Over the course of the next few weeks, Danish art collective Superflex (Rasmus Nielsen, Jakob Fenger and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen) will stage FREE SHOP in different stores around Haugesund, Norway as part of the arts festival Dynamo-Haugesund 08. Superflex experiment with alternative systems of distribution and economic production in their work, such as their Creative Commons-licensed beer franchise FREE BEER and their free photocopy shop and intellectual property discussion forum COPYSHOP. As the name implies, shops participating in FREE SHOP allow purchases free of charge. The stores do not advertise their involvement with the project and often customers are surprised when they attempt to purchase their merchandise. The project plays with customer expectation as well as accepted systems of exchange.
Superflex's work has an incredible optimism to it… even their latest series of films like Burning Car and Flooded McDonalds.
I just interviewed them about their London screening of Flooded McDonalds. See http://mtblog.typepad.com/arts_ecology/2009/01/when-the-levee-breaks.html