Epilogue retraces Postcards from the Future’s journey across the nine different city districts in which the project has taken place, each time involving its inhabitants and users in the realisation of a dedicated postcard/performance.

Postcards from the Future has taken place during an entire year, in collaboration with very diverse populations of the city, in places and at moments remote from another. This book takes up the challenge of gathering this multiplicity within a single bundled work, in order to give to all those who have taken part an overview of what the project has accomplished, partcipants in as much as audience members.

The book does not only document how these nine performances appeared in the visual realm of the city. Epilogue develops for each one of them the very thematic which has conditionned the most its realisation. The book portraits nine different interactions with the city, with its different neighborhoods, populations, infrastructures, administration, et al.

Just like any postcards, the Postcards from the Future are linked to the specific place they depict. What makes them special is that each one is associated with a precise point in time located in the future. Rather than being souvenirs, these postcards act primarily as invitations. By accepting the invitation and going to the address on the date and time indicated on a Postcard from the Future, one will be able to verify the prophecy made, thereby not only questioning the determinism, but also the pertinence of the images printed on the paper.

Collaboration with Charlie White and design of poster/take away for the exhibition Spilling Hot Gossip a selection from The Girl Studies at Oslo Kunstforening.

“Portraiture has always been motivated by two competing and overlapping desires: the desire to record, and the desire to be recorded. Artists Katy Grannan and Charlie White have examined this tension, exploring concepts of identity and subjectivity in a world increasingly dominated by media representations of the ideal self. The Sun and Other Stars presents two bodies of work that map the fragility and resilience of individuality in contemporary Western culture.

Grannan’s unflinching portraits capture adult subjects along the sun-struck boulevards of the American West, transforming them from obscurity to individuality with pathos and candor. White’s series of blonde teenage girls frames the popular and tyrannical appetite for celebrity with a deadpan lack of sentimentality. These two photographic series, accompanied by Grannan’s first film project and White’s new animation and personal collections of mass-culture ephemera, provide a visual vocabulary for an examination of the human subject and the encumbering effect of desire and aspiration.”

— Britt Salvesen, The Sun and Other Stars: Katy Grannan and Charlie White

On Acid presents a radically subjective re-edit of the history of drug experience, following the emergence of drugs as a technology and modernity’s conflicted obsessions with altered states. Tracing a path beginning with philosopher Benjamin Blood’s 1874 pamphlet ‘The Anesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy’ which declares the existence of a ‘majesty and supremacy unspeakable’ observable only after being dosed by nitrous oxide, On Acid assembles texts and images that draw a line connecting archival works by William James, Antonin Artaud, Timothy Leary, and various modernist explorers, to the practice of contemporary artists such as Rodney Graham, Francis Alÿs, Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe. Removed from the familiar cultural contexts of Haight-Ashbury and Grateful Dead psychedelia, On Acid is in itself an experimental program, a recursive acidic process that mirrors the deconstructive relations to counterculture cultivated in contemporary art. The book concludes with a series of new conversations with Freeman and Lowe, Hamilton Morris and Arik Roper.

TEXTS
Francis Alys, Antonin Artaud, Benjamin Blood, Philip K. Dick, Rodney Graham, Brion Gysin, Dr. Albert Hofmann, Jim Hogshire, Aldous Huxley, International Federation for Internal Freedom, William James, Timothy Leary, Marcia Moore, William Rauscher, Alan Watts.

IMAGES
Brian Aldiss, Francis Alys, Carol Bove, Syd Barrett, Mathieu Briand, Krystle Cole, Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, Rodney Graham, Brion Gysin, Carsten Holler, Henri Michaux, John Moeller, Arik Roper, Sandoz Laboratories, Ettore Sottsass, Klaus Weber.

INTERVIEWS
Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman, Hamilton Morris, Arik Roper.

Recorded in Baltimore in May 2011, Live marks not only the first ever vinyl release from The Kingsboro Press, but also the first officially released project from longtime friends, colleagues, and schemers Seeno and Sigler. 3 tracks from Seeno (ex-Ponytail) highlight his uniquely ambient and immersive new age-tingled solo work, alongside 2 poems read from New York-based poet Sigler. L.L. Being, an accompanying text (a dialogue between Sigler and Seeno that covers everything from 2 Fat Ladies and Being There, to Windham Hill and khakis) is available here .

With his debut release on co-owned Smallville record label Stefan Marx presents an exclusive three-part poster collection coated inside a gatefold 12-inch cover sleeve. Giving the Smallville shop and label a visual face since the very beginning Stefan Marx created hundreds of posters and flyers, painted the shop windows regularly and conceived every record cover.

Now is the time for himself to release an extraordinary Smallville/Nieves issue in 12-inch format. Three folded posters (each has the size of 90 x 60 cm) including a first appearance of his Band project The Dead Sea (aka Stefan Marx, RVDS, Lawrence and Birte Löschenkohl).

The Book Trust, a site-specific publication and installation, was originally presented at the NY Art Book Fair, 5–7 November, 2010. During those days, the semi-fictional Investment Futures Strategy, Ltd., comprised of five graduate students from the Department of Graphic Design at the Yale University School of Art, offered an original publication for trade in a series of barters executed by its authors.

The Trust and the accompanying Book Trust Prospectus address matters of micro-economy and distribution, as well as prescribed versus perceived value. The project suggests a new currency specific to the setting of the Book Fair, a context in which a distinct set of commodities is exchanged by like-minded vendors in a finite space and time. It is only in this setting that a book could be posited as capital — a literal stand-in for the money that commonly exchanges hands at the Fair. Perceived worth is thus no longer dictated by edition or price, but instead by a trader’s subjective notion of the values they assign each book.

Over the three days of the Fair, the book, produced in a fixed quantity of 500, varied in value as each negotiation determined and redetermined its worth in the marketplace. With each transaction, the Prospectus assumed the value of the book for which it was exchanged. The traded commodities now comprise The Book Trust — a value-appreciating book bank. By trading with IFS, Ltd., participants acquired a single theoretical share of the bank, the Prospectus acting as a document of that transaction. In framing the project in a format similar to that of a stock exchange, IFS, Ltd. hopes that the Trust emphasizes the tenuous, abstract value of the book: as a designed object, as a medium for content, as a traded commodity, and as a symbol of participation in the project itself.

Prospectus
The Book Trust Prospectus is, in non-equal parts: a local currency, a stock prospectus for The Book Trust, an exploration into the nature of small-scale publishing and its presence at the NY Art Book Fair (R. Giampietro), a survey of precedented alternative currencies (B. Critton), a platform for hyperbolic re-representations of anonymous fiat money (R. Rozendaal), a foray into corporate branding and rebranding (Metahaven et al.), a proposal for a time-based repurposing of existing banknotes (N. Hirsch & Z. Kyes), an analysis of the current state of [art] book-publishing and -design (L. v. Deursen et al.), a venue for research into non-essential commodity futures like tulips and Beanie Babies™ (H. Gassel), a profile of independent art book vendors (Golden Age), and a podium for experimentation with anti-counterfeiting guilloché renderings (B. Griffiths & Z. Klauck). It is the story of its own making and financing as well as an evaluation of the context in which it was made and financed. The Prospectus is a 160-page, perfect-bound, one-colour book, offset-printed in an edition of five hundred by GHP printing in West Haven, Connecticut, USA.

Cancellation for me is this dynamic act: it is at once violent, an attack, an endgame to a struggle, but at the same time the mega opener. In the place of something cancelled there is only opportunity, only potential… For example, an event is cancelled, you have the night free; tour is cancelled, you have two weks to stay at home and work in your studio and sleep in your own bed and not lose money; exhibition is cancelled, now look at all of this time and material you have floating around… The bottom line is canceling as negating, as a way to remove to create potential, to create space. So after working for a while with the graphice of a literal “CANCELLED” stencil image, it was like, how do you cancel that? How does that get further negated?

— Brendan Fowler

Born in Flames, the publication, is an illustrated transcript of Lizzie Borden’s 1983 film ‘Born in Flames’, edited and designed by Kaisa Lassinaro. It includes an interview with Borden conducted in Los Angeles by Lassinaro, as well as the lyrics of Undercover Nation by The Bloods and Born in Flames by Red Crayola, kindly supplied by Adele Bertei and Mayo Thompson.

‘Born in Flames poses the question of whether oppression against women will be eliminated under any kind of social system. […] It is a fantasy presenting a group of women who, confronted with the very “ordinary” oppression women have been experiencing for decades, refuse to take it any longer and become armed fighters against the government. Their position is that oppression against women is not eliminated automatically with “socialism” — not only do political values have to change, cultural values must change and become embedded in practice.’

— Lizzie Borden in Heresies #16, 1983

In the spirit of Borden’s film, the publication was collectively funded by the following individuals and institutions:

Stuart Bailey, Heather Bradley, Eleanor Brown, Geoffrey Brusatto, Culturgest, Wayne Daly, Chris Evans, Beatrice Gibson, Nick Gordon, The Hawthorne Archive, Erna Hecey, Onno Hesselink, Will Holder, Jeff Khonsary, Koenig Books, Uriel Orlow, Falke Pisano, Philomene Pirecki, PrintRoom: Karin de Jong, Ewoud van Rijn, Pro QM, David Reinfurt, Jane Rolo, Catherine de Smet, Benjamin Thorel, Giulia Vallicelli, and Julia Zay.

Stephen Willats’ major essay The Artist as an Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour is re-issued for the first time by Occasional Papers. Published in 1973 by Gallery House, London — where Willats was Director of the Centre for Behavioural Art — and long out of print, the paper includes rigorous analyses of social forms of artistic production and descriptions of a number of projects by the artist.

The Master Builder: Talking with Ken Briggs by Sara De Bondt and Fraser Muggeridge, is a slim (28 pp. plus covers) volume, the size (and look and feel, with coated and uncoated stocks) of a typical Briggs NT programme. It comprises an interview with Briggs, a short biography and portrait, plenty of pictures (24 in colour) of his pioneering posters and programmes for the theatre in the 1960s and 70s, and a detail of Briggs’ slide archive, carefully labelled with Dymo tape.

When asked about his structured, asymmetrical booking forms for the theatre, Briggs claims ‘I didn’t care about beauty or the lack of it. They are purely typographic,’ then goes on to explain his colour system: ‘from warm colours in winter to cool colours in summer: red, ochre, purple, bright blue and so on.’ Which is why he was known as the colourist.