Phase Zero
Maya Valencia
The gritty visual language of New York City’s '70s underground art scenes and social movements is manifested in a slew of guerilla printed ephemera: Punk magazine, The East Village Eye, Provo flyers, the East Village Other. These DIY magazines and newspapers documented art and experimental music performances spanning across the city. Today, the emergence of chronically online internet culture has resulted in newer tactics for displaying content—endless scrolls and memes. Social media’s absurdist aesthetics seep into the visual language and social makeup of NYCs underground, creating a reality rooted in cyberculture networks and schemes.
Phase Zero is an experimental-exploration-time-capsule-print-publication. It is an artifact attempting to document and critique the rapidly evolving culture and visual language of the current counterculture in NYC. Its DIY aesthetic, guerilla marketing, and rapid production mimics the tactics of 70s punk fanzines to contradict the internet aesthetic and create traditional community networks. Constantly evolving to simulate culture and trend cycles, the publication’s formula is simple but never finalized. Its container is an unconventional manifesto: a conversation between the two editors with new annotations for every issue. The discourse continues in monthly community meetings where new content is collected and old content is questioned. This dialogue is manifested in its ephemera: iterations of unfinished issues, typeface sketches on ripped newsprint, existential writings scribbled haphazardly on misprints, and messy Risograph flyers.
Phase Zero is a shared space for anyone to share whatever they want. Phase Zero is subject to change.