Honey Money: fSM – new money for a new society is both extraordinary and unexpected, a book about culture, the environment, infrastructure, bodily waste and revolution, written by Jaeweon Cho and translated and edited by Richard Povall. The book proposes a radical upsetting of the infrastructural economic status quo. Cho believes art, science, engineering and politics all have a role to play in creating a new currency for a new society: Faeces Standard Money (fSM).
Richard Povall mulls over why this book, not an obvious addition to the list, is published by art.earth Books:
“First and foremost, the book and its motivations speak to the core of art.earth’s values: vision, equality, ecological thinking, sharing, co-operation, and remaining open to change. The book also espouses a transdisciplinarity that echoes our approach to everything we do.
The book bids us to re-examine our lives by questioning the utility of one of longest-established infrastructures, and this, surely, is a fundamental tenet of art. Such essential challenges rarely gain traction because of the overwhelming odds stacked against them. Nevertheless, the cogency in the essential argument of this book is striking in its lucidity and logic.
These kinds of challenges to our preconceptions and established structures also represent a meeting place between art-think and science-think. While there have been attempts to blend disciplinary approaches within the Science Walden project — attempts that have not always been successful according to the author — it is the belief that art and science can speak to the same issues and problematics that is striking here.”
