THE-ICONOMIST© is a third generation research project, artist’s magazine and laboratory founded in 2021.
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[ACTIVITY]

“We always think of the imagination as the faculty that forms images. On the contrary, it deforms what we perceive; it is, above all, the faculty that frees us from immediate images and changes them. … Imagination is essentially open and elusive. We could say that a stable and completely realized image clips the wings of the imagination. It causes us to fall from the state of dreaming imagination that is not confined to image, and that we may call imageless imagination, just as we speak of imageless thought.”
— Gaston BACHELARD, in Air and Dreams (1943)

rEDLines is a virtual automated writing installation that subverts the logic of the journalistic headlines to reveal their flaws, excesses, and poetic deviations. Hosted on THE-ICONOMIST, the work operates as a language machine, firing off fragments of text that recombine incessantly, creating impossible headlines, news from a fictional or distorted world, echoes of a collapsing reality. Playing with the double meaning of the term, redlines also refers to corrections, censorship, or limits drawn in red, the installation proposes a space of tension between language, truth, and fiction. Each phrase that appears on the screen carries the weight of a possible headline, but also the lightness of error, chance, and productive failure. [play]

“XXXSPACE” [2025]


A film by THE-ICONOMIST
20m25s, color, sound

XXXSpace is an essay film that emerges from the sensory and symbolic collapse of our time. Set in a dystopian—yet real—context where three simultaneous wars shape the global imaginary, the film presents an iconographic collection of images gathered since 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began. Since then, missiles, explosions, and ballistic diagrams have become part of the global visual landscape, composing a new grammar of war spectacle. The title, XXXSpace, alludes both to the world of pornography and to the aerospace ambitions of lunatic billionaires, colliding the phallic imaginary of war with that of space conquest. The images are accompanied by a technical, almost clinical voiceover that obsessively details the functioning of each missile, rocket, and propulsion system—their ranges, weights, and velocities. This neutral, impersonal narration stands in stark contrast to the explicit violence of the images, making the banalization of weaponry as visual spectacle even more disturbing. [watch]



“THE WORLD AS A STAGE” [2024]


A film by THE-ICONOMIST
11m06s, color, sound

This film is based on images from public security cameras. Evoking William Shakespeare‘s famous phrase, the title suggests that everyday life is constantly under observation, turning us all into actors who play our parts in front of an invisible audience. Just as in the poem “All the World’s a Stage”, where each person plays their part in the great play of life, modern surveillance puts us on a global stage, where our every move is recorded and monitored. This film explores this dynamic, revealing how the constant presence of cameras alters our perception of privacy and behavior. This film is an extension of #issue5 of THE ICONOMIST released in July conceived as a multi-channel digital installation, in which four cameras in different locations are observed simultaneously, with the commentary coming from this control room. “The World as a Stage” also features voiceover fragments of Shakespeare’s poem, the text that opens the magazine issue and a collection of headlines from news websites forming a poem about digital everyday life. [watch]

“Everything everything everything everything. A world on edge of destruction. Objects become precious, matter becomes subject to feel of reverence. This is an art form for artists. The mass of people appreciate Modern art 50 years after its practice. This art form will not be subject to this time lag since it is unlikely that in 50 years’ time there will be a world in which to practice it.”
Gustav METZER, MANIFESTO WORLD (10 July 1963)

“GEN3” [2025]


A film by THE-ICONOMIST
3m35s, color, sound

This short film presents the editorial principles of THE-ICONOMIST, a “third generation” magazine that explores iconomy and the circulation of images in the digital age. Based on the concept of “iconomy”, coined by Gilson Schwartz, and Vilém Flusser’s thoughts on technical images, The Iconomist proposes a critical practice of appropriation, reorganization and re-signification of the contemporary visual flow. More than an editorial space, it is a curatorial and reprogramming experiment that challenges image saturation and invites reflection on the nature of visuality in the 21st century [watch]

“PROPOSALS FOR RECEIVERs”, 2023
forty-four digital images, 1024x1024px each
part of the “ARTIFICIAL” collection

[LATEST ISSUE]

[21×28 cm, 58 pages, softcover. Shipping worldwide via MagCloud]

Nº 7 — BIG DATA. The new issue of THE-ICONOMIST is structured around three verbs: to track, to store, to capitalize. They do not appear as themes or narrative devices, but as discrete operations — technical procedures that have become naturalized, embedded in daily life and in the forms of attention, language, and memory. Text and image share a common surface, contaminated by the lexicon of interfaces, the rhythm of notifications, and the aesthetics of repetition. Instead of chapters, there are fragments: instructions, automated speech, interrupted narratives, visual commands, and snippets of code. The result is an editorial body that behaves like an environment, not a narrative. In the opening text, language approximates the flow of a continuous timeline, where every gesture — getting out of bed, opening an app, looking into the mirror — is already processed data. Typography multiplies, margins fail, images do not explain. System icons, graphic overlays, and fragmented structures compose a visuality that simulates a machine in operation — or in malfunction. The edition does not close around a thesis, but organizes itself as an unstable field of reading. The logic of the three verbs remains active in the act of turning pages: as we browse, we track; as we return, we store; as we interpret, we participate in a broader circuit of symbolic conversion. This edition is the third part of the IMAGE-BANK volume started in 2024, inspired by the words of curator Scott Watson in 1977: “we are all image banks, we all live in an image bank, we carry an image bank and we have the power to intervene in that image bank. [shop here]

[INPUT]

When data is corrupted, the image also takes on a new life. They have lost their original functions, their sharpness, and often any possibility of literal reading. What remains are fragments, noises, spectra. In December 2024, one of our hard drives containing thousands of reference images and project files was damaged, but the recovery process gave us the images we present in this zine. Closer to the idea of a ruin than a document, these images now operate as traces of something that can no longer be reconstructed, only reinvented. F is for FRAGILITY proposes a reflection on the instability of digital memory, the limits of technological preservation and the aesthetic potential of error. Rather than restoring, the project chooses to highlight failure as a form, welcoming impermanence and fragility as an inherent part of the digital creation and archiving process. [buy here]

[13x20cm, 60 pp., softcover. Shipping worldwide]

[EXTENSIONS]

They say that the face is the mirror of the soul. They say that images generated by artificial intelligence have no soul, they are like mirages. MIRROR:MIRAGES presents forty-three mysterious artificially generated faces accompanied by excerpts from the short story “The Mirror”, written by Guimarães Rosa, one of the greatest authors of Brazilian literature. In this short story, Rosa explores the relationship between the reflected image and the true essence of the individual, between the visible exterior and the hidden interior. Her narrative invites us to reflect on the human soul, identity and self-perception at a time when technology is constantly redefining these concepts. These faces, although without a soul of their own, evoke a range of emotions and reflections, provoking us to look beyond superficiality.

Buy in print $90 BRL

STAYNONSTOP is a photobook consisting of a selection of 130 images generated by artificial intelligence. The images are accompanied by fragments of artists’ texts from different sources. The name of the book comes from a reflection on how addictive these image production processes through artificial intelligence can be, like everything these days. By placing these images in confrontation with the text fragments, we try to force new readings and the creation of new contexts different from the ones used to generate the images. This book was part of The Intelligent Library exhibition curated by Rica Cerbarano during PhotoVogue in November 2023 at Base Milano. [buy here] [download. pdf]

[PRESS]

“Taking its name from economist Gilson Schwartz’s 2006 neologism ‘Iconomy’ while also nodding to longstanding news weekly The Economist, THE-ICONOMIST questions our relationship with images in this era of image saturation with each issue using verbs as its themes.”
— MAGCULTURE.com

“THE-ICONOMIST’s latest issue is hectic and “suffocating” in its use of online image banks. The magazine has never really operated within the requirements of a conventional magazine. This isn’t just because the issues don’t have any advertisements or an ISBN number, or even that it doesn’t have a website that can be indexed by Google. The magazine defies a traditional editorial approach at every turn.After its first four issues’ focus on AI-generated visuals, the magazine has returned with its fifth edition — a printed exploration of surveillance in the digital age.”
— ELLIS TREE, It’s Nice That