A dispatch from the creative frontier by the Blackbird Foundation. Observations and artefacts from the creative projects we funded in 2025 including artworks, essays, photography and more.

Economic precarity is up. Market demands are too. People are drowning in digital overload. Political threats loom. The second Anonymous Creative Futures survey shares what 300+ anon artists and creators feel about this moment, their words 100%.

Nine writers explore the future of the internet.

Quiet Media is a print-first publication founded on the simple belief that our attention is our most valuable resource, and it should be treated with care. Through the perspective of 15 contributors, the inaugural issue explores what changes when we stop optimizing for speed and volume, and start designing for depth and meaning instead.

Something is wrong with the internet and we all feel it. Join us & SOFTER for a three-day collective manifesto and workshop to name that feeling together, mapping our digital lives, drafting the principles we refuse to live without online, and building webpages from scratch. Bring your love, your rage, and your hope.

BOOK of HOURS is a free 236-page PDF intended to be viewed in 2-page format on a handheld digital device. Taking the idea of the medieval prayer book into the virtual age, it provides light but also underscores our vast separation from the natural and spiritual worlds.

"Legal Structures for Creative Practices" is an illustrated zine designed for creative entrepreneurs that unpacks the pros, cons, and nuances of various legal structures to help choose the one that will best suit their unique practice. View the digital zine at: AThousandForests.com

The sixthedition of Fishnet Magazine explores the topic of Eroticism. This zine is made up of various artists' works, varying across all different mediums. Preorder shipping starts in May.

ON SKIBIDI is the first in-depth critical examination of Skibidi Toilet. Based off a 3M+ view TikTok series analyzing the YouTube Shorts, this pamphlet seeks to ground Skibidi within its historical moment and use it to illuminate the uncanny configurations of self and screen that define digitality today.

Get detailed Notion templates for all the exercises in the Artist's Way book. ⋆౨ৎ˚⟡˖ ࣪ Unlock your higher creativity with the self-guided 12 week program in the Artists Way written by Julia Cameron. Join artists like Doechii, Alicia Keys, Bella Hadid, and more in the creative transformation guided by these exercises.

Members of the Baukunst collective, startup founders, and guest experts, including leaders from manufacturing giants like NVIDIA, Flex, Tesla, Rivian, and Apple, share a deep dive on one of this decade's most important issues: how AI is shifting manufacturing, employment, and the shape of human work.

NEW EPUB VERSION: Exocapitalism challenges the critical orthodoxy on how it understands and talks about capitalism today.

i’m calling this new series “art from the apocolypse” - and it’s ideal for those life momenets you need to decorate quickly but don’t have time to spellcheck. Perfect for minimalist loving therapists, mental health professionals, and past life regression practictioners who got D's in history class & have an unusually low startle index.

An anthology of 13 essays from the 2025 Essay Architecture Prize. 100% of royalties go to the writers, the judges, and the 2026 prize pool. Order by April 5th!

A journey through the spiral of the Work that Reconnects to detox from capitalism and imagine a more generative way forward.

"Perma free" Amazon books? Discover a unique, easy and clever way to expand your existing audience - attract new readers to your Substack/newsletter, website, digital storefront, IRL business, or any other content, cause or client community you want to grow - through this little known Amazon self publishing strategy for authors and entrepreneurs.

Pompeii! is Prem Krishnamurthy’s evolving digital artwork—a layered PDF archive tracing transformation, ritual, and collective authorship. Released via the Pompeii Commitment, it reframes catastrophe as creative turning, inviting viewers into an open, living document of change.

Mindfulness, magic, (Metta) and mojo. A tiny book about big love - a simple practice to fall back in love with the world (and your life) in difficult times.

Whether you're at a crossroads or lost in the wilds of too many possibilities, this spell conjures a compass from the patterns of your own attention.

A crash course to fall back in love with the world and your life.

First Futures is a free, 4-hour virtual workshop that makes futures design accessible to everyone. Learn practical tools to spot change, map consequences, design speculative products, and create artefacts that challenge the status quo.

Notion activity workbook. Track the practice of loving kindness meditation - cultivate more compassion, self love, purpose, presence and peace.....through the magic of "metta" meditation - and Notion! Beta access to our new mindfulness app (coming Dec 2025 - get notified when it's available in beta)

a girl's bedroom story for the vanishing second internet, this .pdf is a collectible scrap taken from an ongoing confessional prose-poetry project. it is for the girl and her shadow. it should be read alone at 4am, or opened and discarded like an inexpensive gift.

Extra Focus: The Quick Start Guide to Adult ADHD is your starter guide to understanding your ADHD brain and learning a smarter way to find motivation.

"Alt-Alterity" envisions a world where the notion of “alterity” dissolves, making way for new affinities. In response to an era marked by crisis, this curatorial project serves as an artistic provocation, navigating you through speculative realities, rebellious technologies, and fluid identities shaped by the ideas and works of 31 artists.

npw

a digital magazine filled with my favorite images & missed connections collected from newyork.craigslist.org in february 2026 ♡

UNLABELED issue 3 is all about escaping reality with the soft aesthetic. Explore how dress and playfulness have impacted artists in all industries!

LOVE LIKE THUNDER, GRIEF LIKE RAIN is a memoir and practices to move us through grief. The work is an offering that leads us back to love with stories, meditations, and mindfulness exercises. Pre-orders are open for the first 100 editions & include a free digital copy of the book. Orders ship March 2026.

A blend of IRL ritual and AI prompt, this spell is designed to transform your fears into fresh fuel for your creativity.

The first artist release under The Network Archives Label, "Algae Ecosystem," Vol. 1, highlights two creators & two ways of world-building through Vibe Coding. It's a way to document the tools, habits, and creative logic behind the work. This is what modern world-building looks like.

Inspire by the influence of biomimicry in art - the practice of looking to nature’s forms and systems for creative solutions. Focusing on how we as creatives maintain our humanity and what makes us human in a world of ever-changing technology and progress 🌀

One way our world could go from here.

Will we still be asking people to like and subscribe in 10 years? "After The Creator Economy" explores constructive alternatives for the ways we produce, distribute, and monetize creative work online. Co-edited by Austin Robey (Metalabel) and Severin Matusek (co—matter), this release preserves and digitally reissues the zine.

What if AI didn’t run on Silicon Valley logic? Making Sense of Slow AI, compiles 40 pages of eclectic stories on Small, Esoteric, and Ancestral AI – inviting you to think small, make it magical, and plan for the past.

Worlds Unfolding is a guide and inspiration hub for virtual world-making, offering curated prompts, community-contributed projects, and ideas that blend storytelling, design, and imagination. It explores how virtual spaces can foster connection, creativity, and care while critically examining their ties to the dominant paradigm.

Cover: Brittany Shyne (Seeds). Features: Sugar Studios, The Perfect Neighbor, Caribbean documentaries, nuclear documentaries, Julie Goldman, Impact Partners. Festivals: DOK Leipzig 2025, Ji.hlava 2025. Columns: Screen Time.

Chief Hugh Akagi delivers an insightful message to the King of England, asking him to remind Canada that the Peskotomuhkati made their treaties with the King before Canada existed. The Peskotomuhkati people remain unrecognized as a First Nation in Canada. This video and press release are free, collectible items designed to build good relations.

Two new Chorist tracks; physical zine + digital audio. The zine is printed on the artist's father's computer science homework papers from the early 80's. Limited edition. Free.

A zine documenting conversations about resistance from activists outside of technology to translate into modes of resistance against genAI models.

We’ve been told patriarchy is inevitable. It’s not. In redefining power, this book imagines the next world and invites you to help build it. Pre-order for Spring 2026

An anthology of responses to the prompt REBELLION from the School of Critical Design community. A riso printed, lovingly made edition 1/50, with more than 80 pages. Physical copies are bundled with a discounted course or membership to School of Critical Design.

Where are we now as creative people? Where are we going? What do we vision for the future? 75 creative people anonymously share the dreams, concerns, and joys grounding their creative thinking for the year ahead.

Sending loving kindness to all beings, in all directions, everywhere. May all beings be happy. May all beings feel loved. May all beings awaken. May all beings live with presence and peace. May all suffering come to an end. May all beings feel the kindness of strangers. May all beings feel loved and seen. May all beings understand wh

A 52-page zine exploring how artists can channel their creative anxiety. Features contributions and insights from Aubrey Plaza, Melissa Broder, Anelise Chen, Jlin, Mike Rugnetta, Henry Rollins, and Nikki Sixx

In 2018, The Creative Independent published our first zine, featuring the emotional and practical wisdom of Philip Glass, Yumna Al-Arashi, Taja Cheek, and others on how to make a living as an artist. This is a digital edition of that work.

because sometimes you need a shitty pep talk from a stranger

Unplayable: Viewer Manual is a guide to a simulation that refuses play. Four NPC archetypes chase satisfaction that never arrives, their actions narrated and scored by a language model. Part instruction manual, part systems map, the publication documents a world that runs perfectly while keeping its characters suspended inside it.