Son[i]a #344 Femke Snelting
- 00:01 Acceleration: the way computing and technology work on bodies
- 00:30 Intro
- 02:30 Rendering bodies
- 08:55 Real world implications
- 10:55 Possible, probable
- 13:30 The politics of optimisation
- 15:20 Open Standards
- 21:25 Keep the possible alive
- 24:45 Of zeroes and ones
- 27:21 Life is complex
- 31:55 The allure of nature
- 36:12 The inventory
- 47:35 Complexity as an afterthought
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.