#Additivism Workshop: Designing Post-Natural Futures

As the human footprint on the planet becomes more and more visible, an urge for new forms of intervention that take into account this long, temporal impact also becomes apparent. It seems that whilst developing planetary modes of vision, communication and control, the very ecosystems we have been seeking to assert mastery over have now been altered. In rendering the entire Earth both an object of scientific study and of economic profit, we have become implicated in the deep future of every organism that grows, crawls, and mutates on its surface. We have come to inhabit a world where, as Richard Pell and Lauren Allen outline, organisms, their habitats and evolutionary niches, are "no longer determined simply by ecological pressures, but rather by an ongoing negotiation between commerce, regulation, and genetics." [1] Or, as Jason Moore notes, capitalism is a specific way of organizing nature.

The #additivism workshop led by Daniel Rourke and Geraldine Juárez invites us to an exploration of post-natural history, geo-history and Mediterranean world-ecologies, emphasizing critical perspectives driven from the intersection of art, design and activism. #Additivism, which takes 3D fabrication as its critical framework, is a portmanteau of "additive" and activism that exemplifies radical approaches to collective action, extending from the local through to geological timescales.

In this two day workshop, we will identify and name the epistemic conditions under which “post-nature” emerges and thrives. We will take into account the additive logic of extractivism and its deep legacy in the form of techno-scientific projects such as bio- and geo-engineering. We will consider Mediterranean world-ecologies and imagine structures of knowledge and action able to exist outside or beyond “the Eurocene and Technocene initiated by Europeans.” [2] Ultimately, we wish to ask:

"Are we able to imagine alternative approaches that don’t put human-scale actions and interventions first? For whom, why and at the expense of what is “post-nature” produced? Is it possible to consider the emergence of a “post-natural” ethics?"

The workshop will have 2 main components:
a theoretical and critical session and a practical and collaborative session

Participants will be invited to exchange provocative thoughts and ideas, and come up with speculative models, texts, blueprints, designs, etc. As part of the workshop, they will be guided through the processes of additive design using Meshmixer.

[1] "Out of the Lab, Into the Wild - Center for PostNatural History." Accessed January 11, 2016. http://postnatural.org/Out-of-the-Lab-Into-the-Wild
[2] P. Sloterdijk, “The Anthropocene: A Process-State at the Edge of Geohistory?”, In Art in the Anthropocene, eds. E. Turpin & H. Davis. London, Open Humanities Press, 2015, p. 328.