Thursday, 5.7.2018
18:00
In English
Moderation: Julian Bauer

Possible Bodies is a collaborative research by Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that »bodies« are, asking what matter-cultural conditions of possibility render them present. This becomes especially urgent in contact with the technologies, infrastructures and techniques of 3D tracking, modelling and scanning. Intersecting issues of race, gender, class, species, age and ability resurface through these performative as well as representational practices.

The research is concerned with genealogies of how bodies and technologies have been mutually constituted. It interrogates corpo-realities and their orientation through parametric interfaces and looks at anatomies that are computationally constrained by the requirements of mesh-modelling. It invites the generation of concepts and experimental renderings, wild combinations and digital and non-digital prototypes for different embodiments.

The work of Jara Rocha tends to research the situated and complex forms of the distribution of the technological. With a curious confidence in textual logistics and with a clear tendency to profanate modes, it tends to be found in tasks of cultural mediation, research and independent curatorship. Main areas of inquiry have to do with the materialities of present cultures, and are approached through two fundamental gestures: critical thinking and distributed doing. Together with Femke Snelting, she is currently working on the inventory of Possible Bodies (Akademie Schloss Solitude, Bau + Hangar Barcelona and a.pass + Constant Brussels).

Femke Snelting works as artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. In various constellations she has been exploring how digital tools and practices might co-construct each other. She is member of Constant, a non-profit, artist-run association for art and media based in Brussels. Since 1997, Constant generates performative publishing, curational processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes in local and international contexts.