2016 Archives - Morehshin Allahyari

December 20, 2016

The 3D Additivist Cookbook (2016)

The 3D Additivist Cookbook, devised and edited by Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke, is a free compendium of imaginative, provocative works from over 100 world-leading artists, activists and theorists. The 3D Additivist Cookbook contains 3D .obj and .stl files, critical and fictional texts, templates, recipes, (im)practical designs and methodologies for living in this most contradictory of times.

In March 2015 Allahyari & Rourke released The 3D Additivist Manifesto, a call to push 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.

#Additivism is a portmanteau of additive and activism: a movement concerned with critiquing ‘radical’ new technologies in fablabs, workshops, and classrooms; at social, ecological, and global scales. The 3D Additivist Cookbook questions whether it’s possible to change the world without also changing ourselves, and what the implications are of taking a position.

Download the Cookbook

Download the Archive

Gallery

Morehshin Allahyari - Material Speculation - Gorgon

January 25, 2016

Material Speculation: ISIS (2015-2016)

My series Material Speculation: ISIS is a 3D modeling and 3D printing project focused on the reconstruction of 12 selected statues from the Roman period city of Hatra and Assyrian artifacts from Nineveh that were destroyed by ISIS in 2015 in a series of highly-publicized YouTube videos. The series goes beyond metaphoric gestures and digital and material forms of the artifacts by including a flash drive and a memory card inside the body of each 3D-printed object. Like time capsules, each object is sealed (though accessible) for future civilizations. The information in these flash drives includes images, maps, PDF files, and videos gathered on the artifacts and sites that were destroyed. Thus Material Speculation: ISIS creates a practical and political possibility for artifact archival, while also proposing 3D printing technology as a tool for resistance and documentation.

Material Speculation inspects Petropolitical and poetic relationships between 3D Printing, Plastic, Oil, Technocapitalism and Jihad.

On February 26, 2016, I published one of my reconstructions from “Material Speculation: ISIS,” as well as a dossier of my research, as part of Rhizome’s series The Download.^[15] Through this commission, my object file for King Uthal was made openly available to anyone for 3D printing.

I am currently working on finding a platform/museum for the release and the preservation of all the digital files and models from this project. If you are interested a museum, in the Middle-East, please contact me for more information.

In 2016, I was the recipient of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinker award and the Digital Sculpture 2016 Award by The Institute of Digital Art for Material Speculation: ISIS. The series led to a great deal of press and reviews, and has been continuously on loan for exhibition since I completed it, to venues including the Biennale Architettura (Venice, 2016), Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2017), Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences (Sydney, 2017), among others.

*Special thanks to Pamela Karimi, Christopher Jones, Negin Tabatabaei, Wathiq Al-Salihi, Lamia Al Gailani Werr for their help with research.

*Special Thanks to Shannon Walsh, Shane O’Shea, Sierra Dorschutz,Patrick Delory, Christian Pramuk, and Mariah Hettel for their help with 3D modeling.

Material Speculation:ISIS, Zip folder, download series, Rhizome

Download Folder

Gallery

Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation – Ebu

Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation – Eagle King

Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation – Nergal

Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation – King Uthal

Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation – Barmaren

Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation – Maren

Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation – Lamassu

Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation – Gorgon

Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation – Nike

Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation – Unknown King of Hatra

Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation – Ebu

Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation – Venus

Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation – Priest with Eagle

Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation – Marten

Process

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Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation: ISIS – Process

South Ivan Series

The South Ivan Series (dead drops) are an extension (though not formally a part) of Morehshin’s Material Speculation: ISIS series. The three heads in the series are reproductions of reliefs that were originally located at the ruins of Hatra, an ancient city in Iraq (image here) in South Ivan. Hatra was one of the ancient sites targeted by ISIS, and in 2015 a video was released of a fighter shooting these heads with an AK-47. These heads were above ground and visible in ancient times. They survived for thousands of years in the open air. Gertrude Bell photographed them in April 1911 before major excavations took place at Hatra. Each dead drop contains a USB drive, which the viewer can connect to in order to download Morehshin’s openly available research material (images, maps, pdf files, and videos) in addition to the 3D printable object file of the piece King Uthal, one of the reconstructions from her Material Speculation: Isis series.

Morehshin Allahyari - Material Speculation Dead Drops - In use

Lorena Ramírez-López downloading the research archive from the sculpture

Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation Dead Drops – Bearded River God

Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation Dead Drops – Young Boy

South Ivan Heads, Carnegie Mellon University, 2019.

Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation Dead Drops – Medusa Head

Morehshin Allahyari – Material Speculation Dead Drops – Installation Shot

Selected Installation Shots

KAI 10 |Arthena Foundation – Contemporary Ruins Exhibition, 2017

Material Speculation:ISIS, solo exhibition, Trinity Square Video, 2017.

Material Speculation:ISIS, Net Art Anthology exhibition, 2019.

Material Speculation: ISIS, Plastic Entanglements exhibition, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, 2019.

Material Speculation: ISIS, Hood Museum, 2019.

December 30, 2015

The 3D Additivist Manifesto (2015)

In March 2015, we -Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rouke– released The 3D Additivist Manifesto: a call to push Additivist technologies to their absolute limits and beyond into the realm of the speculative, the provocative and the weird. We then opened up submissions to a radical ‘Cookbook’ of blueprints, designs, 3D print templates, and essays on the topics raised by our Manifesto.

The full text and bibliography can be read & downloaded from: additivism.org/manifesto.

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

Introduction

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. 3D fabrication can be thought of as the critical framework of #Additivism: An electric mix of art project, online community, activism, ironic commentary, and revolutionary potential, #Additivism — a portmanteau of “additive” and “activism” aims to disrupt material, social, computational, and metaphysical realities through provocation, collaboration, and science fictional thinking.

The 3D Additivist Cookbook

In Summer 2016 we were artists in residence at Vilém Flusser Residency for Artistic Research in Berlin, an annual award through the transmediale festival for art and digital culture in Berlin. During the residency, we finished T he 3D Additivist Cookbook, a publication unifying many of the strands of the project thus far, including essays, texts, artworks, and, of course, many 3D-printable files.

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