At the moment, there is an abundance of scarcity. Companies complain that there are shortages of semiconductors, lumber, steel, plastics, chemicals, and other inputs and raw materials. The pandemic disrupted many international supply chains.

Astrangia. Credit: Stephen Cairns et al. An illustrated key to the genera and subgenera of the Recent azooxanthellate Scleractinia (Cnidaria, Anthozoa), with an attached glossary, ZooKeys (2012). DOI: 10.3897/zookeys.227.3612. Creative Commons Attribution 3.

A surgeon and his assistant wheel a bed with a panda on it into the operating room of a large hospital in Sweden. This is not a flesh-and-blood panda, however, but a mechanical toy. With great concentration, the surgeon starts to operate, painstakingly removing layer after layer of the furry covering followed by the soft filling. While the surgeon searches for the plastic core in the operational innards, the panda doggedly resists its deconstruction. The noises it emits sound more animal than machine-made, reinforcing the absurd nature of this clash between a living being and a machine. The film's calm, serious, observational style invites us to consider a number of current cultural issues. What is the difference between man and the technology he designs? To what extent are our flesh-and-blood bodies becoming technological bodies? And if, at some point in the future, we all have a technological body, will the operations of the future be like this one, on this pitiably whimpering panda? These are questions artist Tove Kjellmark also addresses in her other work./IDFACast: Tove KjellmarkTags: naked, skinned, art, sculture, toy, toys, panda, operation, another nature and idfa

Mandy Barker, Ophelia medustica. Specimen collected from Glounthaune shoreline, Cove of Cork, Ireland, (Pram wheel), 2015. Series: Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals, 2015 In 1816, John Vaughan Thompson was posted to Cork in Ireland as an army Surgeon.

Fatbergs, the congealed mass of fat and discarded items that are increasingly blocking Britain’s sewers, are the consequence of the plastic crisis in Britain and contain potentially deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria, tests show.

Embracing plastic and the apocalypse: An interview with Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke

additivism is the bastard of these two visions. It conjures nightmares of toxic machines churning out guns, drugs, counterfeit cash and meaningless trash ad libitum. It also take its cue from additive manufacturing technology itself and suggests that small scale, cumulative actions have the potential to bring about bigger, more complex realities.

“ Ido plan to bring back my father,” Ray Kurzweil says. He is standing in the anemic light of a storage unit, his frame dwarfed by towers of cardboard boxes and oblong plastic bins. He wears tinted eyeglasses.

I just came back from two jam packed weeks at Transmediale festival, 2017. Morehshin Allahyari and I were involved in a wealth of events, mostly in relation to our #Additivism project. Including: On the Far Side of the Marchlands: an exhibition at Schering Stiftung gallery, featuring work by Catherine Disney, Keeley Haftner, Brittany Ransom, Morehshin and myself.

Photos from the event are gathered here.

The 3D Additivist Cookbook european launch: held at Transmediale on Saturday 4th Feb.

Audio of the event is available here.

Singularities: a panel and discussion conceived and introduced by Morehshin and myself. Featuring Luiza Prado & Pedro Oliveira (A parede), Rasheedah Phillips, and Dorothy R. Santos.

Audio of the entire panel is available here. The introduction to the panel – written by Morehshin and myself – can be found below. Photos from the panel are here.

Alien Matter exhibition: curated by Inke Arns as part of Transmediale 2017. Featuring The 3D Additivist Cookbook and works by Joey Holder, Dov Ganchrow, and Kuang-Yi Ku.

Photos from the exhibition can be found here.

Singularities Panel delivered at Transmediale, Sunday 5th February 2017 Introduction by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke   Morehshin: In 1979, the Iranian Islamic revolution resulted in the overthrowing of the Pahlavi deen-as-ty and led to the establishment of an Islamic republic. Many different organizations, parties and guerrilla groups were involved in the Iranian Revolution. Some groups were created after the fall of Pahlavi and still survive in Iran; others helped overthrow the Shah but no longer exist. Much of Iranian society was hopeful about the coming revolution. Secular and leftist politicians participated in the movement to gain power in the aftermath, believing that Khomeini would support their voice and allow multiple positions and parties to be active and involved in the shaping of the post-revolution Iran. Like my mother – a Marxist at the time – would always say: The Iranian revolution brought sudden change, death, violence in unforeseen ways. It was a point, a very fast point of collapse and rise. The revolution spun out of control and the country was taken over by Islamists so fast that people weren’t able to react to it; to slow it; or even to understand it. The future was now in the hands of a single party with a single vision that would change the lives of generations of Iranians, including myself, in the years that followed. We were forced and expected to live in one singular reality. A mono authoritarian singularity. In physics, a singularity is a point in space and time of such incredible density that the very nature of reality is brought into question. Associated with elusive black holes and the alien particles that bubble out of the quantum foam at their event horizon, the term ‘singularity’ has also been co-opted by cultural theorists and techno-utopianists to describe moments of profound social, political, ontological or material transformation. The coming-into-being of new worlds that redefine their own origins. For mathematicians and physicists, singularities are often considered as ‘bad behaviour’ in the numbers and calculations. Infinite points may signal weird behaviours existing ‘in’ the physical world: things outside or beyond our ability to comprehend. Or perhaps, more interestingly, a singularity may expose the need for an entirely new physics. Some anomalies can only be made sense of by drafting a radically new model of the physical world to include them. For this panel we consider ‘bad behaviours’ in social, technological and ontological singularities. Moments of profound change triggered by a combination of technological shifts, cultural mutations, or unforeseen political dramas and events. Like the physicists who comprehend singularities in the physical world, we do not know whether the singularities our panelists highlight today tell us something profound about the world itself, or force us to question the model we have of the world or worlds. Daniel: As well as technological or socio-political singularities, this panel will question the ever narcissistic singularities of ‘I’, ‘here’ and ‘now’ – confounding the principles of human universality upon which these suppositions are based. We propose ‘singularities’ as eccentric and elusive figures in need of collective attention. It is no coincidence that ‘Singularity’ is often used as a term to indicate human finitude. Self-same subjects existing at particular points in time, embedded within particular contexts, told through a singular history or single potential future. The metaphor of the transformative Singularity signals not one reality ‘to come’, nor even two realities – one moved from and one towards – but of many, all dependant on who the subject of the singularity is and how much autonomy they are ascribed. The ‘Technological’ Singularity is a myth of the ‘transhumanists’, a group of mainly Western, commonly white, male enthusiasts, who ascribe to the collective belief that technology will help them to become ‘more than human’… ‘possessed of drastically augmented intellects, memories, and physical powers.’ As technological change accelerates, according to prominent Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil, so it pulls us upwards in its wake. Kurzweil argues that as the curve of change reaches an infinite gradient reality itself will be brought into question: like a Black Hole in space-time subjects travelling toward this spike will find it impossible to turn around, to escape its pull. A transformed post-human reality awaits us on the other side of the Technological Singularity. A reality Kurzweil and his ilk believe ‘we’ will inevitably pass into in the coming decades. In a 2007 paper entitled ‘Droppin’ Science Fiction’, Darryl A. Smith explores the metaphor of the singularity through Afro-American and Afrofuturist science fiction. He notes that the metaphor of runaway change positions those subject to it in the place of Sisyphus, the figure of Greek myth condemned to push a stone up a hill forever. For Sisyphus to progress he has to fight gravity as it conspires with the stone to pull him back to the bottom of the slope. The singularity in much science fiction from black and afro-american authors focusses on this potential fall, rather than the ascent:

“Here, in the geometrics of spacetime, the Spike lies not at the highest point on an infinite curve but at the lowest… Far from being the shift into a posthumanity, the Negative Spike is understood… as an infinite collapsing and, thus, negation of reality. Escape from such a region thus requires an opposing infinite movement.”

The image of a collective ‘push’ of the stone of progress up the slope necessarily posits a universal human subject, resisting the pull of gravity back down the slope. A universal human subject who passes victorious to the other side of the event horizon. But as history has shown us, technological, social and political singularities – arriving with little warning – often split the world into those inside and those outside their event horizons. Singularities like the 1979 Iranian revolution left many more on the outside of the Negative Spike, than the inside. Singularities such as the Industrial Revolution, which is retrospectively told in the West as a tale of imperial and technological triumph, rather than as a story of those who were violently abducted from their homelands, and made to toil and die in fields of cotton and sugarcane. The acceleration toward and away from that singularity brought about a Negative Spike so dense, that many millions of people alive today still find their identities subject to its social and ontological mass. In their recent definition of The Anthropocene, the International Commission on Stratigraphy named the Golden Spike after World War II as the official signal of the human-centric geological epoch. A series of converging events marked in the geological record around the same time: the detonation of the first nuclear warhead; the proliferation of synthetic plastic from crude oil constituents; and the introduction of large scale, industrialised farming practices, noted by the appearance of trillions of discarded chicken bones in the geological record. Will the early 21st century be remembered for the 9/11 terrorist event? The introduction of the iPhone, and Twitter? Or for the presidency of Donald J Trump? Or will each of these extraordinary events be considered as part of a single, larger shift in global power and techno-mediated autonomy? If ‘we’ are to rebuild ourselves through stronger unities, and collective actions in the wake of recent political upheavals, will ‘we’ also forego the need to recognise the different subjectivities and distinct realities that bubble out of each singularity’s wake? As the iPhone event sent shockwaves through the socio-technical cultures of the West, so the rare earth minerals required to power those iPhones were pushed skywards in value, forcing more bodies into pits in the ground to mine them. As we gather at Transmediale to consider ai, infrastructural, data, robotic, or cyborgian revolutions, what truly remains ‘elusive’ is a definition of ‘the human’ that does justice to the complex array of subjectivities destined to be impacted – and even crafted anew – by each of these advances. In his recent text on the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster Jean-Luc Nancy proposes instilling “the condition of an ever-renewed present” into the urgent design and creation of new, mobile futures. In this proposition Nancy recognises that each singularity is equal to all others in its finitude; an equivalence he defines as “the essence of community.” To contend with the idea of singularities – plural – of ruptures as such, we must share together that which will forever remain unimaginable alone. Morehshin: This appeal to a plurality of singularities is easily mistaken for the kinds of large scale collective action we have seen in recent years around the world. From the Arab Springs, and Occupy Movement through to the recent Women’s March, which took place not 24 hours after the inauguration of Donald Trump. These events in particular spoke of a universal drive, a collective of people’s united against a single cause. Much has been written about the ‘human microphone’ technique utilized by Occupy protesters to amplify the voice of a speaker when megaphones and loud speakers were banned or unavailable. We wonder whether rather than speak as a single voice we should seek to emphasise the different singularities enabled by different voices, different minds; distinct votes and protestations. We wonder whether black and brown protestors gathered in similar numbers, with similar appeals to their collective unity and identity would have been portrayed very differently by the media. Whether the radical white women and population that united for the march would also show up to the next black lives matter or Muslim ban protests. These are not just some academic questions but an actual personal concern… what is collectivism and for who does the collective function? When we talk about futures and worlds and singularities, whose realities are we talking about? Who is going to go to Mars with Elon Musk? And who will be left? As we put this panel together, in the last weeks, our Manifesto’s apocalyptic vision of a world accelerated to breaking point by technological progress began to seem strangely comforting compared to the delirious political landscape we saw emerging before us. Whether you believe political mele-ee-ze, media delirium, or the inevitable implosion of the neo-liberal project is to blame for the rise of figures like Farage, Trump or – in the Philippines – the outspoken President Rodrigo Duterte, the promises these figures make of an absolute shift in the conditions of power, appear grand precisely because they choose to demonize the discrete differences of minority groups, or attempt to overturn truths that might fragment and disturb their all-encompassing narratives. Daniel: The appeal to inclusivity – in virtue of a shared political identity – often instates those of ‘normal’ body, race, sex, or genome as exclusive harbingers of the-change-which-should – or so we are told, will – come. A process that theorist Rosi Braidotti refers to as a ‘dialectics of otherness’ which subtly disguises difference, in celebration of a collective voice of will or governance. Morehshin: Last week on January 27, as part of a plan to keep out “Islamic terrorists” outside of the United States Trump signed an order, that suspended entry for citizens of seven countries for 90 days. This includes Iran, the country I am a citizen of. I have lived in the U.S. for 9 years and hold a green-card which was included in Trump’s ban and now is being reviewed case by case for each person who enters the U.S.. When the news came out, I was already in Berlin for Transmediale and wasn’t sure whether I had a home to go back to. Although the chaos of Trump’s announcement has now settled, and my own status as a resident of America appears a bit more clear for now, the ripples of emotion and uncertainty from last week have coloured my experience at this festival. As I have sat through panels and talks in the last 3 days, and as I stand here introducing this panel about elusive events, potential futures and the in betweenness of all profound technological singularities… the realities that feel most significant to me are yet to take place in the lives of so many Middle-Easterners and Muslims affected by Trump’s ban. How does one imagine/re-imagine/figure/re-figure the future when there are still so many ‘presents’ existing in conflict? I grew up in Iran for 23 years, where science fiction didn’t really exist as a genre in popular culture. I always think we were discouraged to imagine the future other than how it was ‘imagined’ for us. Science-fiction as a genre flourishes in the West… But I still struggle with the kinds of futures we seem most comfortable imagining. THANKS   We now want to hand over to our fantastic panelists, to highlight their voices, and build harmonies and dissonances with our own. We are extremely honoured to introduce them: Dorothy Santos is a Filipina-American writer, editor, curator, and educator. She has written and spoken on a wide variety of subjects, including art, activism, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology. She is managing editor of Hyphen Magazine, and a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts fellow, where she is researching the concept of citizenship. Her talk today is entitled Machines and Materiality: Speculations of Future Biology and the Human Body. Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliveira are Brazilian design researchers, who very recently wrapped up their PhDs at the University of the Arts Berlin. Under the ‘A Parede’ alias, the duo researches new design methodologies, processes, and pedagogies for an onto-epistemological decolonization of the field. In their joint talk and performance, Luiza and Pedro will explore the tensions around hyperdense gravitational pulls and acts of resistance. With particular focus on the so-called “non-lethal” bombs – teargas and stun grenades – manufactured in Brazil, and exported and deployed all around the world. Rasheedah Phillips is creative director of Afrofuturist Affair: a community formed to celebrate, strengthen, and promote Afrofuturistic and Sci-Fi concepts and culture. In her work with ‘Black Quantum Futurism’, Rasheedah derives facets, tenets, and qualities from quantum physics, futurist traditions, and Black/African cultural traditions to celebrate the ability of African-descended people to see “into,” choose, or create the impending future. In her talk today, Rasheedah will explore the history of linear time constructs, notions of the future, and alternative theories of temporal-spatial consciousness.      

A selection of works from The 3D Additivist Cookbook were printed in issue 11 of Exhibist Magazine, including my essay Becoming Horror in The Plasticene. The magazine published in Turkey features interviews with media theorist and curator Ebru Yetişkin and Kristoffer Gansing, artistic director of transmediale festival. The current issue includes an essay by Ceylan Önalp titled ‘A Journey Through Time in Turkey’s New Media Art Scene’ featuring Ayşe Gül Süter, Ebru Kurbak, Can Büyükberber and Nihat Karataşlı and a selection of texts and projects from ‘The 3D Additivist Cookbook’ edited by Daniel Rourke and Morehshin Allahyari: Daniel Rourke’s ‘Becoming Horror in The Plasticene’; A Parede’s ‘Cheat Sheet for a Non- (or Less-) Colonialist Speculative Design’; Marija Bozinovska Jones + IYDES’ ‘Echoes of Earth: The Rocks of Us’; Symrin Chawla’s ‘Blood Bath’ curated by Browntourage for the 3D Additivist Cookbook The magazine introduces established artists working in the field of new media from Turkey such as Ali Miharbi, Erdal Inci, NOHlab, Pınar Yoldaş, Burak Arıkan and Refik Anadol and the work of artists and collectives such as Memo Akten, Selçuk Artut, Büşra Tunç, Ouchhh, DECOL, Iskele47, Osman Koç, Bager Akbay, Zeynep Nal Sezer, Uğur Engin Deniz, Epitome and Ozan Türkkan.

Interviews EVER ELUSIVE – A POST-DIGITAL INSTITUTION Tuce Erel talks to Kristoffer Gansing < Force Quit > + < Esc > = [ New Media Art ] Mine Kaplangı talks to Ebru Yetişkin Essays A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME IN TURKEY’S NEW MEDIA ART SCENE by Ceylan Önalp A SELECTION FROM THE 3D ADDITIVIST COOKBOOK Daniel Rourke, ‘Becoming Horror in The Plasticene’ A Parede, ‘Cheat Sheet for a Non- (or Less-) Colonialist Speculative Design’ Marija Bozinovska Jones + IYDES, ‘Echoes of Earth: The Rocks of Us’ Symrin Chawla, ‘Blood Bath’ curated by Browntourage for the 3D Additivist Cookbook

Giant collection of fishing nets, plastic containers and other discarded items called a ‘ticking time bomb’ as large items crumble into micro plastics 13.02 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 4 October 2016 13.

Additivism Talk at Spike Island, Bristol (11th July 2016)On July 11th at Spike Island, Bristol, Daniel Rourke will present his ongoing collaboration with Morehshin Allahyari: The 3D Additivist Manifesto and forthcoming Cookbook. A call to push 3D printing and additive technologies to their absolute limits and beyond, into the realm of the speculative, the provocative and the weird.Drawing metaphoric connections between Additive manufacturing and Geological processes, Daniel will talk about plastic, deep time and the incidental production of ‘pseudomorphs’ – destined to outlast the humans that create them.“The fate of ‘man’ in the Anthropocene is not that he will be erased, but that he will be made immortal, as a trace preserved forever in the rock.”- Bronislaw Szerszynski, The End of the End of Nature: The Anthropocene and the Fate of the Human, (2012) Book your place!This event is part of Point Line Time, a drawing research project led by artist and writer Tamarin Norwood as part of her twelve-month residency at Spike Island, Bristol. Throughout her residency, Norwood is working with a network of researchers and practitioners including an animator, a 3D print engineer, a choreographer and a sign language translator to explore the acts of drawing and writing in relation to time and three-dimensional space. She hosts a series of public conversations, presentations and live experiments as she develops a new body of work.

The things we create define us, as a culture and as a species. Yet, so often, as we hurtle into the future, our creations seem to take on a life of their own.

More than Human: From the Politics of Plastics to Shifting our Species Into the UnknownWilla Köerner edited an issue of ART21 Magazine on the subject of Renewal. She interviewed us about #Additivism, asking the right kind of questions about what comes next:The things we create define us, as a culture and as a species. Yet, so often, as we hurtle into the future, our creations seem to take on a life of their own. For just over a year, the artist Morehshin Allahyari has partnered with the writer Daniel Rourke on a project that grapples with this conundrum in such a mind-expanding way that, after speaking with the pair about their work, my brain was reeling. This is a story of two people who, while working to explore the nuances and politics of a new creative medium, have found themselves entangled with a philosophical conundrum: What does it mean to be more than human?↪ Read the entire article here

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY Q&A with Heather Davis, #Additivism and Katrina Burch 28 February 2016 - De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, the NetherlandsCast: Sonic Acts

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY Heather Davis: The Queer Futurity of Plastic 28 February 2016 - De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, the Netherlands --- Plastic is often thought of as a malleable material; its metaphorical connotation, plasticity, implies movement and shape shifting. However, plastic is actually one of the most durable compounds on earth and its presence is reshaping the ecosystems that it proliferates within. For many animals, chemical plasticisers – most infamously Bisphenol A (or BPA) – mimic natural hormones, rendering us less and less fertile. Plastic is also becoming the anthropogenic substrate of a whole new ecology of viruses and bacteria, termed the plastisphere. Plastic, and its associated plasticisers, are among the many anthropogenic compounds that are heralding-in an increasingly infertile future, or a future filled with strange new life forms. While this forecast is certainly horrific, what might queer theory, disability studies, and theoretical approaches to the notion of toxicity teach us? In other words, if instead of running from these toxic and infertile futures, as Mel Chen, Claire Colebrook and others suggest, what might we learn if we began to embrace the nonfilial progeny that plastic, and the plastisphere, might produce?Cast: Sonic Acts

According to a new study, humankind is now entering the “Age of Plastic”. The research investigates the evidence that we are living in the Anthropocene, a time in which humanity is the main geological force.

“Your Shiny Plastic Future Is a Load of Crap”: #Additivism interviewed for HyperallergicGretta Louw interviewed us for Hyperallergic:It was hugely important to us that the manifesto undermine the position from which it is situated. We tried to show the limits and contradictions in our own thinking. The manifesto performs a critique of itself through irony, contradiction, and self-ridicule. The language of the manifesto breaks down and degrades, just like any system accelerated to its limits. Andrea Young’s amazing sound design for the video was also paramount in performing that quality.But I’m going to try to answer your question from more of a perspective of personal experience. One of the things that I have thought about the most in the last couple of years is the new potentials of species-being that new technologies facilitate. As a woman from the Middle East, I interact with a heteropatriarchy, capitalist, colonialist world, and so much of that experience creates a certain kind of alienation that is unique to my very personal/political experience. I deeply connect with a sentence in the Xenofeminism Manifesto — “If nature is unjust; change nature” — and Donna Haraway’s command to “Make Kin Not Babies!” For me, these two are about many things from the past that I want to resist and rebuild. With #Additivism, we want to explore ways of turning alienation into expressions of power.↪ Read the full interview here

Future archeologists aren’t just going to be digging up old bones: Looks like they’re also going to be sifting though old fossilized plastics. For years, scientists have questioned whether or not we’ve entered a new geological timeframe directly impacted by human activity.

Kelly Jazvac, “Plastiglomerate Samples” (2013), plastic and beach sediment, including sand, basalt rock, wood and coral. All of these found-object artworks are the results of a collaboration between Jazvac, geologist Patricia Corcoran, and oceanographer Charles Moore.