The Electric Deep: Dream Visions of the Additive Machine

‘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 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 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 aterm 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 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
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. 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 – 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. 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?