The Electric Deep; Dream Visions of the Additive Machine

Dr. Anna Greenspan XXX XXX and Author Project Dr. Suzanne Livingston Author The Electric Deep: Dream XXX Year Visions of the Additive Machine 2016 Year #XXX #methods #XXX #futures#XXX morph Format Format Theme Theme Action Action Project THE ELECTRIC DEEP: TITLE DREAM VISIONS OF THE DESCRIPTION SHORT ADDITIVE MACHINE “THE 3D PRINTER HAS BECOME, IF NOT YET IN REALITY, AT LEAST IN THE STORIES WE TELL, A VEHICLE OF EXTRAORDINARY MUTATION...”

The Electric Deep: Dream Visions of the Additive Machine Project London/ Shanghai May 2016 ‘When Hackworth got back to the post office and looked through the window of the big matter compiler, he saw a large machine taking shape in the dim red light. Its body had already been finished and was now rising slowly as its four legs were compiled underneath. Dr. X had provided Hackworth with a chevaline... When it was finished, Hackworth released the vacuum and opened the door, ‘Fold’, he said. The chevaline’s legs buckled and it lay down on the floor of the M.C....’Mount’, he said. The chevaline rose into a crouch. Hackworth threw one leg over its saddle... and immediately felt him shoving into the air....then the chevaline trotted into the street and began heading back towards to causeway.’ – Neal Stephenson: The Diamond Age, Penguin, 2011, p232 The 3D printer – part long projected dream, part uncanny, retroactive dread, part hopelessly mundane reality – is reformatting the stories we tell about the material world. Since we need no longer be the molders or shapers of uncarved matter (the history of manufacturing has, for the most part, been a subtractive process of filling, turning, milling and grinding) 3D printers catapult us into a world of synthetic generation. 3D objects are hypnotically layered into existence out of what can appear to be nothing (but a myriad of algorithms, complexity and computational materials), with no natural precedent or preset form. According to the now well-played vision, in the world created by 3D printers, the possibilities of objects are no longer restricted by the innate qualities of preexisting materials. Stone or wood does not have to be coaxed into functionality. Instead, the 3D printers, assemblers, and matter compilers of the future establish a mode of invention that starts from the atom up. Functionality emerges in perfect alignment with the material used. According to Neil Gershenfeld, one of the prophets of the new additive machine: ‘Scientists are now ...developing processes that can place individual atoms and molecules into whatever structure they want. Unlike 3D printers today, those (of the future) will be able to build complete functional systems at once, with no need for parts to be assembled. The aim is to not only produce the parts for a drone, for example, but to build a complete vehicle that can fly right out of the printer.’ The journey takes us from the fictional matter compilers of Stephenson’s ‘The Diamond Age’ to the machines of today that manufacture tissue and stem cells in medicine, onwards to science fiction #methods Format #futures Theme morph Action fantasies of 3D generated factories (not just individual machines) jumping out of 3D generated factories, and then, through biological extension, to the replication of replicating intelligent machines. Automation, or digital fabrication and its accompanying sense of the liveliness of matter can function as a potent and irreversible cocktail – an extreme phantasm, a gentle, often imperceptibly emerging reality and, also, a terrifying realization. Writing in an altogether different context, art historian Wilhelm Worringer exposes the roots of the primal fear that is evoked by these new additive machines. The dominant line in Classical European art (whose prejudice we inherit) is based, he argues, on a celebration of man’s place and presence in the world. At its height, great lumps of solid marble were carved into ‘wonderfully expressive organisms.’ Yet, this delight in the joy and beauty in the rhythms of the organic world was also, a way of ‘easing an instinctive fear.’ In this ‘human centered classical world…the universe becomes knowable, controllable, no longer strange, inaccessible and mystically great.’ (21) Contemporary theorist Jane Bennett probes what underlies this deep-seated unease of a matter/nature that exceeds our control: ‘humans need to interpret the world reductively as a series of fixed objects, a need reflected in the rhetorical role assigned to the word ‘material’. As noun or adjective ‘material’ denotes some stable or rock bottom reality, something adamantine.’ (57) Steven Shaviro’s book ‘The Universe of Things’ is named after a science fiction story set in the near future that details our encounter with an alien race that have come to colonize earth. In the story, the most disturbing aspect of this occupation by aliens is their explicit and visceral violation of the distinction between inert and passive matter and active, vibrant life. The alien’s technology, unlike our own, is intrinsically alive. ‘The Aleutians’ tools are biological extrusions of themselves’ writes Shaviro, who goes on to quote the story that is his inspiration: ‘they had tools that crept, slithered, flew, but they had made these things… They built things with bacteria. . . Bacteria which were themselves traceable to the aliens’ own intestinal flora, infecting everything.’ (46) The nightmare this invokes plays off of a profound prejudice. ‘We tend to dread our own mechanistic technologies, even as we use them more and more. We cannot escape the pervasive sense, endemic to Western culture, that we are alone in our aliveness, trapped in a world of dead, or merely passive, matter.’ (46). The more we envelope ourselves in the myth that we are the only active force in a world served to us as a submissive canvas, the more we feel both dread and

The Shape Shifter: Dream Visions of the Additive Machine Project fascination towards what lies, or lives beyond. Machines that can reproduce any form, artificial or organic, and then, because they understand the means of their own making, start over, erase their work and begin their self-generating process again, suggest a reality that can be outputted and then deleted with extraordinary ease. It is one of the great environmental promises of 3D printing that we will one day be able to build our houses and also the content of our houses from one vast, endlessly recycling reservoir of universal material. Vats, reservoirs, loops. Whole cities will come and go. We’ll be able to move, locate and re-locate like never before. We will no longer see our reflection in fixed carvings of ourselves. We will be able to disappear without a trace. Anxiety begins to creep in – matter itself may have consuming power all of its own. The 3D printer has become, if not yet in reality, at least in the stories we tell, a vehicle of extraordinary mutation, exposing something artificial, and incommensurably alien, at the core of what is natural. Plastic Feed Watching a 3D printer in action, especially for the first time, one cannot help but be captivated. Yet, what entrances is not the machine itself, but the infinite mutability of matter that it gestures towards. What is on display is the pure potentiality of the formless. In its capacity (or at least in its promise) to morph, recompose and reformat, the 3D printer is aligned with plastics, the material which it most often uses to pump out its endless stream of knick-knacks and doodads. Plastics and the 3D printer are cosmically coupled in their technological articulation of matter as process (endlessly formless, formed, re-formed and de-formed). In Worringer’s tale, this extraordinary power of assemblage and replication belongs to the ‘Nomad or Gothic line’ of abstraction that counters the representation of man and is haunted by ‘ghosts, specters and spooks’ – vague and formless beings that envelop and penetrate. As plastic has permeated every aspect of our culture, it too has left a formless debris. It has pervaded everything, facilitated endless bad copies, and has persistently refused to go away. Look around you – there are bottles, toothbrushes, combs, credit cards, smart phones, keyboards. Plastics are everywhere. By the start of this century, plastics were totally ubiquitous. Growing from ‘from barely measurable quantities’ a century ago, to ‘260 million tonnes per annum today’ (Gabrys, Hawkins, Michael, 4), plastics have flooded daily life, driving cheap manufacturing, enabling a quick disposal culture. and then, leaving an endless formless Feed (to borrow a #methods Format #futures Theme morph Action term from Stepehenson) in their wake. Today they coagulate and fester in vast forms floating on the surface of oceans. The power of plastic lies in its nature as shape-shifter. Through ‘the magic of indefinite metamorphoses’ this everyday material has restructured our vision of nature. Rather than privilege the stable structures of the organism (the essential disposition of the classical tradition as Worringer has shown), plastics favour the ever-changing flexibility of molecular selfassembly. Unencumbered by characteristics such as integrity, rigidity, and stability, this synthetic organic operates through constant variation, composing and decomposing its body on the plane of consistency. Matter/Nature is reconstituted through the diversity of a (Spinozist) substance whose constant mutation is productive of the myriad things. A matter lacking in rigidity converges with long held fantasies and fears. On the one hand, it can be seen as a malleable, passive and docile partner – ‘a kind of Play-Doh in the hands of the clever designer who informs matter with intelligence and intentionality’ (Vincent, 22). For some, digital fabrication seems to enact this conjuring power. But underlying the fantasy lies an apprehension that there is a formless matter capable of assembling itself. This is Worringer’s ‘Gothic line’, which is incapable of being captured by the hylomorphic model: ‘Teeming, seething, swelling, foaming, spreading like an infectious disease, this nameless horror.’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 270) Once summoned into existence plastics do not just dissolve into nothing. As Murray Gregory writes, plastics have a profound effect on our ecological system – affecting the bodies and behavior of sea life and then, through the food chain, of ourselves. As a result, great swathes of nature become subject to its power of mutation. ‘The use of plastics is generating new material arrangements’, writes Jennifer Gabrys. Plastics do not biodegrade they degrade into smaller and smaller particles. During this breakdown process they ‘transform faraway places... ‘hitchhiking’ on fishing gear and disposable takeaway containers, typically invasive species are able to make far-flung journeys on this readily available debris. While in transit, these species are able to reshape places, as they circulate on plastic media to settle into – or ‘colonize’ – new environments.’ (Gregory quoted in Gabrys, 212 ) Tiny bits of plastic are now integral part of the ocean, constantly making their presence felt ‘by absorbing chemicals, entering food chains, and altering biological and reproductive processes.’ Spontaneously, and at the same time, newly identified

The Shape Shifter: Dream Visions of the Additive Machine Project forms of microbial life appear to be emerging that ingest the plastic of the seas. One of the ways to manage the presence of plastics is thus to develop bacteria, capable of consuming our debris, and to evolve new forms of plastics that can effectively devour themselves. The word plastic refers to no single identifiable element. Plasticity is instead the state of morphing materials. But its lack of ‘thing-ness’ tells us much more about nature, that to which it is most often opposed, than first would appear. Look closely and even the most solid structures pulse, vibrate, shapeshift. Metal Body ‘Hymn the man at the steering wheel whose ideal axis passes through the centre of the earth’ – Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Plastic is the material that the 3D printer most commonly feeds upon and spits out, but this is only at the surface. Peel back the skin and the additive machine, like all things electric, has a metallic core. Yet, despite its strong – even essential – alignment with technology – is there anything more natural than metal itself? Metal’s mineral body has cast one interminable cosmic thread from the iron-dating of ancient stars (whose age can be called from the amount of accumulated iron) through to the iron furnace of the oldest star, the sun, then on to the crust of the earth’s surface and deep into the colossal heat of its liquid molten core – itself emitting the electromagnetic waves (seas of loose electrons) that keep the electric wires of the earth’s communications networks pulsing and exchanging. Inside the 3D machine, we glimpse the cold, abominable, artificiality of a nature that is, at least at times, totally unforgiving to the humans that it hosts. Metal has always been the lightening rod of great technological and social evolution. From it emerged the steam engines of the Industrial Revolution, the steel frames of modern skyscrapers, nickel and lithium inside batteries, the copper lead and zinc casing of the automobile, germanium and silicon of semiconductors. The Earth’s crust has been cracked into and hacked, forged, molded, re-mixed, sintered and machined to create the economies that traffic on it’s surface (and the trading unit of that economy, the coinage itself). But metal supplies are finite (the earth was only formed once), and so everything we use, we must find ways to recycle and re-use again. #methods Format #futures Theme morph Action It is fortunate then that the intrinsic plasticity of metal allows it to change state and re-form – returning it to a hot liquid soup before being reshaped and re-used again. The magic of metal is its many variable states – not just from molten to cast rigid and back. Some metals conduct heat, some conduct electricity, some melt at high temperatures, some at low, many bend, and some like tungsten are the hardest substances of all. Metal atoms can sit inside the proteins of the body to create extraordinarily adaptable functionality. But elsewhere, in the crust of the earth for example, they line up in the strongly bonded rows to form the rock solid substance we more familiarly know as the shiny stuff itself. Metal is full of potentials and morphing twists and turns. It’s endless urge to mutate is nowhere better outlined than through Terminator’s T1000 shape-shifting cyborg, whose liquid metal body allows it to assume the form of other objects and people, for the ultimate gain of Skynet. As an advance prototype mimetic polyalloy, it is a liquid metal morphing machine. It imitates anything it samples by physical contact. ‘Chemically, metals are the second most powerful catalysts on the planet, losing only to biological enzymes’, writes Manuel Delanda. ‘A catalyst is a molecular assemblage that can intervene in reality, to increase or decrease the speed of a chemical reaction, without itself being changed in the process. Electrically, metals are highly conductive and are used by animals in atomic (or ionic) form to animate their brains and other parts of their nervous systems.’ (78) As a species, inhabiting the earth’s crust, we weave the metallo-cosmic thread ourselves. The workings of our bodies are fuelled by metals that hum within us – calcium, copper, iron, potassium, zinc and copper – all playing their vital part in respiration, circulation and reproduction. ‘Not everything is metal’, write Deleuze and Guattari – ‘but metal in everywhere. Metal is the conductor of all matter.’ (411) In this vein, all of matter, by way of metal, is always communicating, transporting, energizing and animating itself through the bonds and affinities it creates. The search continues in animal biology for an iron element in the brains of birds. Long thought to be guided by electromagnetic forces, that element may prove itself as the honing device, which explains their stunning murmurations and cross planet migrations. The metal in Williams Burroughs blood weighed heavily. In the wandering passages describing the soporific software of addictive drugs he writes, ‘With their diseases and orgasm drugs and their sexless parasite life forms – Heavy Metal People of Uranus wrapped in cool blue mist of vaporized bank notes

The Shape Shifter: Dream Visions of the Additive Machine Project – And the Insect People of Minraud with metal music. His Heavy Metal People were the drugs’. For Burroughs, it was always a cosmic journey. The iron in our blood can be traced back to the inside of a star. It is due to their mastery of the art of metal that Deleuze and Guattari celebrate the blacksmith as the key to minor or nomadic science. With the blacksmith, they write, ‘it is not a question of imposing a form upon matter but of elaborating an increasingly rich and consistent material, the better to tap increasingly intense forces.’ (363) De Landa continues, ‘In other words, the blacksmith treats metals as active materials, pregnant with morphogenetic capabilities, and his role is that of teasing a form out of them, of guiding, through a series of processes (heating, annealing, quenching, hammering), the emergence of a form, a form in which the materials themselves have a say.’ (37) It is metal’s anti-organicism that aligns it with Worringer’s Gothic or nomadic line that is ‘invested with abstraction’. Lacking comfort in an organic nature ‘everything becomes weird and fantastic’(81). The Gothic line, write Deleuze and Guattari, expresses the dream/horror of the metallic. It is ‘inorganic but alive’ …or rather it is ‘all the more alive for being inorganic…This streaming, spiraling, zigzagging, snaking, feverish line of variation liberates a power of life’ (550) Electric Pulse It is no wonder, then, that Michael Faraday, who helped discover the role of electromagnetism and the vast electric life of the universe, was the son of a blacksmith. Watching as his father melted metal, he also forged a relationship with other great forces – the electric deep itself. Faraday was not trained as a mathematician or a scientist. Inspired by the mutability of molten metal, Faraday’s technological tinkerings did most to challenge the notion that nature is made up of stable, concrete, static things. Faraday’s speculative work – which was later proved by the calculations of Maxwell and the inventions of Hertz – forms the basis for the discovery that ‘space itself acted as a repository of energy and a transmitter of forces: [that] it was home to something that pervades the physical world yet was inexplicable in Newtonian terms – the electromagnetic field’ (Forbes and Mahon, 17). This pervasive invisible world of forces, writes Ira S Brodsky in his book The History of Wireless , ‘ultimately changed the way natural philosophers viewed the world.’ Faraday’s experiments with electric and magnetic fields opened the door to an entirely new dimension of the universe. #methods Format #futures Theme morph Action What he uncovered is that ‘sources of electricity and magneticism produce force fields that take on a life of their own.’ With the discovery of electromagnetics, the solidity of matter begins to dissolve. Rigid distinctions between culture and nature, concrete and abstract start to meld as an etheric ocean immerses us in the waves of a spectrum that we cannot directly perceive. All around us the spread of electric machines reveals that the material foundations of the physical world are governed by forces that our senses, on their own, cannot detect. ‘All we know about them – possibly all we can ever know – are the mathematical relationships to things we can feel and touch.’ (Forbes and Mahon, 210) Electromagnetic waves are the ripple effects of the earth’s iron ocean. Comprising one third of terrestrial mass, approximately three thousand km below the surface, a semifluid metallic ocean, bathes the earth in electromagnetic fields. Yet prior to the modern period these ancient invisible vibrations were only ever vaguely perceived. The future orientation of modernity coincides with the understanding that all matter has electrical properties. ‘Electricity has become a mighty kingdom’, said Heinrich Hertz. ‘We perceive it in a thousand places where we had no proof of its existence before. The domain of electricity extends over the whole of nature.’ (quoted in Bodanis, 105). This new conception of the matter of nature gives rise to a myriad of devices that generate, store and control electricity. They act as our sensors for this amorphous realm that surrounds us but that we cannot see, taste or feel. Their growing ubiquity – and intelligence – informs us of their capacity to power the future. With the promise of a 3D printer – a machine that can make other machines, an electrified self organizing nature takes on a power of its own. Now the fantasies, the dreams, the horror comes into focus. The 3D printer is the face (or mask) of an automated source or matrix that incorporates what seem the most artificial of materials – plastic, metal, electricity. Its process of construction points to a technological stratum that re-programmes nature and the natural functions of matter. Watching this inherent malleability, these myriad variations of matter/nature from which we emerge and of which we are a part, we can not help but wonder: who or what is being shaped and who or what is doing the shaping? With thanks to Dr. Luciana Parisi

The Shape Shifter: Dream Visions of the Additive Machine Project Works Cited Bennett, Jane. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press, 2009. Bodanis, David. Electric universe: how electricity switched on the modern world. Broadway Books, 2005. Brodsky, Ira S. The History of Wireless: How Creative Minds Produced Technology for the Masses. Telescope Books, 2008. Burroughs, William S. Nova express. Vol. 978. Penguin UK, 2012. De Landa, Manuel, ‘Deleuze, Diagrams and the Open Ended Becomings’ of the World in Grosz, Elizabeth A., ed. Becomings: Explorations in time, memory, and futures. Cornell University Press, 1999. De Landa, Manuel, Deleuze: History and Science Think Media Egs Media Philosophy Series, 2010 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. ‘A Thousand Plateaus (London.’ Continuum 5 (2004). Gabrys, Jennifer, Gay Hawkins, and Mike Michael. Accumulation: The material politics of plastic. Routledge, 2013. Gershenfeld, Neil. ‘How to make almost anything: The digital fabrication revolution.’ Foreign Affairs. 91 (2012): 43. Gregory, Murray R. ‘Environmental implications of plastic debris in marine settings – entanglement, ingestion, smothering, hangers-on, hitch-hiking and alien invasions.’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 364.1526 (2009): 2013-2025. Forbes, Nancy, and Basil Mahon. ‘Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics.’ Prometheus, 2014. Shaviro, Steven. ‘The Universe of Things: On Speculative Reason.’ The University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Vincent, Bernadette Bensaude, ‘Plastics, materials and dreams of dematerialization’ in. Accumulation: The material politics of plastic. (eds Gabrys, Jennifer, Gay Hawkins, and Mike Michael ) Routledge, 2013. Worringer, Wilhelm, and Herbert Edward Read. ‘Form in gothic.’ (1957). #methods Format #futures Theme morph Action