Possible Bodies

El Proyecto Moderno / The Modern Project

Item number: 127
Item title: El Proyecto Moderno / The Modern Project
Year in which the item emerged culturally or was produced industrially: 1492
Entry of the item into the inventory: 9 October 2021
Cluster(s) the item belongs to: The Industrial Continuum of 3D
Inventor(s) for this item: Possible Bodies

As a field oriented towards the technocratic realm of Modern technosciences, 3D computation has historically unfolded under “the probable” regimes of optimization, totalitarian efficiency, normalization and hegemonic world order.

--

Povinelli's work, who insist on brave unpackings of Modern regimes all-the-way.

--

As a notion, “somatopologies” converges the not-letting-go of Modern patriarchocolonial apparatuses of knowledge production like mathematics or geometry, specifically focusing on an undisciplined study of the paradigm of topology.

--

Faced with the cognitive chaos of a hypermodern life in an imaginary San Francisco, as main characters of the soap, the three sisters-witches deal with questions of narcissism (self-oriented molar life-style), prosthesis (sympathetic magic as new technologies they have to learn to live with without mastering), global networks (teamwork with underworld), and dissatisfaction (nothing works out, relationships fail, anxiety attacks, and loneliness).

--

As a premodern cutting-edge agent of sorting, list-making was highly functional in the technologies of writing in the 12th and 16th century, namely monster literature, histoire prodigieuse or bestiaries.

--

Starting off as a research project about premodern zoology in West Asia, Iran in particular, I found myself getting to know more about how “secularization of the interest in monsters”45 happened through time.

--

A postmodern machinic fantasy in which animators are technical computational de-amputators, exploding the guts of demons.

--

Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian: The Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism.

--

Among all of the apparatuses of the Modern Project that persistently operate on present world orderings, naming and account-giving, we chose the inventory with a critical awareness of its etymological origin.

--

But we learned about the potentials embedded in Modern apparatuses of designation and occupation, and how they can be put to use as long as they are carefully unfolded to allow for active problematization and situated understanding.

--

What can we learn from the conditions of floating brought to us by the virtual transduction of Modern perspective, in order to draft an account-giving apparatus of present presences? How can that account-giving be intersectional with regards to the agencies implied, respectful of the dimensionality of time and aging, and responsible with a political history of groundness? Floating is the endurance of falling.

--

But being surface-dependent, it is received as moving backwards and forwards: the Modern eye reads one shape that changes places on a territory.

--

Cunningham danced Loops for the first time in the Museum of Modern Art in 1971.

--

Imaging platforms draw expertise from computer vision, 3D-visualisation and algorithmic data-processing to join forces with Modern science.

--

By aligning medical evidence with computational power, biomedical imaging seems to operate at the forefront of technological advancement while remaining all too attached to Modern gestures of cutting, dividing and slicing.

--

Computer tomography actively naturalizes Modern regimes such as Euclidean geometry, discretization, anatomy, ocularity and computational efficiency to create powerful political fictions: invasive imaginations and inventions that provoke the technocratic and scientific truth of so-called bodies.

--

The mediatized process of the Visible Human project coincided with a big push for accessible imagining software platforms that would offer fly-through 3D anatomical atlases, re-inserting Modern regimes on the intersection of computer science, biomedical science and general education

--

Slicing Where we introduce the Modern Separation Toolkit, and the aftermath of the cut.

--

The act of separation is a key gesture of Modernity.

--

The Modern Separation Toolkit (MST) contains persistent and culturally aligned modes of euro-andro-able-anthropocentric representation: taxonomy, anatomy, perspective, individual subjecthood, objectivity and many other material-semiotic moves of division.

--

Modern claims of truth work from the assumption that there is a necessary relation between separability, determinacy and sequentiality; between division, knowledge and representation.

--

The disciplines of Art Theory, History of Science and Philosophy of Perception exemplify each with their own means the particular gestures of separation in which the complexities of a particular world are haunted and caught by Modern modes to understand, name, transmit and eventually “apprehend” these worlds

--

But with the emergence of Modern subjecthood, of physical and legal persona freed from their environmental attachments and charged with free will and the capacity of judgment, additional representational norms imposed themselves, somehow occupying an in-between space of singular and normative subjectivity.

--

And in the last section, we listed six different cuts, understanding the act of division as a key Modern gesture that relates knowledge to (mostly visual) representation.

--

With trans*feminist techno-sciences we have learned that it is necessary to problematize Modern regimes and the impossibilities for life they produce

--

It is not (necessarily) about replacing vision with touch, vibrational, thermic and aural renderings although they might be less or otherwise burdened by Modern issues.

--

This is aimed at eventually freeing the slice from the Modern project.

--

What would an a-Modern slice be, how would it behave? How to un-capture the slice from its Modern ghosts?

--

This was a classic confrontation of modern diplomacy, where political pressure allowed a tiny force to fend off a giant

--

They have a very Modernist idea that you run this linear trajectory towards complete know-how of knowledge or whatever and that these systems are incomplete rather than imperfect and that if you have a bit more time, you’ll get there.

--

There’s still this kind of a massively Modernist idea that it’s just a matter of time until we get to that.

--

I think it’s a tendency which is just super Modernist.

--

The world's one and only Visible Woman has revealed everything for the sake of Modern science.

--

Since each of the agents in this collective somehow operates under the Modern regime of representation, we find the software full of assumptions about the naturality of perspective-based and linear representations, the essential properties of the species and so forth.

--

218 The Modern subject, defined by the freedom to make and decide, is trained to self-construct under the narcissistic fantasy of “correct”, “proper” or “accurate” representations of the self

--

Aligning what is to be desired with the possible, they evidently mirror the binary systems of the Modern proposal for the world.

--

It is here that we see Modern algorithms at work: sustaining the virtual by providing certain projections of the world, scaled up to the size of a powerful presence in an untouchable present.

--

To provide us with endless a-Modern mestizo, an escape from representational and agential normativities, software CAN and MUST provide the material conditions for wild combinations or un-suspected renders.

--

These 3D-generated images are aligned with a humanist cultural paradigm, otherwise known as The Modern Project

--

The Modern Project produces a desire for an ecstasy of the real

--

In her article, “On Difference Without Separability” da Silva gives a brief history of modern thought through Descartes, Newton, Kant, Cuvier, Boas and Foucault.

--

She traces the ways that these “modern texts” scientifically image The World as an “ordered whole composed of separate parts relating through the mediation of constant units of measurement and/or a limiting violent force.

--

This separability is a constitutive component for ushering in modernity by which difference is rendered as fixed and irreconcilable

--

This separability is a crucial modern text that fixes the present world in a scene of constant reenactment of these violences though the name of the violence has shifted and is proclaimed as national security, sovereignty, austerity, structural adjustment, sanctity of the family, or freedom.

--

Computationalism inherits the violences of the modern text that da Silva details.

--

How could computation and flesh together constitute more livable messes, if at all? Sketching the shared contours between modernity, and its dependence on black and native violence, and to call it ‘computationalism’ perhaps allows for computing to return to a much more expansive capacity that doesn't always require such violence.

--

As many of the theorists above hold no romances about the extent and saturation of anti-black violence in the modern world, they also tend to the possibilities of life and living that extend beyond that violence.

--

What would it mean to critique math and quantification in their Modern shape, by calling for other logics instead?

--

The episteme of Modern technosciences classifies ‘bodies’ as entities that occupy the dimensions of space and time at a certain scale, with a certain density, at a certain speed, etc.

--

Legitimated areas of research spill into management zones with oppressing practices, and in the entrepreneurial eyes of old Modern scientists glitters startup hunger, impatient to serve the cloudy kingdom of GAFAM.

--

It means the patriarchocolonial linear representation of measurable volumes ends up with providing only with sometimes modular, sometimes fungible entities, circulated by and circulating the everlasting convenience of Modern canons.

--

By Modern convenience, it has become easy to represent distinct elements, but near impossible to engage with inter-connective structures.

--

When the Modern Man finished threading the frame of his latest invention, the perspective device, he could not even start to imagine that centuries later this would be the universally accepted paradigm for representing masses of volume in space

--

And just as one-point perspective made it all the way from Modernity to our present day, so did other even older paradigmatic techniques such as Cartesian axes, Euclidean geometry, cartographic projection or cubic measurement.

--

These paradigms have been assimilated and naturalized to such an extent that they each lost their own history and have become inseparable from each other, interlocking in ways that have everything to do with the way they support the Modern project.

--

Their centrality in all found analysis of volume in the world, means nothing less than a daily imposition of Euromodern values, modes and techniques of study, observation, description and inscription of the complexity around.

--

In other words: volumetrics are being established due to the multi-vectorial political agenda of Modern technosciences, which is directly entwined with commercial colonialism and Western supremacy.

--

It is not a surprise that it is at ease with Modern scientific and cultural paradigms; its values and assumptions co-construct each other.

--

This volumetric regime is sustained by vivid Modern techniques, vocabularies, infrastructures and protocols.

--

Could an ethics and politics committed to volumetric complexity emerge from reverse-engineering the ebbs and flows of industrial affection? Our first task is to rescue continuity from the claws of the established, the normed and the Modern.

--

Just like almanacs at observatories or taxonomies at museums, inventories and herbaria play a role as Modern apparatuses of production of knowledge, capital and order.

--

Following trans*feminist techno-sciences driven by intersectional curiosity and politics, the inventory attempts to unfold the possibilities of this Modern apparatus for probable designation and occupation.

--

Wondering about the post-exotic281 rearrangement of methods, techniques and processes that follow the industrial continuum of 3D, we selected various items of vegetally-engaged-volumetrics to consider technical counter-politics and their reproductive potential in the sense of matters of care and the promising misuses of Modern apparatuses.

--

How those damaging representations infuse the contemporary computational take on “plants” is a direct consequence of Modern technosciences and their utilitarian/exploitative foundations, based on the fungibility of some matters and the extraction of others.

--

In Francoist Spain, under a totalitarian regime of autocracy, inner colonization was the infrastructural bet to provide the nationalist project with all needed resources from within, as well as with a confident step into the developmentist culture of wider Western, Modern economies.

--

As an invasive volumetric study that studies growth from material behavior by cylindrical samples after very precise planar drilling, dendrochronology as a technique also carries the story of how Modern technosciences in one way or another gaslight the borderline between existence and representation.

--

Yes, it comes from a concern that working with the… I’m only deconstructing the different inheritances of Modernity.

--

Through the architecture of Modernity, oceanography has the way of imagining the sea as a column.

--

convoked from the dark inner space-times of the earth, the flesh and the cosmos, particular [amodern] renderings evidence that real bodies do not exist before being separated, cut and isolated.

--

(Instances of The Modern appearing in Volumetric Regimes: )

edit