rmc

Readymades for all! Over the past month, DADA-DATA has been printing DADA objects in 3D, live at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich! DADA MADNESS is here.

DADA-MADNESS, right here! DADA is crazy! DADA is about to crash!

the dead brothers

Readymades for all! For one month, from February 5, 2016 to March 4, 2016 DADA-DATA had the machines working full-out. For hours at a time, three machines – three printers – churned out 3-D data objects live at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, birthplace of the Dada movement. Showcased in the Cabaret window, Printer No. 1 turned out Duchamp’s Fountain. In the Café-Bar, it was Sophie Taeuber’s Dada Head. And in the historic main room of the Cabaret: The Gift by Man Ray.

Every day, more than one hundred brave souls sent us their email addresses in the hope of receiving these objects, made one slow and loving layer at a time on the sidelines of DADA’s centennial.

DADA hopefuls participated from all over, including Austria, Canada, Columbia, Croatia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland, and the United States.

The objects have since been shipped around the world to begin their new lives. See the photos below, sent to us by the DADA Winners!

Because everything was there:

Art is a scam and DADA is its gravedigger!

Art is dead, long live DADA!

Because everything is here :

Industry is a dirty business and 3D its little darling.

The old tools are dead and art is reborn!

the dead brothers

the dead brothers

the dead brothers

the dead brothers

the dead brothers

the dead brothers

the dead brothers

the dead brothers

Dada and
Readymades

Readymades for all! Every day through March 5, 2016, enter the draw to receive your own 3D printed DADA object, delivered to you directly from the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Log in, enter the draw, choose an object, cross your fingers, and watch it being printed. If you don’t win Monday, try again the next day, all the way through Sunday. It’s Dada, it’s free, and it’s yours to win every day!

Dada

1916

Cabaret Voltaire
The spirit of Dada 1916

Adrian Christopher Notz (born 1977 in Zurich) has worked at the Cabaret Voltaire since its reopening in 2004. Appointed its director in 2012, he runs the Cabaret “with noble gesture and delicate propriety.”

The Cabaret Voltaire, birthplace of Dada, was launched on February 5, 1916, by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings. Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp were also on hand for the opening. Arp saw to it that the cabaret was decorated with internationally renowned works of art, such as prints by Pablo Picasso. As well, “an Oriental-looking deputation of four little men arrived, with portfolios and paintings under their arms: they kept bowing politely.” They introduced themselves: Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Jules Janco, and a fourth person, speculated by some to have been Lenin, who lived up the street. That very evening, Tristan Tzara read a few traditional-style poems, which he fished out of his coat pockets in a charming manner.

A week later, Richard Huelsenbeck arrived from Berlin and, with his so-called “negro drum,” set out to intensify the rhythm at the Cabaret Voltaire: he wanted to drum literature into the ground. For almost five months through to June 23, 1916, every night but Fridays, the Dadas put on programmes at the Cabaret Voltaire, “to the point of insanity, to the point of losing consciousness.” In April 1916, a time when Marcel Duchamp was exhibiting his first readymades in New York and Arthur Cravan fought Jack Johnson in a boxing match in Barcelona, they came up with the name “Dada.” June 23, 1916, is associated with the moment that Hugo Ball, dressed in a bishop’s costume, recited his first sound poems. He concluded his presentation with priestly lamentations, experiencing a mystical illumination that would lead him soon after to devote himself to Christian mysticism.

In his book Byzantine Christianity: The Lives of Three Saints (1923), he noted: “When I came across the word 'dada,' I was called upon twice by Dionysius—D.A.-D.A.: Dionysius the Aeropagite.”

Dada

2016

Art is a fraud and DADA is its gravedigger! Art is dead, long live DADA!

Anita Hugi & David Dufresne

The revolution has begun. Its name is the maker movement and its soldiers are the tinkerers, crafters, and do-it-yourselfers who are re-enchanting the (non) commercial world in hacker spaces and other fab labs. Like DADA Obama himself has said: the third industrial revolution will be 3D, or not at all.

DADA TADA!

3D printing is already making artificial prosthetics and natural chocolate, mini-factories and complete cars. Plastic, wax, metal, plaster of Paris, ceramics – everything (or almost) can be molded. It’s like the gesture by Marcel Duchamp, the inventor of the ready-made, who took a bicycle wheel from his garage in Rouen one day and decreed that it was made of art. The work is in the eye of the beholder, as he’d say. Next, he went to the bazaar at the town hall of Paris and bought a bottle rack to make it a standard-bearer for the dying cause of art. In 1917, his Fountain provoked a scandal.

Because everything was there:
Art is a fraud and DADA is its gravedigger!
Art is dead, long live DADA!

Because everything is here:
Industry is trash and 3D its little treasure!
Tools are dead! Long live art!

Let’s put an end to the value of the unique object! Ready-mades for all! Let’s give away 3D printers and get rid of the proletariat. As the ranting DADA Raoul Hausmann said: Victory to the proletatorship of the dictariat!

Print! Print! Print! At the heart of the Cabaret Voltaire, where everything began, at Spiegelgasse 1 in Zurich. Spiegelgasse – “Mirror Alley” – choose your city. Let the printers rattle at the Cabaret Voltaire, packed with “painters, students, revolutionaries, tourists, international crooks, psychiatrists, the demimonde, sculptors, and polite spies on the lookout for information,” in the words of DADA’s other Marcel, the Romanian Marcel Janco.

Print! Print! Print! Because what we want is an art web, a hackerspace web, a web of encounters and insults, where the only things that matter are (bad) taste and (pretty) colors. As Hugo Ball, founder of the Cabaret Voltaire, said: “Our Cabaret is a gesture. Every word spoken or sung here says at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect. What could be respectable or imposing about it? Its cannons? Our big drum drowns them out. It’s idealism? It has long been laughable, in both its popular and academic versions. Its grandiose slaughter and cannibalistic heroics? Our deliberate madness, our enthusiasm for illusion will destroy them.”

Let the illusions imprint themselves!

En avant DADA!