Investment Futures Strategy, Ltd. (United States) in partnership with GRAPHIC magazine (Korea) is pleased to introduce Futures, a semi-official newsletter published as a stand-alone supplement to GRAPHIC #17 (”When Design Becomes Attitude”). In lieu of a traditional contribution, IFS, Ltd. has chosen to use the GRAPHIC platform to continue its experiments in trade and publishing.

The Book Trust Prospectus examined new possibilities for funding, trade value, and distribution by attaching a different kind of significance to the object, thus short-circuiting the expected monetary transaction. Production of the Prospectus, however, relied on labor-intensive methods that required hours of input for a relatively small output. With the Futures newsletter, IFS, Ltd. has hybridized the positive aspects of large-scale corporate publishing — economies of scale or large print-runs, distribution of labor, and maximum efficiency — with the dictatorial authorship afforded by self-publishing. This new model maximizes potential as authors and designers while minimizing the opportunity cost of production and distribution.

Within the logic of IFS, Ltd. Futures will also act as a form of currency: readers can use their copy of the newsletter to trade for a copy of the Book Trust Prospectus (see: the Prospectus, left). These recirculated copies of Futures will then be re-made available as a way to generate revenue for a future, freely distributed, as-yet-undefined project thus continuing the self-sustaining eco-system of publishing and distribution, one in which readers and producers collaborate to generate and circulate content outside of the cost-prohibitive channels of traditional publishing.

The IFS, Ltd. Futures Newsletter is, in non-equal parts: a corporate bulletin, a speculative trading instrument, an experiment in memetic and symbiotic publishing, an internal-external analysis of company performance (B. Critton, H. Gassel, B. Griffiths, Z. Klauck, M. Nguyen), a proposal for an allegorical Escape Act (S. Dockray), a bid for a series of six activities (D. Horvitz), an abridged catalogue of semi-fictional gemstones (L. Francescone), a profile of independent art book distributor (Textfield, Inc.), and a self-reflexive / -reflective cartoon caption contest (R. Rozendaal).