What is #ADDITIVISM?

#Additivism is a movement concerned with critiquing ‘radical’ new technologies in fablabs, workshops, and classrooms; at social, ecological, and global scales. The term is a portmanteau of additive and activism: a gesture to the complex scales at which new forms of action and intervention must take place in an era increasingly saturated by Posthuman affects. By considering the 3D printer as a technology for remodeling thought into profound, and often nightmarish, new shapes #Additivism aims to expose in-betweens, empower the powerless, and question the presupposed.

The 3D Additivist Manifesto (2015) and 3D Additivist Cookbook (2016) are the result of a collaboration between Morehshin Allahyari, Daniel Rourke and a growing array of critical creators. We refigured the 3D Printer in a similar vein to Donna Haraway’s Cyborg (from her influential 1984 text, A Cyborg Manifesto). Our aim being to disrupt material, social, computational, and metaphysical realities through provocation, collaboration, and ‘weird’ / science fictional thinking.

3D fabrication can therefore be considered as the critical framework of #Additivism. The 3D printer is a profound figure for our times. A technology for channeling creative endeavour, through digital processes, into the layering of raw matter excavated from ancient geological eras. Considered as a tool for art, design and engineering, and gesturing towards a forthcoming era of synthetic chemistry and biological augmentation, 3D fabrication technologies are already a site of common exchange between disciplines and material modalities. #Additivism questions whether it’s possible to change the world without also changing ourselves, and what the implications are of taking a position.