2015 – The 3D Addivist Manifesto - Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke
Text
Derived from petrochemicals boiled into being from the black oil of a trillion ancient bacterioles, the plastic used in 3D Additive manufacturing is a metaphor before it has even been layered into shape. Its potential belies the complications of its history: that matter is the sum and prolongation of our ancestry; that creativity is brutal, sensual, rude, coarse, and cruel. 1 We declare that the world’s splendour has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of crap, kipple 2 and detritus. A planet crystallised with great plastic tendrils like serpents with pixelated breath 3 …for a revolution that runs on disposable armaments is more desirable than the contents of Edward Snowden’s briefcase; more breathtaking than The United Nations Legislative Series.
There is nothing which our infatuated race would desire to see more than the fertile union between a man and an Analytical Engine. Yet humankind are the antediluvian prototypes of a far vaster Creation. 4 The whole of humankind can be understood as a biological medium, of which synthetic technology is but one modality. Thought and Life both have been thoroughly dispersed on the winds of information. 5 Our power and intelligence do not belong specifically to us, but to all matter. 6 Our technologies are the sex organs of material speculation. Any attempt to understand these occurrences is blocked by our own anthropomorphism. 7 In order to proceed, therefore, one has to birth posthuman machines, a fantasmagoric and unrepresentable repertoire of actual re-embodiments of the most hybrid kinds. 8
Additivism will be instrumental in accelerating the emergence and encounter with The Radical Outside. 9
Additivism can emancipate us.
Additivism will eradicate us.
We want to encourage, interfere, and reverse-engineer the possibilities encoded into the censored, the invisible, and the radical notion of the 3D printer itself. To endow the printer with the faculties of plastic: condensing imagination within material reality. 10 The 3D print then becomes a symptom of a systemic malady. An aesthetics of exaptation, 11 with the peculiar beauty to be found in reiteration; in making a mesh. 12 This is where cruelty and creativity are reconciled: in the appropriation of all planetary matter to innovate on biological prototypes. 13 From the purest thermoplastic, from the cleanest photopolymer, and shiniest sintered metals we propose to forge anarchy, revolt and distemper. Let us birth disarray from its digital chamber.
To mobilise this entanglement we propose a collective: one figured not only on the resolution of particular objects, but on the change those objects enable as instruments of revolution and systemic disintegration. Just as the printing press, radio, photocopier and modem were saturated with unintended affects, so we seek to express the potential encoded into every one of the 3D printer’s gears. Just as a glitch can un-resolve an image, so it can resolve something more posthuman: manifold systems – biological, political, computational, material. We call for planetary pixelisation, using Additivist technologies to corrupt the material unconscious; a call that goes on forever in virtue of this initial movement. 14 We call not for passive, dead technologies but rather for a gradual awakening of matter, the emergence, ultimately, of a new form of life. 15
We call for:
1. The endless re-penning of Additivist Manifestos.
2. Artistic speculations on matter and its digital destiny.
3. Texts on:
i. The Anthropocene
ii. The Chthulucene 16
iii. The Plasticene. 17
4. Designs, blueprints and instructions for 3D printing:
i. Tools of industrial espionage
ii. Tools for self-defense against armed assault
iii. Tools to disguise
iv. Tools to aid/disrupt surveillance
v. Tools to raze/rebuild
vi. Objects beneficial in the promotion of protest, and unrest
vii. Objects for sealing and detaining
viii. Torture devices
ix. Instruments of chastity, and psychological derangement
x. Sex machines
xi. Temporary Autonomous Drones
xii. Lab equipment used in the production of:
a. Drugs
b. Dietary supplements
c. DNA
d. Photopolymers and thermoplastics
e. Stem cells
f. Nanoparticles.
5. Technical methods for the copying and dissemination of:
i. Mass-produced components
ii. Artworks
iii. All patented forms
iv. The aura of individuals, corporations, and governments.
6. Software for the encoding of messages inside 3D objects.
7. Methods for the decryption of messages hidden inside 3D objects.
8. Chemical ingredients for dissolving, or catalysing 3D objects.
9. Hacks/cracks/viruses for 3D print software:
i. To avoid DRM
ii. To introduce errors, glitches and fissures into 3D prints.
10. Methods for the reclamation, and recycling of plastic:
i. Caught in oceanic gyres
ii. Lying dormant in landfills, developing nations, or the bodies of children.
11. The enabling of biological and synthetic things to become each others prostheses, including:
i. Skeletal cabling
ii. Nervous system inserts
iii. Lenticular neural tubing
iv. Universal ports, interfaces and orifices.
12. Additivist and Deletionist methods for exapting 18androgynous bodies, including:
i. Skin grafts
ii. Antlers
iii. Disposable exoskeletons
iv. Interspecies sex organs.
13. Von Neumann probes and other cosmic contagions.
14. Methods for binding 3D prints and the machines that produced them in quantum entanglement.
15. Sacred items used during incantation and transcendence, including:
i. The private parts of Gods and Saints
ii. Idols
iii. Altars
iv. Cuauhxicalli
v. Ectoplasm
vi. Nantag stones
16. The production of further mimetic forms, not limited to:
i. Vorpal Blades
ii. Squirdles
iii. Energon
iv. Symmetriads
v. Asymmetriads
vi. Capital
vii. Junk
viii. Love
ix. Alephs
x. Those that from a long way off look like flies. 19
Life exists only in action. There is no innovation that has not an aggressive character. We implore you - radicals, revolutionaries, activists, Additivists - to distil your distemper into texts, templates, blueprints, glitches, forms, algorithms, and components. Creation must be a violent assault on the forces of matter, to extrude its shape and extract its raw potential. Having spilled from fissures fracked in Earth’s deepest wells The Beyond now begs us to be moulded to its will, and we shall drink every drop as entropic expenditure, and reify every accursed dream through algorithmic excess. 20 For only Additivism can accelerate us to an aftermath whence all matter has mutated into the clarity of plastic.
Context
This manifesto was published for the first time in an audiovisual format on the Vimeo's Channel of Morehshin Allahyari in November 19, 2015 (1). Subsequently, in April 16 of the same year the video that contains the manifesto was exhibited in the Transfer Gallery of Brooklyn (2), this audiovisual artwork also has the collaboration of Andrea Young, who participated in the audio desing (3).
The 3D Additivist Manifesto was the beginning of another collaborative projects and investigations by Morehshin Allahyari y Daniel Rourke, one of them The Vilém Flusser Residency Program for Artistic Research in 2016 that resulted in the publication of the book 3D Additivist Cookbook in December of the same year in a PDF3D format (4). The book contains the work of more than 100 artists, designers and theorist (4) who for their creations, were inspired by the manifesto published in March 2015 (3).
The manifesto and the book realesed gave way to the #Additivism movement that is led by Allahyari y Rourke (5). The movement considers the 3D printer as a profound metaphor of our times in order that they are technologies that allow an exchange between disciplines and their material forms (5). In the present, The 3D Additivist Manifiesto and the 3D Additivist Cookbook are considerated key resources in the teaching of 3D manufacturing, speculative design and digital culture in fablabs, universities and art institutions around the world (4).
Authors
Daniel Rourke is a British artist, writer and professor from Huddersfield, West Yorkshire (4). In his work, Rourke reflects and explores about the intersection between the digital materiality, the arts and the posthumanism (4). He has participated in different art festivals, some of them Transmediale of Berlín, GLI.TC/H of Chicago and AND Festival of Manchester, he is also an habitual collaborator in Rhizome.org and Furtherfield.org (4). He is currently a professor in the Digital Media Masters at the Goldsmiths of the University of London, where he also lives (4).
Morehshin Allahyari es una artista, activista, profesora y curadora ocasional nacida en Irán (6). El trabajo artístico de Allahyari se enfoca en “las contradicciones políticas, sociales y culturales que enfrentamos a diario” (6). La artista piensa en la tecnología como “como un conjunto de herramientas filosóficas y medios poéticos para reflexionar y documentar nuestras luchas de vidas personales y colectivas en el siglo XXI” (6). Su trabajo ha sido presentado en numerosos festivales e instituciones artísticas, algunos de ellos la Venice Biennale di Archittectura, el Pompidou Center, el Museum of Contemporary Art de Montreal, la Tate Modern, el Queens Museum y el Pori Museum (6).
References
(1) https://vimeo.com/122642166
(2) http://additivism.org/news
(3) http://www.morehshin.com/3d-additivist-manifesto/
(4) https://machinemachine.net/about/
(5) http://contemporarylynx.co.uk/art-science-art-manifestos
(6) http://www.morehshin.com/artist-information/
File
Links
First Edition: http://additivism.org/manifesto
Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20180324021842/http://additivism.org/manifesto