The 3D Additivist Manifesto

In March 2015 Morehshin Allahyari and I 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.

The 3D Additivist Cookbook – composed of responses to that call – was published in December 2016: an extensive catalog of digital forms, material actions, and post-humanist methodologies and impressions.

The 3D printer is a profound metaphor for our times. A technology for channelling 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 forms of materiality. 3D fabrication can be thought of as the critical framework of #Additivism: a movement that aims to disrupt material, social, computational, and metaphysical realities through provocation, collaboration, and ‘weird’ / science fictional thinking. Additivism approaches the 3D Printer as Donna Haraway approached the figure of the Cyborg in her influential text A Cyborg Manifesto (1983). By considering the 3D printer as a technology for remodelling thought into profound, and often nightmarish, new shapes – Additivism aims to expose inbetweens, empower the powerless, and question the presupposed.