k-notes [korp keynotes] is an editorial initiative of Korp Publishing that seeks to assemble a series of pocket-format volumes featuring essays and reflections by artists, scholars, scientists, and researchers on themes central to the foundation’s remit: the climate crisis, displacement, digital inequality, fractured supply chains, and contemporary forms of forced labour. Conceived as a portable space for rigorous and critical engagement, the series acknowledges that these crises are entangled, historically produced, and politically charged, demanding sustained interdisciplinary inquiry rather than technocratic solutions.

The inaugural volume, on the best planet, the worst of times, operates as both an introduction and a provisional epilogue to the series. It gathers contributions from the Board of Trustees, the Advisory Board, and the Scientific Committee, offering personal yet analytically grounded reflections on the constellation of issues that will form the foundation’s core concerns. Rather than advancing definitive answers, this edition foregrounds the generative potential of questions: How might we describe environmental catastrophe in ways that resist resignation and mobilise responsibility? In what terms can we address the forced mobility of people when borders become technologies of abandonment and control? What forms of accountability arise when the infrastructures that sustain life are themselves sites of exploitation and extraction?

This project insists on the necessity of unsettling disciplinary enclosures. By placing artistic practice in dialogue with social and natural sciences, k-notes recognises that the production of knowledge is never neutral but always embedded in power relations, histories of dispossession, and contested imaginaries of the future. The choice of a pocket format is not incidental but a deliberate gesture toward accessibility without simplification—a means of carrying difficult questions beyond institutional settings and into broader publics, including those directly implicated in these crises.

k-notes is therefore conceived not merely as a publishing series but as a critical apparatus for collective thought and intervention. With on the best planet, the worst of times, Korp Publishing signals a commitment to cultivating a public culture attuned to the complexity and violence of contemporary crises, while remaining equally committed to the ethical and political obligation to imagine otherwise. By foregrounding the voices shaping the foundation’s intellectual orientation, this first volume models a form of engaged scholarship that refuses abstraction divorced from struggle, and that understands critique itself as a mode of solidarity.