Readings For Artworkers, No. 1: Culture, Not Profit (2009)

This is the first Volume of the Journal of Free / Slow University of Warsaw and a recap on first year of its activity. Internal diversity of the Volume corresponds to the mode of operation of this para-institution, which experiments with various avenues of knowledge production and exchange. The present and the first Volume is a recap on the 212 working days of the Free/Slow University of Warsaw during the first year of its activity. Internal diversity of the Volume corresponds to the mode of operation of our para-institution, which experiments with various avenues of knowledge production and exchange.

The subject of the first edition of the Free/Slow University of Warsaw was “culture not for profit.” The initiative referred to the tradition of free education, with a focus on establishing an environment that would enable critical reflection not only on culture, but also on its social, political and economic background. The participants made an attempt at a theoretical and practical research of the conditions of knowledge and culture production in the late capitalism, an analysis of the life conditions of activists, artists and cultural operators as well as at exerting an impact on the cultural policy and participating in debates on the current and the future shape of our societies.

Publication is available in Polish in printed form and online in English.

READINGS FOR ARTWORKERS VOL.1: CULTURE, NOT PROFIT. theorists, activists and artists about producing and functioning of culture
Edited by: Katarzyna Chmielewska, Kuba Szreder, Tomasz Żukowski
Authors: Jakob Jakobsen, Gerald Raunig, Marion von Osten, Peter Spillmann, Teresa Święćkowska, Martin Kaltwasser, Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt, Ewa Majewska, NetzNetz, Adrienne Goehler, Katarzyna Chmielewska, Michał Kozłowski, Tomasz Żukowski, Michał Herer
Publisher: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, 2009
ISBN 978-83-929527-6-3
Published under Creative Commons, Attribution, Non Commercial, Share Alike, 3.0

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Christian Fuchs: Internet and Society. Social Theory in the Information Age (2007)

In this study, Christian Fuchs discusses how the internet has transformed the lives of human beings and social relationships in contemporary society. By outlining a social theory of the internet and the information society, he demonstrates how the ecological, economic, political, and cultural systems of contemporary society have been transformed by new ICTs. Fuchs highlights how new forms of cooperation and competition are advanced and supported by the internet in subsystems of society and also discusses opportunities and risks of the information society.

Publisher Routledge, 2007
ISBN 0415961327, 9780415961325
398 pages

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Nicolas Bourriaud: The Radicant (2009) [English/Spanish]

In his most recent essay, Nicolas Bourriaud claims that the time is ripe to reconstruct the modern for the specific context in which we are living. If modernism was a return to the origin of art or of society, to their purification with the aim of rediscovering their essence, then our own century’s modernity will be invented, precisely, in opposition to all radicalism, dismissing both the bad solution of re-enrooting in identities as well as the standardization of imaginations decreed by economic globalization.

To be radicant: it means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them any value as origins, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing. The author extends radicant thought to modes of cultural production, consumption and use. Looking at the world through the prism of art, he sketches a “world art criticism” in which works are in dialogue with the context in which they are produced.

Translated from the French by James Gussen and Lili Porten
Publisher: Sternberg Press, March 2009
ISBN 978-1-933128-42-9
192 pages

Traducción de Michele Guillemont
Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo editora, 2009
Colección: “Los sentidos”
Subcolección: “Artes visuales”
ISBN: 978-987-1556-12-0
226 pags.

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