[...]work


how certain kinetic skeletal rigs naturalize the relationships between volume and surface and skeleton --> which is always symbolic

...................................

notes by other participants of the workshop:
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.sina.workshop

some post-workshop notes:

questions of:
•causality: how Rig-thinking can help to have a better understanding of causal relationships between the ‘moved’ and ‘mover’?
•control: how can we have a more interesting ontology of constraints that allows more interesting articulations of control---(that one-way flow of influence between the soft and the rigid)?
•process and becoming: how the technological nature of the Rig and its relations with the image of the organism in CG can be Rigged for a different articulation of the lived-body? and to which extend the Rig can be helpfull to think about the becoming of the beings-of-the-CG (that means: hacker + 3D model)?
•identity: How within an industry such as Pixar, deeply invested in what is a feeling and affectious living characher, a whole new set of technologies and ontologies must be made and destroyed, learned and unlearned, for a different question of identity: what is a living thing? how Rig matter in a world that is made of Rigs that make Rigs for beings to articulate themselves in, through, and with them? inventing and being invented by them
•model: animation = life; asking what brings us to life, makes us alive? (what we animate and what animates us)
•reading and space of the text: the practice we did with pop-up-book making, a joint page of a book when opened wide, the meaning and influence of the reading animates itself like a Rig, coming into movement, flow and inflow as the result of the muscular skeletal gesture of a “reader” who has two hands: mechanical animacies of the act of reading set in time and space by the “writer”
•which rigs rig rigs? (with Strathernian rhetorics) ---- Rig-making practices are ontological technological choreographies that (in the case of CG) make mesh matter*-----they are involved in ‘making mesh flesh’


[14.05.2017]

...................................

rig: a higher-level description of the motion of the part (of mesh) it is influencing (--> set of “bones” may not be hierarchical or interconnected)
[a] simplified user interface allowing animators to control often complex algorithms and a huge amount of geometry --> control the deformation of the mesh data (=/= imitate real anatomy or physical processes)

modern rigging = hacking (in 3D softwares)

...................................

Disney --> body-ege: feeling good about oneself

(via) the playful mastery over anthropomorphized machines


(Rickels > Hanns Sachs:) the last time machines were used for play and not work was during the time of the Greeks and Romans : culture's value of the human body ==> machine used for amusement

**narcissistic investment (of interest) in the body protects against submission to the machine** --> conceived no longer as plaything but as his own prosthetic extension

movement of fantasmatization

to fantasize aggression = to turn it around upon oneself

guild: the currency of the father function

both genders (at the beginning) are phallically aggressive when it comes to mother


Kafka and de Sade despised the body for its limitations and boundaries

body (which is always also the maternal body) comes only to its mutilation [~ skinning], rebuilding, and reanimation [rig]


body has been left behind in the wake of its media-technical range --> it can no longer be plugged back into any so-called *sensorium* or *corpus*


media --> (from the point of view of) identification with the dead [#rig #nonhuman]--> every medium acquires its only prosthetic aim on a target range of *projection* and *haunting*


media-technical innovation

3D animation industry --> new modes of disposal of the dead
-not on the side of life


phantasm of the missing child
(retrofashion and charge of child abuse)
modern military + *techno-mediatic expansion*

memory pictures
tableaux vivants


technologization
massification
teenagerization --> totally SM, friendly, cool, into being popular

...................................

the spaces between decent bodies

#waiting for render: relations between hacker as organism and the computing beast
what is being processed? intra-actions of both CPU and gut.
*waiting for a slow render to finish, i used to enjoy the process. unfinished renders, slow computers, lag, and queer forms of waiting

[title]
/waiting bodies and slow computing
/differentiated constitutions of the waiting body and the nunhuman computational labor

compositional waiting --> Stewart's attunement

the labor of the CPU, the graphical interfance, and the waiting body of the hacker are in an orientation (--> what am i asking here?)


(Alberti: among the Matis) the practice of ‘curare watching’ (the hours spent observing the process in excess of practical necessity) ["waiting,” looking at unfinished render...] is fundamental to the efficacy of the poison --> the physical and mental experience of making something has an impact on its ultimate properties

...................................

#a comparative software study: principles of worlding in Maya/Blener, Softimage, Houdini

which definitions are postponed?
•objective: that which is instantly defined
•subjective: that which its definition is postponed

change--{time, space, matter}-->
touch--{time, space, matter}--> data flow

in Maya
representation is postponed --> subjective mode of Maya --> an sculpturalist ontology?

in Softimage
the distinction between spatiotemporal modifiers is postponed --> dynamics paradigm?
(the viewport partial renderer in Softimage is part of the phenomenological experience of enacted interface =/= Maya's renderer pops up in another window) 4697942

in Houdini
the definition of the onject is postponed

*which differences are delayed in different 3D software applications?
(the difficulties of clean translation between them)

(when I was working as a 3D generalist I always reworked the default scence, setting up rigs to begin with...)
begining with:
•void
•camera
•light
•chaos
•soup
•turtle's back
•absolute geometry
•ornament
•


how the Latin language in software interfaces dominates the mode of thinking and conditions synthesis?
•how, for example, a Farsi inhabiter might craft a different spatial synthesis in terms of a different linguistic ontology?
[b + a = ba] =/= [آ + ب ~=> با] {a different effect}
•interface question
•phenomenological question
•in Farsi the joint attachments undergo transfiguration, different viscous relational property, adhesion refigured

what would be an interesting interface question posed to each of the 3D softwares?

one language ---{Bauhaus? De Stijl? nasta'ligh نستعلیق?}--to--> another language

...................................

painfully queer


*questions for my ajayeb's Rigs and pop-up book:
my rigs and pop-up book are descriptive concepts, that means: they obtain their meaning by reference to a particular physical apparatus ==>? a constructed cut between the object and the agencies of observation
•pop-up book: an instrument with fixed parts ==> concept of “position”
•Rigs on the other hand tries not to exclude other concepts such as “momentum” from having meaning
--> ajayeb's variables require an instrument with moveable parts for their definition (?)
*exclusions (= physical & conceptual constraints) are co-constitutive*
*objectivity (= possibility of unambiguous communication, boundry articulations) --> reference must be made to bodies in order for concepts to have meaning (?)*
•my Rigs and books are about how discursive practices are related to material phenomena

(*)reading: “text” is the interface between the matrialization of “reality” and subjectivation of “reader” --> inseparability of language and reality in ajayeb
(“We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down, The word ‘reality’ is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.” Petersen < Barad)

ajayeb's iterative processes of materialization

عجایب نامه =/= imagined and idealized human-independent reality
ajayeb's stories of historically nunhuman people

in ajayeb's descriptive intra-actions with reality, humans and language are part of the configuaration or ongoing reconfiguring of the world, that is phenomena


we cannot so easily answer where the apparatus “ends”

•(but again, how can I answer) which ontological practices are embodied (or embeded) in (the productive and constraining dimension of regulatory) apparatuses of my ajayeb? (rigs, hypertext, pop-up, etc.)
•(resisting the anti-metaphysics legacy) how can I keep insisting on accountability for the particular exclusions that are enacted in (my) ajayeb and taking up the responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundries (of my objectivities)?


(*)effect: marks left on the agencies of observation


enacted =/= having
(agency is the matter of enactment not something that one ‘has’)

(*)disarticulation: the question of who/what gets to be imagined (and in which way)


(Barad's sentences are long in a way for the reader to feel all those particular words in one breath)


(in medical practices) the machine becomes the interface between the objectification of the spacific body under experience (for example the fetus) and subjectivation of the technician, physicianm engineer, and scientist.

...some ontologies:
•classical realist: posit some fixed notion of being that is prior to signification
•Kantian transcendentalism: being completely inaccessible to language
•linguistic monism: being completely of language
•Baradian agential realism: phenomena are constitutive of reality


...................................

kinetic, energies expressed in variables


integrated definitions:
•movements of an isolated body
•in detachment with the rest of the world
•linear function of time
•all energy is kinetic
•value of “potential energy” is zero


...................................

metallurgy concerns matter in movement

matter-flow

what about the 3D hacker? what is in flow?

form is ever-emergent =/= pre-determined -->? default


[Alberti on northwest Argentina first millennium ceramic vessels:] potters’ bodies were shaped irrevocably by their skilled practice
objects they made were never complete ==> they were aligned with others’ concerns ==> they were drawn into potters’ social identities --> into the category of potter


*skill and ontoloical risk [--> question at CG artist]
-becoming subject to the processes they are involved in --(this commitment)--> involves them in both the task and its ongoing material consequence

skilled practices situated as the mediator between one realm and the other =/= (in Amazonia) where natural and cultural processes are not distinguished in the same way, skill is conceived far more broadly and is not an exclusively human capacity
(for Kuna) [*]skill: a mark of the maker's openness to alterity, learned in dreams from animals that lost the ability to perform those activities in mythic times, it not only acts upon surfaces or moulds forms; it also transfers qualities


skill matters (=/= gauge of technical action applied to raw material--like the case of The Magicians)

hackers and potters
(potters’ identities were vulnerable, how about hackers after a millennium?)

CG artist's intervensions in 3D materials (concidered active)

(we are living in) an inconstant world in which materials (including computers?) were lively and equally capable of subjectivity

(conventionally conceived) polygon modeling: reproducing, or representing a mental image of a completed body-pot

*?how CG artist can learn, like La Candelaria potters ****to take part in an aesthetics of care that is also a response to the threat of the inconstancy of all forms****, responding to perturbations in the movement of materials, to include knowledge of its inconstancy and of materials always capable of subjectivity
(this is significant for my research on ajayeb, due to the ways iranian culture is attracted to the image, and my self to CG and digital form making)

my relationship with the digital (articulated with Alberti:) that body-polys (body-pots) are ambivalent responses to the threat of inconstancy in a world wherein forms (like statues of myrtle) were only ever apparent --> each making of a body-poly (or pot) is a performance and an improvisation, unscripted and therefore cab go wronge
[Alberti + Budden + Sofaer + Ingold + Hallam]


3D model = partial subject

...................................

in Maya particles are as little ping-pong balls --✕--> relativity theory destroyed the idea of consistent objects
--> extreme forms of realism



Hitchcock's vertigo effect --> a tool i built years ago: https://www.highend3d.com/maya/script/vertigotool-for-maya
simultaneously zooming and pulling away : we apear to be in the same place, yet the place seems to distort beyond our control ==reestablishing==> the way we experience “here”
the vertigo tool doens't do away with human experience, it drastically modifies it in a dizzing manner
--> a dangerous knowledge zoom lens tool, a vertiginous antirealist/antiliteral abyss (=/=? irony device ==> presenting us with intimacy with existing nonhumans)

...................................

#veil
@Janina
@Ale


Nicole Archer: ‘textile’: a material formed at the intersections of desire and modern politics
•textile's ‘textility' = texture
•textile's ‘textuality' = readability

to be prepared to address relations consistencies ==> (hope to) meaningfully reform them

*(Archer lingering in the textile's volatile gum) to develop forms of critique that can account for the peculiar textiles ‘we’ are currently wrapped-up in* [globalized economies, militarized laboratories, etc. (BioSteel and so on)]

text +/& textile
•in metaphor: the social fabric, the Internet, the Fold, etc.
•in myth: Arachne's textiles, or Penelope's epic loom
}--✕-->? to account for neo-liberal and transgenic subjects

(traditionally:) textile (racialized and gendered, as “woman's work”) “=/=” text

*fabric conditions and binds our desires and bodies ---@Janina

(Archer >) Gernreich exposed how the fashion system instrumentalized the body's desire to move” while inscribing it within the time-signatures of modern capitalism

uniform = contemporary fashion's other

digi-camo (redesigned and digitally remixed camouflage fatigues worn by the US military)

desire for “freedom” and for alternative temporalities + desire for discipline and physical restraint
}--> *tight spaces our desires are prone to work themselves into*

textures and taxonomies of fashion and uniformity

Abu Ghraib --> (in the pursuit of a) perverse desire for justice (a desire that many feel is best met in the violent erasure of certain subjects)



(let's) stop pretending that “we” weren't already caught-up in the messy circuits of desire

“[...]Freud's figure of the woman who has nothing better to do than but braid her pubic hair into a futile simulation of the phallus, and who (interestingly enough) accidentally invents weaving as an outcome of this inherently fetishistic gesture” (Archer > Barthes > Freud)


Gernreich working with “the future” as a medium and not as a destination***
-he was keen to work with fashion as a ‘time-based medium’(~ deliver us onto alternative temporalities)

[*]fashion: a distinctly modern clothing regime engineered to materially manipulate “the past” so it may serve as a springboard into “the time to come”, an attempt to create the perfect tension between “right now” and “back then” ==> (fashion serving as one of modern culture's main engines catapults the wearers) towards a time and place where present-day problems can no longer reach them and unknown pleasures are made manifest & continually converting the erratic power of our desires into a kind of motion that can be effectively capitalized upon

(brackets and bracelets)

...momentary and marvelous sensations of free fall (by way of design)

Janina's wardrobe malfunctions

*the fine line between sexual liberation and sexual exploitation (in Space 1999 and Star Trek uniforms)*
(Archer:) “Star Trek's futuristic costumes assert their ‘other-worldliness’ by emphatically exposing as much of a woman's body as possible to a relatively prudish American public during the peak of the sexual revolution. Theiss’ garments were literally devised to slip back into the legacies of shame that had heretofore defined the origin of sexual difference and the litany of unequal gender relations that followed.”

() the artist and his muse (typically gendered image of the fashion designer and his model) --> based on the classical notion of an unhampered and naturally feminine ground of conception =/= masculine drive to be “creative” : (old notion that) “woman is the origin ==> it is up to man (Gernreich) to be original” --> to refashion feminine mater-iality into more meaningful forms

easily inscribed and veiled shame of nudity

*hyper-exposure* and *self-consciousness* (aimed at the shame ‘we,’ who live within ‘the cultures of the textile,’ are possessed by)

...deep-seated knowledge that the textile leaves us continually and hopelessly exposed


*our need to be forever wrapped-up in the text/ile* : endlessly bound by the perpendicular, criss-crossing of one another's desires and the ‘significances’ we ascribe to such satisfying predictability


textile screens

textile’s discursive usefulness: its ability to support and exploit the image of our “alternative” identities

(Lacan's) objet petit a : prediscursive, meaningless thing’


textiles (and the clothing shaped from them) are not “convenient things” that help curtail or discipline our desires (by properly veiling them), rather, they are the very object cause of our desire

capturing and suspending our desires in fabricated flights of fancy =/= a sieve (alak) to pass through onto places unknown/unknowable



embodied politics of impropriety

rethinking how ‘the body’ is typically interpolated, along temporal lines

the medium of the textile (--> fashion's main medium --> thread of sexual difference running through this fabric)

...styles that are not pre- or over-determined by a dualistic form of sexual difference

sartorial scheme

abstracting the concept of ‘the body’

attire

(more) body's social ranges of movement
(more) flexible corporeal aesthetics and articulations


{Edie's odd,protracted sleeves of her dress in Warhol's ICA exhibition 1965} the surreal transformation of a woman's arm into a pachyderm's long, wily, and authority-defying appendage...


the conventional and deeply gendered notion that fashion is “[ephemeral], frivolous, relegated to the domain of the feminine and the body, as opposed to art, which [is] deemed [eternal,] masculine and placed in the sphere of the mind and psyche” (Archer > Geczy and Karaminas)

and--> intertwining of fashion and art has long been regarded as absolutely key to the production of the modern social fabric--intended (like the warp and weft of a textile) to remain discreet, always perpendicular

modern aesthetic theory --> contradictory structure of difference of “fashion =/= art” : “fashion design = art's constitutive other” (= that mode of creative production that is beholden to the market and to the manufactured whims of the embodied, consumer passions =/={ art's singularity, extraordinariness, [Nietzschean ethics of] standing alone ==> timeless or universal knowledge =/= ‘everyday culture'})

radical beauty of the quotidian

mundane material culture is repeatedly *elevated* and “translated” into art --> “losing its place within lived reality ==> to become critically meaningful” =/= (Gernreich's) art and fashion critically transformed so that they run parallel and start to resonate with one another

(for Benjamin) translation [~= criticism]: allowing (translatior's) language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue [=/= preserves the state in which (translatior's own) language happens to be]
-to transform “the original” text/thing through the medium of the other, echoes that are produced in the space that opens up between an “original” and “secondary” text --> [*]translation: inconsequentiality of original/secondary separation
--Gernreich--> to make clothes in-between art and fashion (now and the future, the self and the other)


it-girl

Beatlesque escape

new paths that young people are charting requires clothes



(Archer is making me interested in fashion by helping me go through the) economic and scopophilic grains of the fashion industry

the idea of the ‘new look’ absolutely dominating the fashion scene during the mid 21st century
‘new look’ fashion strictly obeying the laws and divisions of optically delineated Cartesian space, and its attending epistemo-ontologies and political economies (-Archer: the proportions of Dior's famous silhouette absolutely required that one always take a well-heeled “step-back” in order to comprehend themselves in a mirror, a camera lens, or even a street window) --> (offering consumers new manners in which) to dress, but also **to see and to understand themselves and their potentiality**

[myself, like many critical artists of my generation, we glean (harvest خوشه چينى) the occurrence of ideological violence]

relaxed clothing shapes
affordable
easy-to-care-for
mix-and-match fabrics
hyper-modern color combinations and patterns


couture خياط زنانه

animosity, bad blood, animus's system, the system is made

perennial enfant terrible
(the naked constant prince)

social change <== **fashion must (and will) go out of fashion**
Gernreich's economic critique of the fashion system --?-->{ disregard of the wearer's comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilized woman's apparel ==> conspicuously figured the middle-class woman caught-up in the middle of the fashion system as being utterly passive and woefully unimaginative -->
•seeing woman's fashionable transfiguration only in terms of what it properly signified within the bounds of a patriarchal civil society and a capitalist economy
•failing to appreciate the pleasures that fashionable styles offer their wearers in spite of the physical and social restrictions they impose
}--> parochial economic critique (operating in a wholly rational realm) =/= (Elizabeth Wilson:) how these ‘transforming actions’ might do violence to these orders --Archer--> **how the powerful and highly volatile work of desire unfolds within the fashion system**

***oppression =/= passivity***

Gernreich --> fashion ‘works’ not simply by way of its significant expense, but rather at *the expense of signification*

{ fashion = fantasy }==> fashion offers our desires a medium through which:
•to formally manipulate the discourse of the body
•to violently threaten the rational ordering of its meaning
•to from which to produce pleasures that exceed satisfaction or sense
•to operate on the text/ile in ways that are non-linguistic (within waking life)


Lyotard's “the dream-work does not think, but ‘manhandles’ the text and operates on the text as if it were a material” =/= Lacan's “the unconscious is structured like a language”

Lyotard on Freud's assumption and insistence that the textures of a text affect its meaning --> Lacan's failure (as analyst and philosopher) in not being able to appreciate how fantasy (~ the forms of desire ~? fashion) pits the materiality of signifiers against what they try to signify

“if desire is the mobile element (here the wind, elsewhere water) that crumples the text, can it also be the fixative which keeps certain parts of it readable? I know of only one notion which can satisfy these conflicting demands: the notion of form, of fantasy”

(my struggle with my colleagues) not to confuse fashion [or any object] for “an object that the subject imagines and aims at” instead [...]