On October 28th from 11pm to 4am, join your fellow K48osmonauts at Santos (100 Lafayette St) as we escape the Earth's problems and celebrate the launch of K48: Starship Couterforce, issue No. 7—NYC's most awesome artist's fanzine. There will be music and dancing all night as we countdown the last minutes before take off—put on your space suits and bring favorite aliens.
Live performances by Come Rad Comrade, Brother Bruno, Tha Pumpsta, Living Days, Popular Science—featuring Tobell von Cartier and DJ set's by NYC's Kingdom, Michael Magnan, Atomly, Telfar and Fatima Al Qadiri.
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K48 is proud to announce the launch of its seventh issue: Starship Counterforce.
In this edition, K48 explores space, science fiction and our race toward the future.
Our planet is dying. The world faces environmental and economic collapse, consumption continues at even faster rates and governments wage war to feed corporate greed and oil dependency... we feel more and more imprisoned by the forces of gravity and wish to break free of our oxygen bubble—this spaceship Earth.
Today it's hard to imagine what the future might look like... one example that has inspired K48 from the start is George Lucas' student film, THX 1138. In his film, which he calls "an artifact from the future", what's left of life of Earth is sedated and confined to living in a subterranean world under constant surveillance and where emotions are against the law. There's no more love, only work to build a robotic police state and to consume —"buy more now," and "be happy".
We're not that far off from Lucas' vision. In the late 70s and through the mid 80s the pages of OMNI made the future seem glamorous. Today, however, in light of the very real and practical space station, deep space exploration and the search for other habitable planets has lost some of its magic. Nevertheless, the idea of space still resides in our culture as a means of hope and escape. The clean geometric constructions, spectral patterns, cosmic powers, and quantum physics associated with space let us turn away from our human problems and desire to imagine a world uncontaminated by our presence.
Excursions within the issue include photos by Marco Boggio Sella that bring news of the moon landing to a small West African village in Burkina Faso, a fashion spread of Telfar Clemen's 2008 ECO Society collection abstracted by Jason Farrer, prose by Amir Mogharabi theorizing the meaning of a last breath in The Cosmogony of Deceit, and an interview with Klaus Schulze the father of electronic music by editor Scott Hug. The issue's cover is a specially designed gold-embossed spacemetric construction by Jonah Groeneboer and each issue comes with a sculpture of light produced by Anne Koch and a soundtrack CD compiled and mixed by Samuel KkLOVENHOOF of led er est.
Special events include a preview exhibit at the 3rd Annual New York Art Book Fair, a launch party with band performances at Santos Party House on October 28th, an exhibition at Rekord in Oslo, Norway and a satellite launch party at the Aqua Hotel in Miami on December 5th. Further events will be posted on thek48bullet.blogspot.com.
K48#7 Artists/writers:
Jarrod Anderson
Fatima Al Qadiri
Marc Andreottola
Hrafnhildur Arnardottir (a.k.a. Shoplifter) w/Erez Sabag and Edda Gudmundsdottir
Hackworth Ashley
assume vivid astro focus
Brian Belott
Matt Bua
Michael Bilsborough
Jesse Bransford
Coley Brown
Bureau V
Christophe Chemin
Telfar Clemens
Ryan Compton
Claire Corey
Brent Cowley/Asher Penn
TM Davy
Will Duty
Chris Duncan
FACE
Jonah Freeman
Jack Goldstein
Jonah Groeneboer
Andrew Guenther
Wade Guyton
Jonathan Hartshorn
Brandon Herman
Hood by Air
Timothy Hull
Xylor Jane
Craig Kalpakjian
Shaun Kessler
Anne Koch
Terence Koh
Jeff Konigsberg
Michael Lazarus
Paul Lee
Severiano Martinez
Gloria Maximo
Keith Mayerson
Justin McAllister
Josh McNey
Robert Melee
Nicholas Messing
Johnny Misheff
Amir Mogharabi
Slava Mogutin
John Monteith
Mary Nicholson
Micki Pellerano
Misaki Kawai & Pete Pezzimenti
PFFR
Scott Reeder
Tyson Reeder
Theo A. Rosenblum
Samuel de la Rosa
Ezra Rubin
Borna Sammak
Justin Samson
Desi Santiago
Anja Schwörer
Marco Boggio Sella
Hiro Sugiyama
Robert Sumrell
James Swain
Mungo Thomson
Donnie & Travis
Jan Wandrag
Pete Watts
Grant Worth
Will Yackulic
Yemenwed
K48 Music by:
Fatima Al Qadiri
Der Räuber und der Prinz
Nacho Patrol
led er est
Medio Mutante
Brother Bruno
Living Days
Tha Pumpsta
Atomly
Kingdom
Popular Science
Come Rad Comrade
Tobias Bernstrup
2vm
Jeffrey SFire
Grackle
Frank Alpine
What if John McCain were a former president of the Harvard Law Review?
Last week I got invited to participate in an outdoor art event held in the historic Missouri State Penitentiary. The prison is one of the oldest west of the Mississippi and held some of the most notorious criminals — like James Earl Ray, the guy who shot Martin Luther King. The pen first welcomed prisoners in 1836 and operated until 2004 when a new prison opened just outside of Jefferson City. I grew up not far from Jefferson City, in California, Missouri. This was a very fun experience and I want to thank the curator and event organizer, Carla Steck for inviting me to participate. Today the project made front head-line news in the local paper. Apparently, the crew that was hired to demo the site is pretty pissed. Read all about it on the front page of the local newspaper here...
