What happens when you unleash 1,000 fancy journals into the wild? Determined to find out, Brian Singer, a 34-year-old graphic designer, started buying notebooks in bulk. Then he got one hundred artists and designers — among them, big names like Joshua Davis, Michael Mabry, and Gary Taxali — to do ten covers each. In August 2000, he sent all 1,000 journals out into the world. Some traveled abroad in the hand luggage of acquaintances. Others were sent to those who requested one via the project website. The rest were left in porta potties and phone booths around his hometown of San Francisco. Singer also asked participants to scan and upload their entries onto the site, hoping it would result in a collective record of the location and content of each notebook.
Six years, fifty states, and more than forty countries later, 998 of the journals are still out there documenting sob stories and art projects and random tidbits of creative energy input by people from all walks of life. Director Andrea Kreuzhage’s documentary, 1000 Journals, tracks down journal participants from Marseille to Zagreb and weaves them into the inspirational story of the designer whose curiosity blossomed into a global phenomenon. “We were all creative people at one point in our lives, and now we all go to work every day and sit in traffic. So…what happened?” Starting in Berlin, 1000 Journals is slated to tour the film-festival circuit throughout the year.

HISHAM AKIRA BHAROOCHA did Issue 17’s Earth By. “We all have an inner cosmos that reflects our understanding of this planet,” he says. “This image is from my inner cosmos.” The Brooklyn-based artist combines music, visual art, and photography to create multimedia works that have created buzz in the NYC underground community. Born in Niigata, Japan to Burmese and Japanese parents, Hisham has taken his work globally to places like the Watarium Museum in Tokyo and De Vleeshal in the Netherlands. His musical endeavors include founding two bands, Lightning Bolt and Black Dice, collaborations with Doug Aiken and the Boredoms, and his first solo album, Full Bloom, which was released in January. At its core, Hisham’s mission is simple and integrative — he hopes “for each medium to embrace the other — to create and support each other without borders.”

Seriene. It means “welcome” in Samburu and can be heard as you make your way past the proud, elaborately adorned warriors of the Samburu people, who occupy a remote region of northern Kenya, near the foothills of Mount Kenya. Semi-nomadic pastoralists, they are excellent blacksmiths and subsist primarily as farmers and herders, though meat and vegetables are not often available. So they survive on what surrounds them, preserving meat with salt, making soups from bark and roots, and drinking milk and blood from their livestock. These days, draught has put even more strain on the Samburu, stifling their ability to keep livestock and grow even meager crops.
     During his first encounter with the Samburu, photographer Lyle Owerko was told, “We will feed you what we have. You will drink what we drink, you will eat what we eat, and you will drink blood if that is all we have to offer.” Later, he was offered a plate. “Tonight we give you our best meat and bread,” they told him. “You will drink Samburu tea to quench your thirst.” It’s tough to trace back the origins of the Samburu further than a couple of hundred years, as many of them have no identification or knowledge of their own age. Instead, theirs is an oral tradition, spliced with mythology.

Photo by Paul Pedersen, Beauty, 1993

In recent years, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson has become a prime exemplar of the international art star. He’s received no shortage of praise for his installations, which frequently incorporate light, water, and various natural or unnatural representations of the earth’s elements, to become the fine-tuned infrastructure for an experience of the perception of beauty as it manifests in the world. His work often inspires the kind of gee-whiz wonderment that youngsters first experience in learning about the physical sciences, but they rest clearly in the domain of fine art, drawing on crafts as much conceptual as technical.
     Four years ago, at the age of 36, the artist experienced a major career breakthrough when the Tate Modern commissioned him to fill their massive Turbine Hall, with a site-specific installation. Eliasson’s Weather Project tapped into a global phenomenon — the weather — in a way that particularly resonated with UV-deprived Londoners. The large former power plant became a literal and metaphorical mirror of the local landscape, with a giant “sun” regulating the accumulation and dissipation of mist beneath a mirrored “sky”. Visitors came repeatedly to bask, frolic, and picnic. They also came to meditate. By taking the weather’s core elements out of circulation and re-creating them within the museum, the artist offered witnesses the space and time to reconsider their relationship to reality. This is his oft-stated agenda, which tends to be met in very visceral, participatory ways.

Photography by Alexander Berg

The photos here were taken during one of two marathon studio sessions in New York City. In 2003, Alexander Berg had received access to an empty storefront through the Chashama space grant program, which provides temporary free space to artists around Manhattan. Like any ambitious photographer, Berg was looking for a novel and powerful idea to catalyze his artistic vision. He says One Shot came to him as a rigorous but playful experiment. “I’d recognized that the first frame of any shoot always held more tension, expectation, joy and fear, and the project became a kind of open question about what can happen in only one frame.” Berg put a sign on 42nd Street outside the makeshift studio, at the epicenter of the world’s most international city, and also emailed friends. Then, for ten hours a day he photographed portraits of any and all comers. The theme was simple: Be as you are or however you wish to be — you have only one frame.