Individual Project

BodyBuilding. Inefficient Tool Building for Quantified Beings

Tetem, Enschede (NL)

hackersanddesigners.nl

Group exhibition in collaboration with Hackers & Designers, The Underground Division, Nazanin Karimi, Thomas Rustemeyer, Kiki Mager

On a daily basis, our bodies are being scanned, tracked, debugged, rendered, manipulated, and categorized by different technologies. How are we, as users and makers, able to understand our bodies' relationships to these biometric computational processes? BodyBuilding is a process-driven exhibition curated by the Hackers & Designers collective (H&D), which investigates the intersection of technology and the agency of the (human, post-human, trans-human, non-human) body from a maker's perspective.

Engaging with technologies such as scanners, geocomputation, and motion capture, the commissioned works problematize the role of the "body” in computation. In addition to the commissioned works, H&D will work in collaboration with architectural designer Thomas Rustemeyer, to develop a support structure which will host the works of the invited artists. The structure will reflect the ways in which H&D functions as a community, a network, and an infrastructure.

As the artists are also tool-makers, visitors are invited to actively take part in processes of constructing and deconstructing tools, ask questions about their inner workings, their ethics, and socio-technological entanglements. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the works on display will be activated through different (inter)activities such as hands-on workshops, lectures and discussions.

Anja Groten is a member of collective Hackers & Designers.