Son[i]a #344
Femke Snelting
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Femke Snelting is a Dutch artist and designer, who works at the intersection of design, feminism and Free Software. She is a member of Constant, a non-profit, artist-run organisation based in Brussels. She is also part of Possible Bodies, a collaborative research project developed in collaboration with Jara Rocha, which is the main topic of our conversation.
Possible Bodies questions and problematises the formulation, conception, and rendering of bodies across different 3D technologies such as modelling, tracking and scanning. Their affirmative critical research draws attention to the ways in which these techniques end up implementing and even amplifying a host of prejudices based on race, gender, class, age and ability which, far from being circumstantial, are woven into the actual source code of all sorts of applications. Snelting, Rocha, and their collaborators collect and document instances of these problems, as a strategy for thinking about their roots and implications, and also to eventually file what they call “bug-reports”. As Snelting says, it’s not about making algorithms fair, it’s about changing the systems that enable those algorithms to operate in the first place.
We talk to Femke Snelting about embodiments, optimisation, and 3D disasters, about the possible and the probable, parametric interfaces, and open standards, and about disobedient action research.
Open-weather
In this two-voice podcast, researcher-designer Sophie Dyer and creative geographer Sasha Engelmann weave speculative storytelling through glitchy weather satellite transmissions in a dialogue tinged with the feminist meta-practices that run deep beneath their collective operations. Together, they talk about NOAA satellites, about building alliances and about weather literacy, occasionally interviewing each other as friends and guiding us through the generous network of feminist thinkers that informs their practice.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with researcher and activist Jara Rocha. We talk about research as an interdependent practice and we call for complexity. Along the way, we speculate on non-coercive forms of computation and consider some case studies from the collaborate project Possible Bodies and its spin-off, Underground Division.
Jara Rocha
Researcher and activist Jara Rocha’s practice is concerned with mediating and mobilising the conditions of meaning production and materials for possibility. Fond of complexity and grounded in a trans*feminist sensibility, they explore the inequalities and stark contrasts in the distribution of the technological. They draw attention to the politics and aesthetics embedded in infrastructures and to how power organises itself, becoming simultaneously visible and inaccessible. A pure exercise in political imagination and situated dissidence that takes us from reproductive technologies to critical pedagogies in formal, non-formal, and informal structures, by way of technocolonialism and turbocapitalism. Without ever taking our eye off the global perspective and our immediate environment: from global care chains to the precarisation, invisibilisation, and offshoring of labour.
Zach Blas
Zach Blas talks about utopian plagiarism, biometrics, life patterns, and unthinkable moments; about identity, opacity, and paranodes; about speculation understood in terms of usefulness, and about how we can go about conceiving sensual alternatives to the internet’s total mono-narrative today.
Ramon Amaro
The researcher and lecturer Ramon Amaro introduces the basics of machine learning, its criteria for assigning value, the collision between blackness and the artificial, its flaws, and the problem of impunity that all too often accompanies them. He also calls for a techno-resistance that would require us to sacrifice our current view of the world and of ourselves.