The KS Project

You may be looking for the zine The K/S Art Project.

Community
Name:	The KS Project
Date(s):	2018-ongoing
Type:	Fanart, Fanfiction
Fandom:	Star Trek's Kirk & Spock
URL:	The KS Project
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The KS Project began in 2018. It is a fan-run community created to preserve and share fanart and fanfiction.

"The KS Project is a continuing non-profit mission to rescue, collect, and share original art & fanworks focusing on Star Trek’s iconic duo Kirk & Spock, helping in the curation and preservation of this cultural history for fans today and in the future. Get in touch if you have unwanted fanzines, or art you want to see go to a good home!"

The KS Project is a continuing mission to rescue, collect, and share original art and fanworks focusing on Star Trek’s iconic duo Kirk and Spock, helping in the curation and preservation of this cultural history for fans today and in the future.

The two characters conveyed an indefinable, profound relationship that has been explored and enriched by over half a century of prolific creative fandom (producing art, sculpture, fanfic, vids, theatre, film, crafts, filk songs…) alongside endorsed books, comics, artistic merchandise and more.

The project was conceived by a fan who was inspired at a difficult time by the two characters and the relationship they saw on screen, initially becoming the recipient of gifts of unwanted fanworks. Realising this rich material and history was in danger of being lost (e.g. disposed of by disinterested parties or becoming inaccessible in other ways), they declared a ‘safehouse’ for anything that people wished to see go to a devoted home, especially fanzines, and began to research and catalogue the material. Given its founder is an artist, and no other project exists with this as a primary focus, art is particularly welcomed and appreciated. It would be amazing to one day be home to one of the most comprehensive archives of original Kirk and Spock art/fan art, and to be able to safeguard it for the future.

This indeed hopes to add to other efforts to rescue and conserve such work and help other fans access and enjoy it going forwards. If you are part of any projects, institution or fan-lead, for example, to digitize, catalogue and share fanworks, then do feel free to get in touch.

If you are a collector, especially of Trek art, or even an original creator, whether or not you have anything to donate or sell, it would be great to hear from you. Even fewer comprehensive records exist of the fan art than fanzines, including artists who have produced huge bodies of original work over the years but much is MIA or remains rarely seen. As originals are found and added to the collection, they will first be shared online. If a grand gallery is a far off dream, ways to view the physical work will progress step by step, with possibilities such as bringing it to events or visitations.

This is a fan-run non-profit passion project, so means and resources are limited, but every way will be found to make this a success and special contribution to the fandom, relying on mutual generosity and enthusiasm.

Live Long and Prosper!

Fan Comments

[renegadepublishing]: A lot of marginalized history is lost when people die and folks going through the estate in a hurry, with no idea what they’re looking at, pitch it all in the “Donate” box – or the garbage. This last especially happens when it’s LGBT+.

Fanbinders and folks who received copies: it’s something to think about! Do your part to preserve fandom history.

• Put your books in your will.

• Choose a fannish next of kin. (You can formally designate a fannish next of kin on AO3 for your account there.)

• Put copies of your wishes for the books *between* the books on the shelf.

[prismatic-bell]: :Speaking as a fandom historian who’s finding it stupidly difficult to collect older zines in SETS so I can document the conversations had in the letters to the editor:

PLEASE DO THIS!!!

Heaven forbid any of you should pass on at an untimely age, but I can’t tell you what a blessing I’d consider it to receive someone’s hand-bound fanfiction as a museum exhibit with a little letter in the front explaining why they picked that story to bind and how they did it. THAT’S HISTORY. THAT’S MAKING HISTORY. That letter would be called “provenance” and it explains where the item came from and how it came to be, and may provide things like a date or place of origin. I’m literally reading a novel-length fanfiction right now in a fandom I have zero interest in because it’s from 1978, I found the author–still alive–online, and I want to talk to her about her fanfiction before it’s too late. You can have that conversation now. Even if you’re like “I’m 17, who cares about my Dream SMP fanfiction?” I assure you, years from now, having a bound copy of your Dream SMP fanfiction will be something to write academic papers about. On the levels of transformative work (since Dream is, himself, making a transformative work of Minecraft), on the fact that this was a digital fandom from which a tangible work was created, on the fact that you took the time to learn amateur bookbinding to make it happen, all of that will be as historically valuable 30 years from now as teenage diaries from the moon landing are today. All of it! Anything you write in there? Thoughts on what you read, on the bookbinding process, on where you found the story? That shit is so valuable it makes gold look cheap.

If you’re in an all-digital fandom, the fact that you have this item tangibly makes you a keeper of record. In other words: if the entire internet went down forever tomorrow, we would still have proof the property existed and some evidence of how people interacted with it, thanks to you. I can’t overstate how important that is, but I can give you an example: do you know we don’t actually know what all the items were in a traditional Victorian condiment set? Today we’ve got salt, pepper, ketchup, sugar, and occasionally mustard, but we have no idea what all of those items were 130 years ago. Nobody ever fucking wrote it down. It was just assumed that you knew what went into A Proper Table Service, and as times and tastes changed, whoops, there goes that knowledge. Are you bookbinding the next Shakespeare? Probably not, but let’s get real, back in 1598 even Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare, he was just some guy who wrote pretty good plays–but today we consider his work a wealth of cultural knowledge.

So yes! Keep this stuff! Write down the provenance! Consider also looking into generalized historians like me (there aren’t many of us out there, but the number is growing as academia realizes how much transformative fandom really has its own culture and history), and looking into specific places you want your fannish works to go. There are academic libraries out there absolutely overflowing with Kirk/Spock zines they can’t interpret (because they have nobody on staff who studies fandom history), don’t know what to do with, and now have to consider throwing away because what the hell do they want with a copy of Spockanalia? (ME. SEND IT TO ME.) BUT, there are also academics who’d love to get their hands on this stuff, if only people knew they existed. Do a little research, make fandom historians happy, and rest easy knowing your work will be treated with care and dignity when you’re gone.

[ksproject]: Just weighing in here as a dedicated sanctuary for Kirk/Spock fanworks - collecting; rescuing; preserving; collaborating over sharing, accessibility and research (a big study being put into writing of both the source material and the fandom). And encouraging others to become fandom and fanwork historians and guardians. As far as we know this is the only project building a dedicated original art archive, which hopes to find and collect many lost works, and catalogue these and others that existed at one point. Of course, this in addition to zine preservation, and all other forms of fan, official or other creative works relating to the characters.

It’s amazing what gets lost, destroyed, or ends up in the wrong hands. There is the sad story of Chris Soto whose family deliberately destroyed their work when they died. Barbara Gordon, well known in the fandom, died a few years ago, and didn’t leave her collection to anyone. It ended up being sold at an estate sale in bits and scattered; some just disappearing, some being sold on by traders and others, making a logistical and financial challenge that could have been avoided. Those of us working on these preservation projects are passionate volunteers - we don’t have excessive funds, and often dedicate everything we have spare to this passion, relying on the support and forethought of others. Whether it’s a big collection, a single piece you’ve had on the wall for years, or just a shoebox of doodles - this is what the KS Project is here for!