Carrying, embeddedness, printedness. Window-into-the-page. A grand assembling. (2016)

For the launch of Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke’s 3D Additivist Cookbook, I was invited to speak and participate on a panel at Printed Matter on December 2, 2016. Since the editors were releasing the book as a special “3D PDF,” I used this opportunity to write a short performative talk about the history of the PDF and the qualities of “carrying” and “embeddedness” in contemporary publishing—asking the question: What if the letter carries the pigeon? The book itself “is a free compendium of imaginative, provocative works from over 100 world-leading artists, activists and theorists. The 3D Additivist Cookbook contains .obj and .stl files for the 3D printer, as well as critical and fictional texts, templates, recipes, (im)practical designs and methodologies for living in this most contradictory of times.”

My essay “The Distributed Monument” is also included in the book.

“To embed an object in a document seems like a fantastical paradox, that the document’s printedness might yield an object. But what if documents carried objects? Contracts that carry guns, prescriptions that carry their own pills. I’m interested in experimental publishing that asks us to consider: What if the letter carries the pigeon? Objects in their hosts . . . impossible to extract, without destroying everything. An almost inside-out condition. The container swallowed by the contained, a kind of hiding in plain sight. Embedded tools, passed along, concealed at first. Discovered, touched and moved. Set in motion. The compression of space within the host. Embedding textures in objects, objects in PDFs, PDFs in ZIPs, ZIPs in emails. ”

Download The 3D Additivist Cookbook →

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