Bruce Sterling

3DAdditivism getting weirder, if that is even possible

Public additivists

Two-day workshop and public talk with Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke on 22 and 23 June 2016 at District.

WED, 22 June, 10:30-17:00 Workshop Day 1

THU, 23 June, 10:30-17:00 Workshop Day 2
THU, 23 June, 19:00-20:30 Public Talk

DESIGN BEYOND THE HUMAN: An Introduction to The 3D Additivist Cookbook

A talk and Q&A session by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke on the possibilities locked up in additivist technologies, with particular focus on the work of the critically renowned and emerging artists, makers, and theorists included in the forthcoming 3D Additivist Cookbook.

In this talk the artist-activist Morehshin Allahyari and writer-artist Daniel Rourke will tackle the question of what it means to design beyond the human. Is it better to try to change the world or change ourselves, and what are the implications of taking a position in this debate?

In March 2015 Allahyari and Rourke released The 3D Additivist Manifesto, a call to push additive manufacturing technologies to their absolute limits and beyond, into the realm of the speculative, the provocative and the weird. They then issued a call for submissions for a radical Cookbook of blueprints, designs, 3D-printing templates, and essays on the topics raised by their Manifesto. #Additivism is a portmanteau of “additive” and “activism,” a movement antagonistic to the timescales, infrastructures, and social givens layered into every 3D print. Additivist ideas and objects disrupt common boundaries, exhibiting a conceptual malleability reminiscent of plastic.

This summer Allahyari and Rourke have been artists in residence with transmediale and the Vilém Flusser Archive, where they have edited and finalized the content for The 3D Additivist Cookbook in collaboration with designers Manuel Bürger and Simon Schindele. They plan to publish the Cookbook in a digital edition in late 2016, to be distributed under a Creative Commons License. Inspired, in part, by William Powell’s The Anarchist Cookbook (1969), The 3D Additivist Cookbook contains critical speculative texts, templates, recipes, (im)practical designs, .obj and .stl files, and methodologies for living in this most contradictory of times….