Porous Bodies is an essay film in diptych format where found footage meets newly shot images in an assemblage editing. The film investigates how our bodies are becoming data and explores the concept of porous bodies. Optical and infrared scanning systems penetrate beyond the skin, measuring the materiality and patterns of our iris or palm veins, while optical tools capture our identities from afar, without consent, by analysing videos of our physical and choreographic uniqueness.

Iris scans read the materiality of the eye through infrared light, a confrontation between two lenses, one organic and one technological. Authority and agency reside in the latter; the eye becomes mere material, algorithmically turned into code. Similarly, palm vein scanning reduces the hand, once a symbol of manual labour and political emancipation, to a biometric signature. Through gait recognition, we are identified by the way we walk, our choreographic uniqueness rendered into data. Facial recognition becomes obsolete; no one in a crowd is anonymous anymore.

All these scanning techniques oscillate between micro and macro images of our bodies, used for the control of people, protesting crowds, security systems, crypto-based economies, digital IDs, and in refugee camps. Vulnerable populations often become testing grounds for such technologies.

These emerging, transgressive technologies penetrate our bodies, while self-quantifying devices extend the intrusion A walking body, optically and mathematically analysed without consent transformed into a porous, penetrable and permeable entity, a cloud of harvestable data. We are porous, open to these operations, sometimes unknowingly, sometimes willingly. Still, the body remains a representation of agency: the walking body, the body in the street, the political body that assembles with others. Mobilised datafied clouds in motion, grasping for agency in an increasingly authoritarian landscape.

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