intro

Building up or digging down, simulating more-than-human bodies, imagining new and fantastical volumes or managing resources, volumetrics are continuously figuring and refiguring life and living. From the fossil fuel industry to the so-called creative industries, computational practices are being deployed to imagine and materialise new volumes to exploit and inhabit. Computational arts practices such as 3D Scanning, Rendering and Animation, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality have been a significant agent in shaping this volumetric turn. Consequently these new volumetric practices are in relentless dialogue with both the calculation and measurement of environments and the extraction and entertainment industries. This event seeks to explore critical volumetric practices capable of generating new political and affective ecologies and challenging dominant forms of geopolitical and industrial volumetric power.

With this in mind “Volumetric Ecologies” brings together researchers, artists and theorists to investigate the implications and possibilities of volumetric imaginaries of environments. As part of the volumetric turn we explore more-than-human immersive technologies and the ways in which they figure environments across an expanded field of practice. The workshop will critically reflect on the agency of computational arts practices as a significant force in shaping the volumetric turn. The evening keynote by Deborah Levitt will explore how the world-building capacities of animation and VR technologies bring into being new forms of cosmotechnics. This one day explorative forum presents a diversity of perspectives and practices which reimagine and recast the constructs of environment, bodies and mediated worlds through the articulation of volumetric practices.

Hosted by ICE, Computational Arts at Goldsmiths, and in partnership with the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology at Birkbeck, University of London. Organised by Helen Pritchard, Rachel Falconer and Joel McKim.