A biannual publication by W/— Projects in collaboration with Leong Leong Architecture, White Zinfandel is devoted to the visual manifestation of food and culture produced within the lives of creative individuals. The second issue of White Zinf, as its editors have come to call it, brings together a mostly-new cast of characters who have devoted their creative energies to indulge a sometimes perverse obsession with art and food. The first issue of White Zinf was inspired by the ethos of Gordon Matta Clark’s FOOD restaurant — raw, resourceful and a celebration of New York’s downtown artist community in the 1970s.

For the second issue, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Rather than the singular and novel, it is inspired by the generic and banal. As a perfect marriage of pragmatism and cultural excess, the TV dinner represents a culinary baseline that spans nearly fifty years. Its origins can be traced to middle America in the early ‘60s and various processed food companies.

But the exact moment of the TV dinner’s invention is vague, not unlike the processed foods sealed within. As an archetype and common denominator of Western Pop culture, the TV dinner spans our collective nostalgia with conflicting sensations of comfort and disgust.

For several year, Bastien Aubry and Dimitri Broquard have been making work inspired by outsider art or the applied arts like handcrafts or ceramics. It appears as if they both don’t think much of rules and that they just spontaneously adapt their ideas. That makes their work fresh and full of expression. In the Beginning it was Humid — their fourth publication with Nieves — features a broad selection of their ceramic works from the last few year, and concludes with a short story by A.C. Kupper.

Bastien Aubry (1974) and Dimitri Broquard (1969) established the two-man design studio Flag in 2002. They work for art and cultural institutions, producing catalogues, artists books, magazines and posters. FLAG also creates drawings, illustrations for editorials and private projects. Both Broquard and Aubry respectively teach at art schools in Switzerland.

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.

Outpost is an annual print publication on art, design and community action from cities that have been traditionally underexposed beyond their local contexts. Each beautifully produced and visually engaging issue of Outpost focuses on a single urban location and comes packaged with a limited edition print by an artist from the featured city. Outpost is a journey into the creative heart of a place, and via features like “Secretly Famous” (profiles of the most infamous artsy locals), guerrilla engagements with tourist attractions, historical explorations, mapping projects, and deep dives into artist collectives and organizations, Outpost exposes the myriad ways in which unique local communities arise through creative collaboration and production.

Exploratory and playful, critical with a sense of levity, and inspired by hand-drawn maps, flags, totem poles, poorly pixelated iPhone photos, moody landscapes, and the spirit of adventure, Outpost is dedicated to strengthening ties between communities and spreading new ideas about how creative culture can change our world.

Conceived in collaboration with curator Sharmini Pereira design studio OK-RM and published on the occasion of the 2011 Abraaj Capital Art prize, Footnote to a Project* is a collection of images, citations and references that support and inform the creation of the five selected artworks. Informed by the book’s title, the headline concept was to express the historical traditions of footnoting and its relationship with reading and writing. The designers adopted the use of a variety of typographic symbols traditionally used by type setters to indicate footnotes. The book takes the form of an enlarged paper back and is split into 5 equal parts — one for each artist — providing an in-depth documentation of the works through images and extended captions. The book is accompanied by two book marks intended to facilitate navigation between image and text.

Art & Seoul is a biannual, bilingual, arts and culture magazine which highlights the work of artists and designers from Korea through interviews, essays, profiles, and various collaborative projects.

Issue 111 Libraries includes features by Adam Lauder on Performing the Library; Jen Hutton on Dexter Sinister; David Senior on the Whole Earth Catalogue; Randy Lee Cutler on Reading; Pandora Syperek on ILLUMINnations: the 54th Venice Biennale; Jenifer Papararo on Frances Stark: I’ve Had it and a Half at The Hammer Museum, and an artist project by Read-in. Issue 111 also includes reviews of: Rabih Mroué: The Inhabitants of Images at Prefix ICA; Song Dong: Waste Not at the Vancouver Art Gallery; Gina Badger: Mongrels at Issue Project Room; Adel Abdessemed: The Future of Décor at OCAD Professional Gallery; Chris Curreri: Something Something at University of Toronto Art Centre; The Birds and the Bees at Oakville Galleries; The Domestic Queens Project at FOFA Gallery, Concordia, and Wim Botha: All Around at Galerie Jette Rudolf. Also included is a review by the 2011 C New Critics Competition winner Kari Cwynar on Models for Taking Part at Presentation House Gallery.

A celebration of the mundane. MS Sans invites thirteen contributors to explore the potential of the typeface Microsoft Sans.

“Each glyph feels as if constructed from rigid individual bits expressing no empathy for the bows and straights of the other. Compare these letterforms to the negative spaces of its progenitor Helvetica; whence MS Sans borrowed its original file name, helv.tff. Inspect closely how the stems of the lowercase b, d, g, p, and q bend not to their respective bowls. O, daughters and sons of the New House what brother of Arial is this? What absent father’s nose is present in this numeral 1? And to whose crooked grandmother do we blame thine unspinely 8? Yet take no offense. Similar results manifest when a gaze is exercised on your humble narrator.”

— Stewart Smith

They Magazine is a dialogue between literature and art. Each issue has a unique design and features stories from different authors centered around one unifying thought.

They 3 features short stories from Dallas Clayton, Cian O’Day, Reeves Wiederman, Arna Bontemps Hemenway, Jason Parham and Aaron Lake Smith.

Reference Work is a conceptual business textbook.

As stated by Syms “Reference Work is the text I wish we had read prior to opening our business Golden Age. It contains original essays from Marco Kane Braunschweiler and I, the syllabus from the only business class we ever took, summaries from our favorite business books and a collection of resources that we’ve found helpful over the past four years. The book may be interpreted as sarcastic or irreverent, but I hope readers will notice our sincerity. It is difficult trying to enter the business world as a right brain thinker, not because those skills aren’t essential, but because that world is structured around hard metrics and art is difficult to quantify. Reference Work is intended to demystify some of the day-to-day operations of a cultural business and expand the definition of commercial success.”

The text was edited by Zachary Kaplan. The book was published with the assistance of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago on the occasion of We Are Here: Art & Design Out of Context, an exhibition curated by James Goggin.