What we are reading next...

I been busy – got to see Richard Barbrook twice, once at Postmasters and again at 16 Beaver. The gig was admirably prepped with links to his texts at – 16beavergroup.org/monday/ . Barbrook is being hosted by Trebor Scholz's Insitute of Distributed Creativity, which is producing a conference on new media education in a week or so at the CUNY Graduate Center.
So, yeah, this class and next has been about gifts and labor (mostly) -- so we are reading:
a text about the Mess Hall in Chicago -- http://messhall.org -- the text is "What Is Mess Hall?" which is on this website
Maja Kuzmanovic and Sha Xin Wei, “Sustainable Arenas for Weedy Sociality” at “[foam]” -- http://f0.am/publications/2002_diac/
The Survival Coupons project distributed by the art group Škart during the war in Serbia (1997-2000) – these look better in color at http://www.nyfa.org/nyfacurrent/skart/skart_page4_survivalcommons_part1.htm
texts about Temescal Amity Works -- www.amityworks.org
“The World is Ours” by Alice Kim from The New Art Examiner (Chicago; Sept./Oct. 2001) – a review of Department of Space and Land Reclamation
http://counterproductiveindustries.com/dslrPressPages/dslrPress_NAE.html -- (counterproductiveindustries.com has lots of other stuff there, too, we’ll look at later)
Generosity projects -- http://welcomebb.org.uk/projects/generosity.html -- a report on a conference in San Francisco in 2002
table of contents for Ted Purves, ed., “What We Want Is Free”
from the online ‘zine “runme.org - say it with software art!,” a story by Jacob Lillemose on the Simple Sex Site Cyborg Link Harvester by Sintron
http://www.runme.org/feature/read/+ssslh/+76
review of the exhibition "Work Ethic": at Baltimore Museum of Art, by T.J. Demos in ArtForum, Feb, 2004
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_6_42/ai_113389512
one article by Marina Vishmidt, “Precarious Straits” from Mute #29 Winter/Spring ’05 is at --http://www.metamute.com/look/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=1&NrIssue=29&NrSection=10&NrArticle=1469
and for theory,
the links page of the 2002 “Free Biennial” has lots of stuff on the gift economy, and info on and texts by artists we can talk about:
http://www.freewords.org/fwlinks.html
The key text here, and reproduced all over the web, is anarchist anthropologist David Graeber’s "Marcel Mauss: Give It Away,” which is about the author of “The Gift,” a classic small book on the gift economy.
and of course the big lump of text, Brian Holmes, "The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique," a 22-page PDF at http://www.noemalab.org/sections/ideas/ideas_articles/holmes_personality.html