Udd24_T8_The Additivist Manifiesto

THE 3D ADDITIVIST MANIFIESTO

FULLY SCALABLE MODULAR COMPONENT SYSTEM FOR HOUSING. RECONFIGURED CREVICES: AN HABITUAL INTERRUPTIO

THE 3D ADDITIVIST COOKBOOK

MOREHSHIN ALLAHYARI Y DANIEL ROURKE ECOLOGIES OF THE ARTIFICIAL MEDIA archive MA-BA TRANSVERSAL WORKSHOP ETSAM-UPM + STRELKA KB

UDD 24 SORIANO SPRING TERM 2021-2022 P7-8 + MHAB

TEXTO

8

In March 2015 we launched The 3D Additivist Manifesto as a call to expand and challenge the scope of the 3D printer. We hoped, at the very least, to begin a conversation about the material politics of this clunky, often over-hyped machine; a politics that might inspire tutors, and technicians into using and teaching the 3D printer in critical, poetic, and disruptive new ways. What we quickly realized was that as well as disassembling additive manufacturing into a range of images, metaphors and theoretical associations, we had also unwittingly birthed a term that offered us a way to think about the scale at which all actions – whether 3D printable or not – take place. #Additivism is a coinage of additive and activism, and as such, signals to the potential of small scale, incremental processes to have substantial and long lasting effects. The works in this cookbook are extensive in their capacity to transmute digital forms through the material world into human scale actions and impressions, but it is to a scale beyond single bodies and minds that we are most interested in attending. As we write this in late 2016 our manifesto’s apocalyptic vision of a world accelerated to breaking point by technological prowess seems strangely comforting compared to the delirious political landscape we see before us.

Whether you believe political malaise, media delirium, or the inevitable implosion of the neoliberal project is to blame for the rise of figures like Farage, Trump and – potentially – Le Pen, the promises they make of an absolute shift in the conditions of power appear grand precisely because they choose to demonize the discrete differences of minority groups, or attempt to overturn truths that might fragment and disturb their allencompassing narratives. These populist grand narrators join a long list of doomsayers, who seed utopian visions in the minds of their followers through a language of hate and fear. At this time we turn to the small scale motions of the 3D printer, and the incremental transformations locked up in recipes, toolkits and digital files for solace and inspiration.

Though we invoked grand narratives such as the Anthropocene, human evolution and extinction, civilization collapse, cyborg uprisings, and large scale social unrest in our manifesto, it is from infinitesimal gestures and their collective enactment that we believe the most profound transformations arise. #Additivism is attentive to more than the transformation of zeroes and ones into physical layers on a 3D print bed. Every text, work, and speculative proposal contained in this Cookbook comprises a series of incremental steps necessary to manufacture other realities. It is in the tradition of the recipe, then, that the metaphor of #Additivism might be best understood. Recipes are one of the primary modes of making, learning, sharing, and revising (im)possible worlds. To follow a recipe is to grapple with forces well below and above the scale of the individual, for whether the maker is kneading yeast, flour and water into bread, or combining charcoal with saltpeter to produce gunpowder, the outcome of their work has the capacity to compel innumerable bodies into expressing

2

further, previously invisible, motivations into reality. Recipes are powerful, from the Latin posse, ‘to be able’. Recipes are political, from the Greek politikos, ‘relating to, or among others’. And recipes, in that they promise to cause certain effects if they are followed, are theoretical, from the Greek thea, ‘to look outward, or contemplate’, and horao, ‘to attend to something closely’. Even before their particular ingredients are collected, prepared, and combined, recipes harbor a radical potential to transform the given world.

The works submitted and curated for The 3D Additivist Cookbook were selected because we considered each of them - in their own unique, often subtle ways - to be radical. They each offer a position, a provocation, or a mode of thinking we found essential to further and even surprise our vision of the (im)possible. To maintain this openness we also found it necessary to interrupt our own conceptions and predilections. To achieve this we commissioned two artist collectives, Browntourage and A Parede, to curate subsections of Additivistic artist works. You will find these at the center of the Cookbook, woven together by a discussion between two of the commissions.

We chose to present the Cookbook in 3D-PDF format in homage to the long and checkered history of grassroots, DIY publishing. We are also distributing all of the 3D models in an accompanying Torrent, allowing the Cookbook to act as an opensource informational vehicle and archive for both its critical ideas and the practical means of realizing and mutating them. 3D-PDF may appear clunky and inefficient alongside more seamless, high resolution media, but whereas a HTML5 website can be blocked by the firewall of an institution or government, we believe a PDF is able to flow more freely and pass from screen to desktop printer, email to email, very much in the tradition of photocopied punk zines and radical pamphlets.

The 3D Additivist Cookbook was, and is, the collective creation of a large community of people. To behold this compendium of recipes, toolkits, theoretical writings, and potential objects is to contend with an assembly of speculative worlds we have no desire to limit. We hope the diversity and scope of these works inspires actions and narratives into being that far exceed the scope of our collective vision. The 3D Additivist Cookbook is an idea, a community, a movement, an archive, and a collective effort to inspire and challenge narratives for governing, acting, networking, and creating together. #Additivism proposes that multiple, infinitely colorful and profoundly different worlds can and should exist simultaneously. #Additivism proposes that the time to start designing, prototyping and manufacturing those radical worlds – in abundance – is now.

Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke, November 2016

THE 3D ADDITIVIST COOKBOOK

The 3d Additivist Manifiesto 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. We declare that the world’s splendour has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of crap, kipple and detritus. A planet crystallised with great plastic tendrils like serpents with pixelated breath… 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. 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. Our power and intelligence do not belong specifically to us, but to all matter. Our technologies are the sex organs of material speculation. Any attempt to understand these occurrences is blocked by our own anthropomorphism. In order to proceed, therefore, one has to birth posthuman machines, a fantasmagoric and unrepresentable repertoire of actual re-embodiments of the most hybrid kind.

Additivism will be instrumental in accelerating the emergence and encounter with The Radical Outside.

Additivism can emancipate us.

Additivism will eradicate us We want to encourage, interfere, and reverseengineer 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.The 3D print then becomes a symptom of a systemic malady. An aesthetics of exaptation, with the peculiar beauty to be found in reiteration; in making a mesh. This is where cruelty and creativity are reconciled: in the appropriation of all planetary matter to innovate on biological prototypes.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

4

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.

We call for: 1. The endless repenning of Additivist Manifestos.

2. Artistic speculations on matter and its digital destiny.

3. Texts on: I. The Anthropocene II. The Chthulucene16 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.

THE 3D ADDITIVIST COOKBOOK

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 s 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 androgynous 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

6

vii. Junk viii. Love ix. Alephs x. Those that from a long way off look like flies.

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. For only Additivism can accelerate us to an aftermath whence all matter has mutated into the clarity of plastic. video manifesto: additivism.org/manifesto Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke, 2015

THE 3D ADDITIVIST COOKBOOK (2017), DEVISED AND EDITED BY MOREHSHIN ALLAHYARI & DANIEL ROURKE, IS A FREE COMPENDIUM OF IMAGINATIVE, PROVOCATIVE WORKS FROM OVER 100 WORLD-LEADING ARTISTS, ACTIVISTS AND THEORISTS. THE 3D ADDITIVIST COOKBOOK CONTAINS .OBJ AND .STL FILES FOR THE 3D PRINTER, AS WELL AS CRITICAL AND FICTIONAL TEXTS, TEMPLATES, RECIPES, (IM)PRACTICAL DESIGNS AND METHODOLOGIES FOR LIVING IN THIS MOST CONTRADICTORY OF TIMES. IN MARCH 2015 ALLAHYARI & ROURKE RELEASED THE 3D ADDITIVIST MANIFESTO, A CALL TO PUSH THE 3D PRINTER AND OTHER CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIES, TO THEIR ABSOLUTE LIMITS AND BEYOND INTO THE REALM OF THE SPECULATIVE, THE PROVOCATIVE AND THE WEIRD. THE 3D ADDITIVIST COOKBOOK IS COMPOSED OF RESPONSES TO THAT CALL, AN EXTENSIVE CATALOG OF DIGITAL FORMS, MATERIAL ACTIONS, AND POST-HUMANIST METHODOLOGIES AND IMPRESSIONS. #ADDITIVISM IS A PORTMANTEAU OF ADDITIVE AND ACTIVISM: A MOVEMENT CONCERNED WITH CRITIQUING 'RADICAL' NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN FABLABS, WORKSHOPS, AND CLASSROOMS; AT SOCIAL, ECOLOGICAL, AND GLOBAL SCALES. THE 3D ADDITIVIST COOKBOOK QUESTIONS WHETHER IT'S POSSIBLE TO CHANGE THE WORLD WITHOUT ALSO CHANGING OURSELVES, AND WHAT THE IMPLICATIONS ARE OF TAKING A POSITION.

THE 3D ADDITIVIST COOKBOOK