Goldsmiths College Department of Art MFA Lectures 2018 - 2019

Series 1.1: Offence is the Best Defence: On the Success of Social Media Toxicity

8 Oct 2018 — Daniel Rourke (Goldsmiths): “We're trying to have the non-weird future get here as fast as possible.” 15 Oct 2018 — Isobelle Clarke (Birmingham): "Poor little snowflake, are you 'grossly' offended?": Quantifying Communicative Styles of Twitter Trolling 22 Oct 2018 — Zeena Feldman (Kings College, London): Beyond Time: On Quitting Social Media 29 Oct 2018 — William Davies (Goldsmiths): War of Words: Embodiment and Rhetoric in Online Combat

Daniel Rourke 8th October 2018 “We're trying to have the non-weird future get here as fast as possible.”

From the Latin ‘aequivocare’, for ‘called by the same name’, to equivocate is to use language ambiguously to conceal a truth or avoid commitment to a single meaning. In this talk Daniel Rourke will consider equivocation in the performative (social media) speech acts of figures such as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

How their speech acts exposit a 'shared' future, or a means of ‘escaping’ our present conditions, has much to tell us about how the very idea of the ‘true’ or the ‘false’ has shifted in the era of algorithmic governance, and social media campaigns such as #MeToo.

Turning to Homi K. Bhabha's theories of postcolonial discourse, as well as introducing the project The 3D Additivist Manifesto – co-created with Morehshin Allahyari – Daniel will end by trying to reaffirm the equivocal act, pointing out a way to generate and move toward non-determinate futures without imperialising them.

BIO: Dr. Daniel Rourke is a writer/artist and co-convener of Digital Media (MA) at Goldsmiths. In his work Daniel creates collaborative frameworks and theoretical toolsets for exploring the intersection of digital materiality, the arts, and posthumanism. These frameworks often hinge on speculative elements taken from science fiction and pop culture: fictional figures and fabulations that might offer a glimpse of a radical ‘outside’ to the human(ities). His writing and artistic profile includes work with AND Festival, The V&A, FACT Liverpool, Arebyte gallery, Centre Pompidou, Transmediale, Tate Modern, Sonic Acts Festival, as well as recent artistic collaborations with a cast of hundreds... web: machinemachine.net.

Presented by the Art Department, Goldsmiths.

Casting Code: Reflections on 3D Printing Blog The letterhead of Henri Lebossé announces that his firm uses a ‘mathematically perfected process’ and a ‘special machine’ for ‘reducing and enlarging objects of “art and industry”’.

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.

Singularities panel, Transmediale (5th Feb 2017)The video of our #Singularities panel at Transmediale is now online:Featuring the extraordinary talents of Luiza Prado & Pedro Oliveira (A parede), Rasheedah Phillips, and Dorothy R. Santos speaking (and performing) on refiguring techno-colonialist and heteronormative pasts, presents, futures and identities.The introduction to the panel - written by Morehshin and myself - can be found here. Photos from the panel are here.Stick around for the discussion and Q&A

On the Far Side of the Marchlands, Berlin (Feb 1st - March 26th)Exhibition opening Wednesday, February 1st (opening from 6pm) - March 26thErnst Schering Foundation> Facebook Event Page>

More info: additivism.org/marchlands

with works by Morehshin Allahyari, Cathrine Disney, Keeley Haftner, Brittany Ransom and Daniel Rourke

A ‘marchland’ is a medieval term for a space between two or more realms; a zone betwixt the control of states, in which alternate rules of law and conduct might apply. On the Far Side of the Marchlands explores the potential of radically new topographies – “intertwined histories and overlapping territories” – composed of hybrid realms of experience, culture and materiality.

On the Far Side of the Marchlands - an exhibition and collaboration between Morehshin Allahyari, Cathrine Disney, Keeley Haftner, Brittany Ransom, and Daniel Rourke - speaks to the contemporary desire for transformation. The exhibition features a zoo of hybrid figures: from stupid/intelligent insects to short-sighted/forward-thinking posthumans; from chimera materials that ooze, respire and transmute, to murky politics impossible to clarify as either positive or negative. On the Far Side of the Marchlands expands on the material and conceptual hybridity expressed in The 3D Additivist Cookbook: a compendium of provocative projects by over one hundred artists, activists, and theorists concerned with ‘Additivist’ practices. The exhibition and Cookbook invite visitors to look beyond boundaries, speaking to a growing need for radical forms of transformation.The 3D Additivist Cookbook, conceived and edited by Daniel Rourke & Morehshin Allahyari, is also presented in the exhibition alien matter (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2 February – 5 March 2017), curated by Inke Arns. On the Far Side of the Marchlands is a partner exhibition to the special exhibition alien matter, co-financed by Berlin LOTTO Foundation within the scope of ever elusive – thirty years of transmediale, supported by the British Council.

Additivism at Transmediale 2017Some details about #Additivism events coming up in Berlin as part of Transmediale Festival, 2017:On the Far Side of the Marchlands Wednesday, February 1st (opening from 6pm) - March 26thErnst Schering Foundation

with works by Morehshin Allahyari, Cathrine Disney, Keeley Haftner, Britt Ransom and Daniel Rourke

ever elusive - thirty years of transmedialeThursday, February 2nd (opening 7pm) - February 5thHouse of World Culturesalien matter (exhibition)

Thursday, February 2nd (opening 7pm) - March 3rd  House of World Culturesfeat. (#Additivism Cookbook) works by Joey Holder, Kuang-Yi Ku, Ami Drach and Dov Ganchrow3D Additivist Cookbook LaunchSaturday, February 4th, 6pmHouse of World Cultureswith Morehshin Allahyari, Miriam Rasch, Daniel Rourke, and invited Cookbook participantsSingularities (panel)Sunday, February 5th, 12pmHouse of World Cultureswith Morehshin Allahyari, Daniel Rourke, Dorothy Santos, Rasheedah Phillips, Luiza Prado & Pedro Oliveira (A Parede)Hope to see all your beautiful faces

The 3D Additivist Cookbook is out now…

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.

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

The 3D Additivist Manifesto at HMKV, Dortmund (May 2016)In the series HMKV Video of the Month, HMKV presents current video works by international artists for the duration of one month each. In May 2016 we are presenting The 3D Additivist Manifesto by Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke.Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel RourkeThe 3D Additivist Manifesto (Das 3D-Additivistische Manifest)Video, 2015, 10:11 Min.Almost 100 years after its publication Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke are updating the Futurist Manifesto (1909) by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in a dark but appropriate way.

Accelerationist ArtDespite its image of rapid technological change, progress under capitalism has stalled. Spinning ever faster is not the same as going somewhere. Contemporary Accelerationism wants to take off the brakes, and it is enlisting art’s help to do so……Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke have produced the Additivist Manifesto for art in the Anthropocene (the video for it features the “Urinal” 3D printable model I commissioned from Chris Webber). They “…call for you to accelerate the 3D printer and other technologies to their absolute limits and beyond into the realm of the speculative, the provocative and the weird”. This is the kind of acceleration through (and into) art that works as both epistemic and left accelerationism without merely illustrating the program of or being instrumentalised by either. It is accelerated critical theory.

»Wir haben die Möglichkeit, Dinge auferstehen zu lassen« Warum tut es vielen Menschen fast körperlich weh zu sehen, wie Terroristen auf Statuen mit dem Vorschlaghammer einhauen? Weil diese Kunstwerke die Geschichte und Kultur von 3000 Jahren Zivilisation repräsentieren.

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY #Additivism: An Encounter with The Fluid Outside 28 February 2016 - De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, the Netherlands --- A talk and Q&A session by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke about The 3D Additivist Manifesto + The 3D Additivist Cookbook and the artist’s own research and practice in relationship to #Additivism, activism, and critical/poetic approaches to 3D printing. #Additivism is a collaboration between artist and activist Morehshin Allahyari and writer/artist/academic Daniel Rourke. In March 2015 they released The 3D Additivist Manifesto: a call to push additive manufacturing technologies to their absolute limits and beyond, into the realm of the speculative, the provocative and the weird. They then issued a call for submissions for a radical ‘Cookbook‘ of blueprints, designs, 3D print templates, and essays on the topics raised by their Manifesto including text and projects on environmental ethics, objects in movements for social and political change, the renewed contemporary significance of the artist manifesto by the likes of the Accelerationist and Xenofeminist movements, and the potential of radical intervention in contemporary technocapitalism.Cast: Sonic Acts

From 26 - 28 February the first edition of Sonic Acts Academy took place in Amsterdam. For this three-day event artists, theorists, and scientists were invited to expand on their research through lectures, concerts, film programmes, work presentations, masterclasses and workshops. The Academy relates to topics that are connected to the ‘dark matter’ theme Sonic Acts is currently investigating with its projects such as Dark Ecology and The Geologic Imagination, informed by the realisation that we live in the Anthropocene, and questioning how this forces us to rethink concepts of nature, culture, technology, and ecology. The opening took place at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam with performances by Thomas Ankersmit, Okkyung Lee, and others. The programme at de Brakke Grond featured lectures and presentations by Susan Schuppli, Louis Henderson, Heather Davis and others, and the performance and club night at Paradiso featured Lotic, M.E.S.H., Nkisi, and many others. sonicacts.com/2016Cast: Sonic ActsTags: Sonic Acts Academy

“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

This stunning essay, written by Alexis Anais and Anna Khachiyan, accompanies Morehshin Allahyari’s Material Speculation exhibition, at Trinity Square Video, Toronto: As ISIS has shown, the potential futures that digital technology promises to provoke almost always teeter on the ethically ambiguous—trapped in a crossfire of discourses that vary depending on who’s doing the talking…Allahyari’s work refuses to accept this hypocrisy, which seem to ignore the many number of intimidations put forth by the West. She recognizes that what has traditionally been considered public history is often made vulnerable, subject to possession by organized violence and radical politicking, in which both sides are equally implicated…The concept of 3D printing as symbolic of corporeality and mortality is defined in the Manifesto as “infatuation,” following the idea that the human body desires a cyborgian evolution. ↪ Read the full essay here

Additivism talk for Disnovation Panel at Transmediale, (4th Feb 2016)Daniel Rourke talked about deep time, horror, crap, ‘The Weird’ and The Radical at Transmediale festival, Berlin.

The talk was part of the Disnovation Research panel, featuring Jean-Marie Boyer, Ewen Chardronnet, Nicolas Maigret, Erin Sexton, and moderated by Ryan Bishop, with reflections on the work of #Additivism co-creator Morehshin Allahyari. ↪ Listen to the talk and follow the slides here.

Additivism selected for Vilém Flusser Residency Program for Artistic Research 2016

We are extremely excited to announce that our project #Additivism was accepted as recipient of the Vilém Flusser Residency Program for Artistic Research 2016. You can read the jury statement here:Morehshin Allahyari’s and Daniel Rourke’s project #Additivism sets in motion a critical approach towards 3d-printing as a technology which is all too often subsumed into the hype factor of “maker culture”. The project of additivism is a timely response to the (post-)anthropocene age where the originary agency of human creation is being called into question both by machinic automation and environmental crisis. As a bastard methodology located somewhere between accelerationism and subversion, it brings together art, design, and engineering in a radical mixture that aims at nothing less than writing the world anew. This approach that enables a concretion of the algorithmic abstraction of 3D printing resonates strongly with Vilém Flusser’s thinking on the technical image. [Read Full Statement]The residency program is a cooperation between the Vilém Flusser Archive at the Berlin University of Arts (UdK) and Transmediale, festival for art and digital culture Berlin.Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke will be in residence in Berlin through May and June of 2016 working closely on The 3D Additivist Cookbook and a related series of workshops and events.