George Maciunas is known as one of the original Fluxus artists, and was a co-organiser of the International Festival of Newest Music, regarded as the earliest Fluxus event, in which John Cage, Nam June Paik and others took part. For his work "Flux Smile Machine", a multiple, Maciunas developed a gag which forces the user to smile. The compelled character of the smile is of course obvious, as it resembles a painful grimace rather than a relaxed smile, making it into an atavistic and threatening gesture directed against bourgeois society. To bare one s teeth to the entertainment industry, to counter the entire banality of the everyday with a simple object of humour - this is the intent behind Maciunas production. The motif of the Flux Smile Machine was also issued by Maciunas as a stamp, Fluxpost (Smiles) - an artistic medium that found an application in the context of mail art. For Maciunas the stamps and the multiples were part of his large- scale anti-institutional infrastructure scheme for Fluxus production, under the auspices of which he operated a shop, publishing house and distribution agency in Manhattan.