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.

Sight + Sound Festival - Eastern Bloc, Montreal, September 27thUnder the theme [Non-Compliant Futures], Sight + Sound festival 2017 will perform an autopsy of the grand narrative of innovation, the very one which promised us a radiant future dependent upon hyperconsumption, techno-positivism, digital colonialism, and the myth of infinite growth. With over thirty international guests, the festival program, curated by Disnovation.org, will question the standardized imaginaries of the future and highlight intersecting paths and strategies that aim to reveal, perturb, and pervert the cult of innovation.Following on from the gospel of progress, evolution, and growth from centuries past, today’s vocabulary of innovation and disruption are rhetorical instruments par excellence. They flood the dominant discourse of our times, flowing from the political arena into the fields of labour, education, and art. Meanwhile, in periphery to the daily onslaught of techno-solutionist propaganda, numerous critical, alternative, deviant, and speculative practices are (re)emerging globally. They pave the way to a critical and grassroots reappropriation of the possibilities envisioned by our technological society.Sight + Sound 2017 calls to break free from a linear notion of progress and, rather, re-introduce concepts such as degrowth and maintainability to the core of our vision of the future. It is also an invitation to embrace our alien-becoming, which we are already collectively enduring with the whole of human and non-human life.Together with artists, activists, performers, and theorists, NON-COMPLIANT FUTURES inhabits this tsunami of capitalism and human action by populating it with a host of artistic alternatives — rather unlikely but preferable possibilities that will act as the basis to broader debate and critical projections into the future.

The 3D Additivist Cookbook is out now…

Exhibition: The World Without Us. Narratives on the age of non-human actors (22nd Oct 2016 - 5th March 2017) The 3D Additivist Manifesto is part of ‘The World Without Us’ exhibition, currently open at HMKV Dortmund:In „The World Without Us“ humans will be replaced by machines, Artificial Intelligences will be optimized by other AIs and algorithms will be programmed by self-learning algorithms. In this way a radically different, post-anthropocentric world could develop where non-human life forms would eventually prove to be better adaptable than humans.

Screening of 3D Additivist Manifesto at Speeding and Braking conference, Goldsmiths (13th May)The 3D Additivist Manifesto will be screened on Friday 13th May as part of the Speeding and Braking: navigating Acceleration conference, at Goldsmiths, London.Watch the screening and Q&A online at 18.15 - 21.00 The conference Speeding and Braking: Navigating Acceleration explores the material and phenomenological consequences of both accelerations and decelerations, as well as the aesthetic strategies afforded or precluded by them. It is concerned with the material inscription, practical harnessing and social experience of varying speeds, from the perspective of contrasting temporalities. Particular emphasis is placed on transversal approaches reading across, and drawing into dialogue, seemingly incompossible positions within the fields of sonic and visual arts, cultural and critical theory, and media and communications.

Additivism on Disnovation Research panel @ Transmediale, Berlin (4th Feb 2016)#Additivism will be part of the Disnovation Research Panel at the upcoming Transmediale Festival. Disnovation Research is a project by Nicolas Maigret inquiring into the mechanics and rhetoric of innovation. Considering the “propaganda of innovation” as one of the ideological driving forces of our era, it aims to explore the notions of technological fetishism and solutionism through speculations and diversions by artists and thinkers. The Disnovation panel will highlight a few outstanding projects on this issue, with Daniel Rourke introducing the #Additivism speculative research project – a collaboration with artist and activist Morehshin

Allahyari – followed by Ewen Chardronnet presenting the fifth issue of the Laboratory Planet newspaper.

We will be at TRANSFER Gallery, Brooklyn, on Thursday April 16th, 2015 - IN THE FLESH - to present The 3D Additivist Manifesto, including its 1080p World Premiere.

Invite yourself and ALL humans at our:Facebook Event Page

We hope you can attend!

I am privileged to be involved in Ways of Something: an incredible collaboration between artist Lorna Mills and (currently) 85 artists. Episode 3 will have its World Premiere at The Photographer’s Gallery, London, on February 12th 2015. 85 web-based artists remake John Berger’s historic documentary ‘Ways of Seeing’ (1972) one minute at a time. Originally commissioned by The One Minutes, at Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam and compiled by Lorna Mills, the episodes present a sequence of 3D renderings, filmic remixes, videos and webcam performances which subvert the tropes of art history in an entertaining and overwhelming way. Followed by a Q&A between Julia van Mourik, director of The One Minutes and Lorna Mills via Skype.

Artists in Episode 1 1: Daniel Temkin, 2: Rollin Leonard, 3: Sara Ludy, 4: Rhett Jones, 5: Jaakko Pallasvuo, 6: Dafna Ganani, 7: Jennifer Chan, 8: Rea McNamara, 9: Theodore Darst, 10: Matthew Williamson, 11: Hector Llanquin, 12: Christina Entcheva, 13: V5MT, 14: Marisa Olson, 15: Joe McKay, 16: Carla Gannis, 17: Nicholas O’Brien, 18: Eva Papamargariti, 19: Rosa Menkman, 20: Kristin Lucas, 21: Jeremy Bailey & Kristen D. Schaffer, 22: Giselle Zatonyl, 23: Paul Wong, 24: Alfredo Salazar-Caro, 25: Sally McKay, 26: RM Vaughan & Keith Cole, 27: Andrew Benson, 28: Christian Petersen, 29: Faith Holland, 30: Jennifer McMackon Artists in Episode 2 1: Kevin Heckart, 2: Geraldine Juarez, 3: Gaby Cepeda, 4: Angela Washko, 5: Emilie Gervais, 6: LaTurbo Avedon, 7: Lyla Rye, 8: Mattie Hillock, 9: Antonio Roberts, 10: Georges Jacotey, 11: Daniel Rourke, 12: Sandra Rechico & Annie Onyi Cheung, 13: Yoshi Sodeoka, 14: Alma Alloro, 15: LoVid, 16: Andrea Crespo, 17: Ad Minoliti, 18: Arjun Ram Srivatsa, 19: Carrie Gates, 20: Isabella Streffen, 21: Esteban Ottaso, 22: ZIL & ZOY, 23: Hyo Myoung Kim, 24: Jesse Darling, 25: Tristan Stevens, 26: Erica Lapadat-Janzen, 27: Claudia Hart, 28: Anthony Antonellis Artists in Episode 3 1: Carine Santi-Weil, 2: Nicolas Sassoon, 3: Tom Sherman, 4: Kim Asendorf and Ole Fach, 5: Rafaela Kino, 6: Alex McLeod, 7: Kate Wilson and Lynne Slater, 8: Aleksandra Domanović, 9: Systaime, 10: Erik Zepka, 11: Adam Ferriss, 12: Rodell Warner and Arnaldo James, 13: Debora Delmar, 14: Brenna Murphy, 15: Nick Briz, 16: Carlos Sáez, 17: Jenn E Norton, 18: Juliette Bonneviot, 19: Luis Nava, 20: Vince McKelvie; 21: Claudia Maté 22: Evan Roth, 23: Shana Moulton, 24: Sabrina Ratté, 25: Jordan Tannahill, 26: Vasily Zaitsev feat.MON3Y.us, 27: Ann Hirsch REVIEWS - Read an interview with Lorna Mills about Ways Of Something on The Creators Project. Read here. - Ben Davis wrote an essay looking at the first two episodes on artnet. Read here. - The project was also featured by Animal New York here.

Julia van Mourik is an independent curator and editor, based in Amsterdam. Since 1999, she has produced visual arts projects and has composed programmes and publications, exploring new possibilities for presenting the moving image. She is Director of The One Minutes, a place for artists to experiment, to produce and to present within the inexorable limit of 60 seconds, hosted by Sandberg Instituut, Masters of Art and Design in Amsterdam (NL). She is also director of the Lost & Found programme, where artists show material that doesn’t fit comfortably into regular gallery contexts, that seems out of place. And she is Adviser to the to the Dutch Cultural Media Fund, promoting the development and production of high-quality artistic programmes by the national public broadcasting corporations. Lorna Mills has actively exhibited her work internationally in both solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990’s. Her practice has included obsessive Ilfochrome printing, obsessive painting, obsessive super 8 film & video, and obsessive on-line animated GIFs incorporated into restrained off-line installation work. She has also co-curated monthly group animated GIF projections with Rea McNamara for the Sheroes performance series in Toronto, a group GIF projection event When Analog Was Periodical in Berlin co-curated with Anthony Antonellis, and a touring four person GIF installation, :::Zip The Bright:::, that originated at Trinity Square Video in Toronto. In June 2013, Mills opened a solo exhibition ‘The Axis of Something’ at TRANSFER, her work was exhibited by the gallery at the Moving Image Art Fair NYC in March 2014, and her second solo show for TRANSFER is currently in development for 2015.  Her most recent solo project was Ungentrified a large GIF projection installation at OCADU in Toronto for Nuit Blanche. £7 / £4 concs Episodes 1 and 2 are produced by The One Minutes at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. Episode 3 is produced by Lorna Mills.        

We awoke Bleary eyed today, memories buzzing in our noisy heads. Did last night really happen? Were you there? Can you prove it? Machines by Other Means, an event curated by Christina Millare and Cornerhouse for Abandon Normal Devices Festival, was bound to be a winner. Five hotel rooms in The Salutation Hotel & Pub were to become the venue for a whole series of monstrously noisy events. Noisy sounds; noisy approaches; noisy intentions. A house party in a hotel is so right for GLTI.CH Karaoke it hurts. And it did hurt, in a good way. Countless joyful krooners crammed into our meagre space, propping themselves up on springy hotel beds and tasty Northern fine ales. We were joined by a whole host of online head-swayers, who logged into our tinychat webspace from 9pm until 2am (Seoul/London/Berlin/?????). They sang, we sang louder; they laughed; we laughed with them; they requested songs, we gathered around the webcam and joined in singing with them. It was a ball. Below are some photos of the event (see them on Facebook too), with some snazzy official press photos to follow . Videos have been rumoured to exist… Lots of thanks to EVERYONE who attended, live in Manchester Meatspace, or virtually via the magical interwebs. Please leave a comment if you were there, or hit us up at our Facebook and Twitter pages. Special thanks to Jennifer Chan, Nathan Jones, Antonio Roberts, Rosa Menkman, Mark Amerika, Bo Ningen, Linda Stupart for trying to logon so hard, and especially Christina Millare and everyone at the Cornerhouse for putting up with us!

View all photos at

With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. The point is that truly rare events, say events that occur only once in a million [as the mathematician Littlewood (1953) required for an event to be surprising] are bound to be plentiful in a population of 250 million people. If a coincidence occurs to one person in a million each day, then we expect 250 occurrences a day and close to 100,000 such occurrences a year.

Going from a year to a lifetime and from the population of the United States to that of the world (5 billion at this writing), we can be absolutely sure that we will see incredibly remarkable events. When such events occur, they are often noted and recorded. If they happen to us or someone we know, it is hard to escape that spooky feeling.

Ideal for the commute, the lunch-hour, the stolen moment: shortness necessitates the perfect user-friendly format, arguably suited to the fast paced nature of everyday contemporary urban living. At the same time such compression of structure and content allows for moments of haiku-like contemplation. This symposium has been curated to celebrate all that is great about the short form.

The first half will feature five minute papers on short forms, from fiction to poetry, from comics to GIFs. The speakers are research students from across the humanities and colleges of the University of London. The second half will be devoted to a panel of invited guests; practitioners from different media who will discuss aspects of their own work, concluding with a Q&A.

The papers will be collected for a special issue of postgraduate journal Dandelion, "On Brevity", for autumn publication, and the discussion will be recorded for podcasting.

is a virtual jukebox oozing with time-delayed, glitchy fun. Streaming live over the web, London and Kumamoto will be joined in a sing off to end all sing offs. The first GLTI.CH KARAOKE event will laugh in the face of the nine hour time difference, of poor bandwidth, bad lip syncing, and terrible foreign language translations. All that matters is that the interwebs keep running and the participants keep on singing.From our first event we will encourage a whole series GLTI.CH Karaoke happenings. Using webstreaming software our eventual aim is to link up multiple cities across the globe for an all-out, Noon til Noon, 24 hour Karaoke marathon. This means we need YOU to help host future events, with all proceeds raised going to The Japan Society Tohoku Earthquake Relief Fund.

The Known Unknowns is a scheduled cycle of continuous readings running parallel to Volatile Dispersal: Festival of Art Writing, an evening organised by Maria Fusco and Book Works at Whitechapel Gallery.

The festival reflects on the materialisation and dematerialisation of art writing through six newly commissioned works by Adam Chodzko, Ruth Ewan, Babak Ghazi, Beatrice Gibson, Nathaniel Mellors and Gail Pickering.

The aim of The Known Unknowns is to gather an interesting number of contributors to publicly read extracts or entire sections of their own texts.

The fluidity and the continuity of the act of reading-aloud will unveil a focus on both the singular texts and the whole reading as a unique entity.

This constant balance between singularity and plurality will also produce an interesting tension with the six commissioned intervention happening around the Whitechapel Gallery.

The Known Unknowns

21 November 2009 - Whitechapel Gallery

First Section (6.30-7.30)

Intro

• Neil Chapman

• Jeremy Akerman

• Ruth Beale

• Katrina Palmer

• Clare Gasson

• Hilary Koob-Sassen

• Nick Thurston

Second Section (7.45-8.45)

• Laure Prouvost

• Jamie Shovlin

• Reto Pulfer

• Ruth Höflich

• Daniel Rourke

• Sally O’Reilly

Third Section (9-10)

• Anna Barham

• Matt&Ross

• NaoKo TakaHashi

• Brighid Lowe

• antepress

• Stewart Home

Saturday 21 November, 6pm

Until 11pm

Showcasing UK artists and writers, this parley-based event speculates on the materialisation and dematerialisation of art writing through newly commissioned works, together with readings drawn from open submission. The event is hosted by Maria Fusco with Book Works and structured around issue three of The Happy Hypocrite, themed ‘Volatile Dispersal: Speed and Reading’. A specially produced publication is available on the day, published by Book Works.

New commissions include a lecture, readings, performances and installations by Adam Chodzko, Ruth Ewan, Babak Ghazi, Beatrice Gibson, Nathaniel Mellors, and Gail Pickering, together with The Known Unknowns, a cycle of readings organised by Francesco Pedraglio, including antepress, Jeremy Akerman, Anna Barham, Ruth Beale, Neil Chapman, Clare Gasson, Ruth Höflich, Hilary Koob-Sassen, Stewart Home, Brighid Lowe, Matt&Ross, Sally O'Reilly, Katrina Palmer, Laure Prouvost, Reto Pulfer, Daniel Rourke, Jamie Shovlin, Naoko Takahashi and Nick Thurston.

Download a copy of the festival programme here 

Schedule

Ground Floor – Gallery 2

6.00 – 7.45 pm, 8.05 – 8.45 pm, 9.20 – 10.00 pm
BABAK GHAZI
Lifework: Documents
Installation

7.45 – 8.05 pm
GAIL PICKERING
The Revolutionary Costume For Today
Performers: Catherine Ashton, Gedvile Bunikyte,
Sebastian Truskolaski

8.45 — 9.20 pm
BEATRICE GIBSON
A Vertical Reading of B.S. Johnson’s House Mother Normal
Performers: Josette Chiang, Beatrice Gibson,
Catherine Hawes, Jennifer Higgie, Will Holder,
Jacqueline Holt, Lupe Nunez-Fernandez,
Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sperlinger

Floor 1 A – Foyle Reading Room

7.00 pm, 7.30 pm, 8.00 pm, 8.30 pm, 9.00 pm
RUTH EWAN
A Child’s Catechism
Performers: Jordan Cummins and Mohammadur Rahman
Duration: 5 mins

Floor 1 B – Galleries 5 & 6

6.00 — 11.00 pm
Bar

6.30 — 7.30 pm
The Known Unknowns
Cycle of readings organised by Francesco Pedraglio
Neil Chapman, Jeremy Akerman, Ruth Beale, Katrina Palmer,
Clare Gasson, Hilary Koob-Sassen, Nick Thurston

7.45 — 8.45 pm
The Known Unknowns
Laure Prouvost, Jamie Shovlin, Reto Pulfer,
Ruth Höflich, Daniel Rourke, Sally O’Reilly

9.00 — 10.00 pm
The Known Unknowns
Anna Barham, Matt&Ross, NaoKo TakaHashi,
Brighid Lowe, antepress, Stewart Home

10.00 — 11.00 pm
Launch of The Happy Hypocrite: A Rather Large Weapon
Contributors: Bernadette Buckley, Jeff Derksen,
Candice Hopkins, Anthony Iles, Daniel Kane,
Yve Lomax, Robert Longo, Sean Lynch, Laura Oldfield Ford,
Luke Pendrell, Rachelle Sawatsky, Mark Von Schlegell, Natasha Soobramanien, Nick Thurston

Floor 2 – Study Studio

6.00 – 10.00 pm
NATHANIEL MELLORS
The Preface
Installation

Floor 3 – Clore Creative Studio

6.30 — 7.30 pm
ADAM CHODZKO
Longshore Drift
Lecture / performance

In association with: The Happy Hypocrite, Book Works, supported by Arts Council England, The Elephant Trust and the Department of Art, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Free, no booking required.

Holly Pester is a performance poet currently working on a project with the Barry Museum in Manchester. I, raven, the is about the relationship between words and sound, and the title itself inevitably brings to mind Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, in which the refrain “Never More” reads increasingly, as the poem progresses, as less like words and more like sounds.

Pester’s poem attempts to capture the “shape of words” and as she reads, her mouth contorts into shapes. The result is a series of sounds from everyday life that seem disconnected from the actual meaning of the words. “The sound is a square” is a constant refrain, and Pester duly shapes her mouth like a square, producing a churned-up sound. Words rhyming or related in sound to square (such as war) are similarly chewed over and mangled. Pester says of the poem’s protagonist that he “is concerned with the physical world ”, while the sounds of the physical world invade the piece, with growls and pips emerging from Pester’s mouth th