Os homens invadem museu e, armados com marretas e furadeiras, esmigalham o que encontram ao redor. A duros golpes, os artefatos de valor viram rastros de pó e pedra.

additivism: a movement that aims to disrupt material, social, computational, and metaphysical realities through provocation, collaboration, and ‘weird’/science fictional thinking

This is your chance to get in on the 3D conversation. Offering you the chance to put your thoughts, discussion, and ‘recipes’ into the The 3D Additivist Cookbook, their team is now actively calling for submissions to the upcoming online tome, which will be a provocative collection of “speculative texts, templates, recipes and (im)practical designs for living in this most contradictory of times.”

L’artiste iranienne Morehshin Allahyari s’engage dans la reproduction en impression 3D des sculptures millénaires détruites à Mossoul en février par les djihadistes de Daech.

Morehshin Allahyari, artiste, enseignante et activiste iranienne à l’origine du récent 3D Additivist Manifesto passe à l’acte. Présenté cet hiver à Paris lors du festival reFrag, le manifeste conçu avec Daniel Rourke appelle les artistes, activistes, ingénieurs et écrivains à repousser les limites physiques et conceptuelles de l’impression 3D, en soulignant que le plastique des imprimantes 3D est un dérivé de pétrochimiques cuisinés à partir du pétrole, cette huile minérale composée d’une multitude d’éléments organiques remontant à des millions et des millions d’années. L’impression 3D constitue pour les additivistes la métaphore par excellence de l’impasse écologique dans laquelle se trouve notre société.

Men descend on the venerated space, laying waste to anything they can topple. Armed with sledgehammers, power drills, and cellphone cameras, they leave dust and stones in their wake, mere suggestions of the priceless artifacts proudly displayed only hours before…

Time and again, conflict has been bad news for historical artifacts and sculptures. There was the infamous burning of the Library of Alexandria, the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan by the Taliban, and the Nazi’s battle to burn as much “degenerate art” as they could find. Swept up in a violent fervor, mobs and soldiers have been quick to destroy what took societies centuries to create; what museums and collectors spent decades collecting, preserving, and documenting for the public.

The digital era looks different: files can be cheaply hosted in data centers spread across several states or continents to ensure permanence. Morehshin Allahyari, an Iranian born artist, educator, and activist, wants to apply that duplicability to the artifacts that ISIS has destroyed.

Now, Allahyari is working on digitally fabricating the sculptures for a series called “Material Speculation” as part of a residency in Autodesk’s Pier 9 program. The first in the series is “Material Speculation: ISIS,” which, through intense research, is modeling and reproducing statues destroyed by ISIS in 2015. Allahyari isn’t just interested in replicating lost objects but making it possible for anyone to do the same: Embedded within each semi-translucent copy is a flash drive with Allahyari’s research about the artifacts, and an online version is coming.

In the lead-up to her solo show, institutions of Resolution Disputes [iRD], at Transfer Gallery, Brooklyn, Daniel Rourke caught up with Rosa Menkman over two gallons of home-brewed coffee. They talked about what the show might become, discussing a series of alternate resolutions and realities that exist parallel to our daily modes of perception.

iRD was exhibited at Transfer Gallery in March & April 2015, and also functioned as host to Daniel Rourke and Morehshin Allahyari’s 3D Additivist Manifesto, on April 16th.

Rosa Menkman: If I remember correctly you and Morehshin wrote an open invitation to digital artists to send in their left over 3D objects. So every object in that dark gooey ocean in The 3D Additivist Manifesto actually represents a piece of artistic digital garbage. It’s like a digital emulation of the North Pacific Gyre, which you also talked about in your lecture at Goldsmiths, but then solely consisting of Ready-Made art trash.

The actual scale and form of the Gyre is hard to catch, it seems to be unimaginable even to the people devoting their research to it; it’s beyond resolution. Which is why it is still such an under acknowledged topic. We don’t really want to know what the Gyre looks or feels like; it’s just like the clutter inside my desktop folder inside my desktop folder, inside the desktop folder. It represents an amalgamation of histories that moved further away from us over time and we don’t necessarily like to revisit, or realise that we are responsible for. I think The 3D Additivist Manifesto captures that resemblance between the way we handle our digital detritus and our physical garbage in a wonderfully grimm manner.

Regine Debatty at We Make Money Not Art

A few days ago, I was at Parsons Paris for reFrag: glitch, a series of workshops, talks and performances that address the multifold ways in which glitches manifest and/or are mobilized artistically in our lives. Participants talked about flash crashes in the financial market (more about that one soon), wacky operating system from the early nineties, Spinoza glitches, archaeology of bugs, etc. It was good, brain-stimulating and intense. We even watched the documentary of a fist fucking performance. Here’s the project page if you’re into that kind of entertainment.

Benoit Palop interviewed us for The Creators Project

It took over a year of intense reflection and exploration for San Francisco-based new-media artist and art activist Morehshin Allahyariand London-based writer and artist Daniel Rourke to create The 3D Additivist Manifesto, a research project that combines art, engineering, science fiction and digital media aesthetics into a call to arms to soar beyond the current limits of 3D printing. 

Here, the creative, “intelligent,” and evolutionary technology—for which the possibilities are still being explored—is probed in a 10-minute video essay that takes viewers deep into an uncanny journey of 3D-rendered landscapes and surreal objects, set to a soundtrack by Andrea Young.

It’s a dynamic call to artists, researchers, and other interested parties to reflect on the current state of additive manufacturing. The end goal is the “Additivist Cookbook,” a methodological collection that will bring together submitted ideas, thoughts, and designs for the future of 3D printing.

To learn more about “Additivism," The Creators Project spoke with Allahyari and Rourke:

Corinna Kirsch over at ArtFCity

It’s about time, 2015. With every new machine-age, come manifestos to help us figure out how to relate to each other, as well as our machines. From the violent beauty of the Futurists to the menacing biotech in the “Cyborg Manifesto,” we’ve clamored for a way forward that isn’t tied town to the past. Savage poetry—rather than clarity—tends to be a manifesto’s strong suit.