Jara Rocha

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.

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.

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. 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.

In this podcast, we talk with Nicolás Malevé and Jara Rocha about infrastructures, software programmes and museums. We turn our attention to changes of scale, algorithms, black boxes, epistemicides and cybercides, and we explore the notions of service, access, and air as controversies: what is triggered by changes in temperature, in marketing strategies, and in web render formats? What materialities are suspended in response to these changes? We also consider palliative care and abolition as possible strategies for dismantling world-forms that should cease to exist, and think about how new forms—which we may not yet have managed to imagine—may be generated in this process.