MAT 111PF - Reading Response - 3D Additivist Cookbook

The three articles in the 3D Additivist Cookbook—"Print Green," "Free Universal Construction Kit" by Golan Levin and Shawn Sims, and "The Domestication of Plastic by Heather Davis"—provide disruptive critiques and innovations at the intersection of digital fabrication, material culture, and environmental sustainability. Not only do these projects aim to highlight that 3D printing is not merely a tool to turn abstract into physical things, but they also reverse conventional usage of digital fabrication while emphasizing their impact in social debates regarding the material world.

Print Green challenges the absolute technological nature of digital fabrication by incorporating a nature aspect into the project. It uses 3D printing as an ecological practice by utilizing biodegradable material infused with seeds, where the printed item grows into a plant eventually. It seeks to discuss the wastefulness of traditional digital fabrication by demonstrating a real potential for the intertwining of technology and nature. The artist’s intention behind this project aligns with values of eco-friendly practices and regenerative design. By utilizing the power of digital fabrication, the project was able to come to life, as 3D printing allows direct control over material composition so that the living greens can be incorporated into the printed part. However, a disadvantage is that biodegradable filaments are not as popular, and industrial adoption remains modest.

Golan Levin and Shawn Sim’s Free Universal Construction Kit is composed of 3D-printed adapters that are used to connect incompatible toy construction systems. Through this project, the artists promote open-source design, creative freedom, anti-material wasting, and anti-corporate resistance through enabling users to bypass proprietary constraints. This project was made possible through the usage of digital fabrication, as it allows for quick prototyping and distribution of adapters, giving the users more control over creative freedom and modifications. Essentially, it allows for the precision and accessibility where the users can print their own adapters at home without relying on conventional manufacturing completely. A disadvantage, however, is that this grand access to digital fabrication will increase plastic usage, further increasing material waste.

In “The Domestication of Plastic,” Heather Davis critiques how 3D printing can be a means of promoting a culture of disposability. She argues that despite digital fabrication’s potential to be an eco-friendly technology, 3D printing is still heavily reliant on plastic, which is inherently rooted in petrocapitalism and environmental degradation. Davis establishes a point that the romanticization of 3D printing neglects the truth lying in the life cycle of plastics. She compares the usage of 3D printing to “negotiating the immanence of oil to provide glitches, cracks, and imperfect renderings that new imaginaries of plastic unfold” (Davis 3). This claim provokes an alternating notion that I have established about the possibility of coexistence between environmental and digital. Even while efforts, like Print Green, aim to counter these contradictions, Davis reminds us that technology can still be harmful to the environment in the long term.