The 3D Additivist Manifesto •
https://additivism.org/manifesto •
Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke •
2015 •


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:

    The endless re-penning of Additivist Manifestos.
    Artistic speculations on matter and its digital destiny.
    Texts on:
        The Anthropocene
        The Chthulucene 16
        The Plasticene. 17
    Designs, blueprints and instructions for 3D printing:
        Tools of industrial espionage
        Tools for self-defense against armed assault
        Tools to disguise
        Tools to aid/disrupt surveillance
        Tools to raze/rebuild
        Objects beneficial in the promotion of protest, and unrest
        Objects for sealing and detaining
        Torture devices
        Instruments of chastity, and psychological derangement
        Sex machines
        Temporary Autonomous Drones
        Lab equipment used in the production of:
            Drugs
            Dietary supplements
            DNA
            Photopolymers and thermoplastics
            Stem cells
            Nanoparticles.
    Technical methods for the copying and dissemination of:
        Mass-produced components
        Artworks
        All patented forms
        The aura of individuals, corporations, and governments.
    Software for the encoding of messages inside 3D objects.
    Methods for the decryption of messages hidden inside 3D objects.
    Chemical ingredients for dissolving, or catalysing 3D objects.
    Hacks/cracks/viruses for 3D print software:
        To avoid DRM
        To introduce errors, glitches and fissures into 3D prints.
    Methods for the reclamation, and recycling of plastic:
        Caught in oceanic gyres
        Lying dormant in landfills, developing nations, or the bodies of children.
    The enabling of biological and synthetic things to become each others prostheses, including:
        Skeletal cabling
        Nervous system inserts
        Lenticular neural tubing
        Universal ports, interfaces and orifices.
    Additivist and Deletionist methods for exapting 18 androgynous bodies, including:
        Skin grafts
        Antlers
        Disposable exoskeletons
        Interspecies sex organs.
    Von Neumann probes and other cosmic contagions.
    Methods for binding 3D prints and the machines that produced them in quantum entanglement.
    Sacred items used during incantation and transcendence, including:
        The private parts of Gods and Saints
        Idols
        Altars
        Cuauhxicalli
        Ectoplasm
        Nantag stones
    The production of further mimetic forms, not limited to:
        Vorpal Blades
        Squirdles
        Energon
        Symmetriads
        Asymmetriads
        Capital
        Junk
        Love
        Alephs
        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.

Bibliography / Reading List •

1 William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook •
2 Philip K. Dick, Pay for the Printer  / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? •
3 F.T. Marinetti, The Manifesto of Futurism •
4 Samuel Butler, Darwin Among the Machines •
5 Evelyn Fox-Keller, Refiguring Life •
6 John Gray, Straw Dogs •
7 Stanislaw Lem, Solaris •
8 Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming •
9 Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials •
10 Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto •
11 Stephen Jay Gould & Elisabeth S. Vrba, Exaptation: A Missing Term in the Science of Form •
12 Susan Sontag, The Imagination of Disaster •
13 Benjamin Bratton, Some Trace Effects of the Post- Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics •
14 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution •
15 Anna Greenspan & Suzanne Livingston, Future Mutation: Technology, Shanzai and the Evolution of Species •
16 Donna Haraway, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble •
17 Christina Reed, Dawn of the Plasticene Age •
18 Svetlana Boym, The Off-Modern Mirror •
19 Jorge Luis Borges, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge & Michel Foucault, The Order of Things •
20 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share


The 3D Additivist Manifesto was created by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke, with sound design from Andrea Young.

The Manifesto is publish under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence •
