Somatopologies (materials for a movie in the making)

Initially created as an installation for Constant_V, somatopologies travelled to 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, the Exhibition Library at Seoul Mediacity Biennial, LUMA Arles A School of Schools, C-Mine Genk and Goldsmiths, London at Volumetric Ecologies.

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 which 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.

All materials can be found here (videos, subtitles, installation guides in FR, NL, EN): https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/somatopologies/

Somatopologies (materials for a movie in the making)

Item 014: The Right-Hand Rule + Item 105: A ray from the eye

First things first, find your Region Of Interest. In this case, it is going to be somewhere here for us. Today, we are not going to do any manual segmentation. We are going to do the entire process in their semi-automated tool. The semi-automated tool that you can use in ITK-snap is located here: It is called the Active Contour Selection Tool. When you click that, you see your Region Of Interest here, in the dotted box. 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.^[1]

Item 014: The Right-Hand Rule + Item 105: A ray from the eye

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.^[2]

Item 014: The Right-Hand Rule + Item 105: A ray from the eye

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.^[3]