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.

The 3D Additivist Cookbook

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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 #AdditivismAn 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 The 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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Morehshin Allahyari - Bitrates

بیت بر ثانیه – Bitrates (2014)

Bitrates is the first New Media Art exhibition in the city of Shiraz in Iran, curated and organized by artists Morehshin Allahyari and Mani Nilchiani, hosted by Dar-ol-Hokoomeh Project at Shiraz Artist House. With a vision to create a space dedicated to emerging artistic practices, workshops, talks, presentations and exhibitions, Dar-ol-Hokoomeh Project (co-founded by Mohsen Hazrati and Milad Forouzandeh) seeks to expose the creative community and general public to the potentials of new technologies and New Media theory and practice.

In their curation process, Morehshin and Mani have selected artists that each use variety of digital tools, material, and software in their works to present a specific category and technological aesthetics of new media art; from artgame, creative coding, experimental 3D animation to glitch art and animated GIF. The significance of the term “Bit Rate” is two fold: On the one hand, every digital art work at one point or the other needs to navigate the bottleneck of “bits”. Ideas turn into bits, bits are streamed over a network, to a screen, or to a tangible output such as a 3D printer to form an experience. While simultaneously, as a generation who sought their exposure to the world outside through slow, clunky dial-up modems, our interaction with the world at large was at the mercy of “bit rate”. بیت بر ثانیه (Bitrates) draws attention to these ideas through the presentation of the work that engages and explores technology and internet as a medium.

Featuring: Morehshin Allahyari, Benjamin Bacon, Andrew Blanton, Alex Myers, Brenna Murphy, Ramsey Nasser, Mani Nilchiani, Daniel Rourke, Alfredo Salzar-Caro, Angela Washko.

A lecture and a Q & A session will be held with Morehshin Allahyari and Mani Nilchiani at Daralhokoomeh on Sunday May 25th, 6:30 PM.

Website: http://daralhokoomeh.com

***GIFbites is one of the projects of Bitrates exhibition (curated by Daniel Rourke). For the opening of Bitrates, a selected version of this project was displayed in the gallery, followed by a complete showcase of all the GIFs for the GIFbites exhibition, May 30th-June 6.