image: Céline Lamée

You are what you eat / read

你吃/读什么就像什么

Time: Sunday Dec 1st
5pm Reading Group
7pm Dining Group

Where: HomeShop 家作坊

Please RSVP to hello@concreteflux.com in advance if you want to participate in the food event as places are limited!

Food will cost 40RMB per diner.
On Sunday Concrete Flux 流泥 will be hosting a double event at HomeShop 家作坊. In one room, simultaneously, we will be running a reading and discussion group on the theory of hybridity, the theme for Concrete Flux Issue 2, and cooking hybridity-themed food under the guidance of Emi Uemura, Orianna Cacchione and Richard Gong.

The text for our reading group is Chapter One of the quintessential hybridity reading, Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (pdf available here / ENG only).

Join us for an evening of thoughtful discussion at 5pm, and eating from 7pm Sunday 1st December at HomeShop.

十二月一日（本周日）《流泥》将在家作坊的一个空间中举行两个活动。《流泥》第二刊以混杂文化理论为主题，此次两个活动也围绕混杂这个主题展 开。一边是围绕混杂文化理论的阅读和讨论，另一边是Emi Uemura, Orianna Cacchione 和 Richard Gong指导我们做混杂的佳肴。

本次读书会将阅读混杂文化理论 的经典著作Homi Bhabha的《文化地标》（The Location of Culture）的第一章。（下载英文版）

邀请您本周日晚上5点在家作坊参加这两个美味的，思想性的活动。加入我们吧！

The next meeting of Happy Friends Reading Group is scheduled for 5 pm on December 1st at HomeShop. Coincident with the recently-announced theme of Concrete Flux, Issue 2: Hybridity,  we will read “The Commitment to Theory,” the first chapter of Homi Bhabha’s  book The Location of Culture (1994).

Please leave a comment if you would like to receive a copy!

photo: Céline Lamée

For the next (first post-Design Week) meeting of the Happy Friends Reading Club, scheduled 5 pm on November 3rd 2013, we will be discussing a brief excerpt from Guy Debord’s 1967 book, Society of the Spectacle. You can find the whole text here.

下一个开心朋友们读书小组开会，十一月三日五点，我们讨论居伊·德博的《景观社会》 中文版第一章，在这里找到的。

For the next meeting of the Happy Friends Reading Club, scheduled for 5 pm on Sunday, September 1st, 2013 we will cover chapters 8–10 of Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier (2013… read what you can).

Following a sequence of readings on science fiction, utopia, human economies, and value, we turn to the words of “the prophet of Silicon Valley” (Simon & Schuster, publisher) to wonder whether micropayments can redeem the promises of this dystopia we have sunk into. mmm, sounds a little Utopian.

Please leave a comment if you would like to receive a copy of the text.

For the next meeting of the Happy Friends Reading Club, we will read the final chapter of “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value” (2001) by David Graeber (Chapter 7: “The False Coin of our own Dreams”). The meeting will take place at 5 pm on Sunday, July 21st at HomeShop.

On a string of meetings on utopia, events, and non-visible energy—all things not quite in existence, at least not to the naked eye—we follow with a chapter from anthropologist David Graeber’s questioning of value as “blind spot” of anthropology. For even in this field, concerned with understanding cultures of the other, there is a common risk of understanding value in economic terms. From the introduction:

Please leave a comment for a copy of the text!

Your presence valued greatly!

A Constructed World, Hospitality, 2001 (presented by Anna Hess, 2011)

For the following meeting of Happy Friends we will meet on Sunday June 9th at 5 pm to discuss texts from “Speech Object” (2011) by Australian artist group A Constructed World (Geoff Lowe and Jacqueline Riva). They will be present via Skype thanks to Guo Hao. When the question came out: what is this about? the following gentle suggestion was made by Geoff:

Re: speech object- how to consume?
Hey Hao

well I think maybe the best way is to read these 2 short texts
…try this at home p27
speech objects p73
both are very short
-or a bit longer
a new role or repertoire… p32

the idea is to begin to track how the audience may be involved in a work even before it is made

to think away  from creation and expression ( where an art work appears from nothing)
to translation and diffusion

so with the audience rather than thinking they don’t-know ( stupid public who have to be educated)
begin to think about how any work of art may have origins in its audience.

its a prompt its not a manual
the book rose out of an exhibition in 4 parts that attempted to chart how a work and its reception could move around in space and time

hope this helps a bit!
XXGeoff

Please leave a comment to receive a link to the pdf.

The next meeting of the Happy Friends Reading Club will be held at HomeShop on Sunday June 2nd at 5 pm.

We will discuss the contents of the brief interview After the Event: Rationality and the Politics of Invention; An interview with Alain Badiou by Radical Politics between philosopher Alain Badiou and some students who form the Radical Politics Group at the University of Essex in 2003. From our brief foray into utopian studies, we wondered, can anything happen, does history exist, in utopia? And so the question of the event.

“It is imperative to understand that an event is always relative to a situation; it is an event for the situation, and not above or outside it. Consequently, when I say that an event is beyond calculation, beyond prediction, this is naturally beyond prediction within the situation of which the event is the supplement, or the added singularity. As such, the event is not in itself unintelligible: it is unintelligible in regard to the means of prediction, of forecast, or of continuity that are those of the situation. But the intelligibility of the event is created in the fidelity to the event.” —Alain Badiou

Please leave a message if you would like to receive the text.

At the last meeting it was decided to pick through a bit more of Fredric Jameson’s book “Archaeologies of the Future” to better understand what in the Utopian separates the appeal of the deodorant ad from the dream of the egalitarian society, the conservative ideal of perfection from the progressive imagination, and how to explain this diagram?

For those who would like to join, please choose a chapter or two from anywhere in the book that interests you, and see you at the next meeting at HomeShop at 5 pm on April 14th, 2013. If you are lacking a copy of this book, please leave a comment.

For the next meeting of Happy Friends Reading Club, we go on from the tensions between economies of perversion and play in Fourier and Sade, as elaborated by Klossowski, to investigations into varieties of the Utopian, with the first 2 chapters of “Archaeologies of the Future” (2005) by Fredric Jameson. 

The meeting will take place at HomeShop at 5 pm on Sunday, March 31st . If you would like to receive a copy of this book please leave a comment.

The next meeting of the Happy Friends Reading Club will take place at 5 pm on Sunday the 27th of January, 2013, at HomeShop.
We will be reading Pierre Klossowski’s “Living Currency” (1970).

Please leave a comment to receive a copy.