Volumetric Regimes:

Six years of trans*feminist disobedient action-research on 3D technologies, paradigms and procedures culminated in Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence. Compiled by Possible Bodies, the publication brings together diverse materials on the political, aesthetic, computational and relational regimes in which volumes are calculated. Volumetric Regimes foregrounds techno-ecological practices that invite widenings of what is possible.

For this presentation, several “computational ecologies of practice” were selected to “feel the borders” of how so-called plants are being made present. The figure of “so-called plants” problematizes the limitations of the ontological category of “plant”, and the isolation it implies. So-called plants questions the various methods that biology, computer science, 3D-modeling or border management put to work to create finite, specified and discrete entities which represent the characteristics of whole species, erasing the nuances of very particular beings.

Volumetric Regimes emerged from Possible Bodies (Femke Snelting, Jara Rocha), a collaborative project at the intersection between artistic and academic research. This disobedient-action-research project was initiated in 2015 to explore the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities in the context of 3D computation. The publication Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence is published as part of the Data Browser series (eds. Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa) at Open Humanities Press (2022).