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.

For Flusser, the capacity of the technical image, a central ontological concept of his media theory, is the “concretion of the algorithmic abstraction”. Unlike traditional images, technical images do not represent the world. Due to processes of analysis, caclulation, and computation, technical images are projections of abstract concepts. Flusser believed that one day there wont be a difference anymore, on a cognitive level, between concrete objects and so-called simulations:

At the same time Flusser believed that such new technologies which enable the creation of new worlds should be deployed as to promote liberation: to break out of the capitalist pre-determined structure of the program and to experimentally try out new possibilities; to not become a “functionary” of the program but a creative “player” against its determinations.

The Vilém Flusser Residency Program for Artistic Research 2016 will enable the artists to develop their project of #Additivism  through a series of workshops and the completion of their ambitious 3D Additivist Cookbook that will both collect neighbouring projects and facilitate the further distribution of the #Additivist methodology.