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.

This publication examines the spaces, nations, and communities created by artists or indivuals to develop alternative modes of living. Throughout history individuals have continuously developed systems based on a mix of reality, fiction, and mediatization, create micro-nations, or fight for their existence. All these proposals are simultaneously real and utopic. By inventing identity signs (IDs, flags, constitutions, currencies, etc.), by practicing their beliefs (be it through dance, naturism, terrorism, or collectivism), and by working on the boundaries of reality (parallel worlds, isolationism, new territories, etc.), these proposals are challenging our definitions of normalcy and territoriality. The title Utopics is itself the free contraction of utopias, you, topic, topos, and pics.

Conceived as a glossary, the book includes artists such as Le Bélier, Carsten Höller, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Fabrice Gygi, General Idea, Lang/Baumann, Matt Mullican, Mai-Thu Perret, NSK (Irwin), Peter Coffin, Steiner & Lenzlinger, Superflex, as well as intitiatives such as La République Géniale (Robert Filliou), State of Sabotage (Robert Jelinek), micro-nations, L’Ecole de Stéphanie, etc.