3. Depths and Densities
Workshop Depth and densities (transmediale, January 2019) https://2019.transmediale.de/content/depths-and-densities-a-possible-bodies-workshop
Report on the workshop, published in Transmediale Journal, 2019: https://transmediale.de/content/depths-and-densities-a-bugged-report
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4. Possible Bodies Inventory
A disobedient action-research device (2015-2020)
http://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/
5. Somatopologies
Installation exhibited at Constant vitrine, Istanbul Design Biennial, Seoul Mediacity Biennial, LUMA Arles and C-Mine Genk. Plus online version: https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/somatopologies/
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- ↑ Povinelli, Elizabeth A. “Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism”. Duke University Press. Kindle Edition. Duke University Press. 2016, pg. 9.
- ↑ https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/rendering/
- ↑ ‘“Holing in gaug” refers to the practice of working an area already worked by others, and these others are interweaved throughout this project. The practice of “holing in gaug” is part of a feminist practice that continues to chip away at advanced capitalism as it continues to work on areas of importance rather than always produce the “new”.’ Helen Pritchard
- ↑ From the Biofriction Open Call https://hangar.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Biofriction-Open-Call.pdf
- ↑ Kingdom dysphoria is an invented transposition of the term ‘gender dysphoria’, which describes the distress and violence caused by binary sex assignment. Kingdom dysphoria would be the harm caused on all living and non-living entities as a result of the assignment of fixed categories, taxonomies and kingdoms.
