The Possible Bodies Inventory: dis-orientation and its aftermath

Abstract

Following Sara Ahmed’s invitation “to think how queer politics might involve disorientation, without legislating disorientation as a politics”, the collective enquiry Possible Bodies research team inventoried three items related to 3D artifacts, following through the implications of the contemporary renderings of “dis-orientation”
they invoke. Each in their own way, the items relate to a world that is becoming oblique, where inside and outside, up and down are switching places and where new perspectives become available.  They speak of the mutual constitution of technology and bodies, of matter and semiotics, of nature and culture andhow orientation and the subjectivities that emerge from it are managed across the technocolonial matrix of representation in turbo-capitalism. The three items allow for a look at tools that represent, track and model “bodies” through diverse cultural means of abstraction, and eventually convoke their aftermath in a call for “disobedient action-research”.