“Our competitors don’t want to compete with us on a level playing feild. They are, more than anything, imitators… There’s no attention to detail. There’s no attention to safety! It’s all cowboys and gypsies” (Doctorow, 262). -Sammy
Mating Ritual or 3D Scan?
Steph brings up the politics of 3D scanning. Representation and agency of a body that we lose control over once its uploaded to the web, but gain the ability to manipulate and distort the body? Zev is unmoved. He volunteers to be scanned and in what appears to be some sort of mating dance (from an alien perspective) leads to the production of a virtual Zev body, that could be birthed through the womb of 3D printer. Reproduction in its most abiotic form.
Hey Lauren! I like the connection you made from scanning as a form of reproduction. The photo you chose is beautiful and helped to visualize and make this connection clear. I agree that there was an alien quality to the experience of watching Zev scanned, and think its great you explored that aspect.
!
Very concise. I love this image and the question you frame it within.
the politics of scanning a body to bring into the virtual realm is extremely important and absolutely needs more investigation/interrogation. as evidenced by the “3d woman” vs “3d man” google image search, the objectification of female bodies is contingent in the virtual realm as it is in the physical, and when the conversation of manipulating these scans includes the gendering of these .stl files, what does it mean to manipulate a 3d virtual woman? how does the manipulation of a virtual woman differ from manipulating a 3d man? who in the physical controls virtual bodies? to frame these questions i’m linking an article about dr matt taylor’s sexist wardrobe choice during his nasa press conference last week, as a way of informing the question of “who is in power in the fields of science, how are these spaces violently gendered?”
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/14/rosetta-comet-dr-matt-taylor-apology-sexist-shirt
I’m a little confused by this interpretation: perhaps meaning has been searched for where there is none..? I think my motives regarding the scan were less a part of a mating ritual, and more a jump at the chance to be able to say I’ve been three-D scanned.
Lauren, I thought your CST Post this week was very striking, but in a comical sense. I believe that this post has met all the standard checks in the checklist of standards that are supposedly committed in every CST Post. (Actually, very few people follow it anyways.) Great job!
~Anthony
The politics of the whole scenario is interesting and surely seems to grind some peoples gears much more then others. I found zevs unmoved and carefree approach to be quite cool actually.
Alternatively, were you interpreting here my motives, or the literal movement of the scanner over my body?
Wow! I love where you took this analogy, the image of the mating birds perfectly demonstrates the alien act we all witnessed in last week’s CST lab. You tied this strange act into the conversation in seminar comparing a three-D printer to a womb completing the image of the reproduction cycle .