ISSUE Nº 10
To happen/To unhappen
Following Reality Check, an exploration of expectation, belief, and the fragmentation of reality into multiple, often conflicting perspectives, System of Situations takes the images from the previous issue as its starting point and throws them into a new set of circumstances. Through collage, these images collide with a myriad of everyday events, absurd situations, and ordinary observations, producing unexpected associations and deviations from their original meanings. This tenth issue is an experiment in progress. Its pages will be cooked over the coming week, allowing chance, interference, and improvisation to shape the final publication. For now, only the front and back covers are available. The complete issue will be released in print and available for purchase once the process is finished.
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ISSUE Nº 9
To believe/To discredit
The ninth issue of THE-ICONOMIST, titled Reality-Check, explores the fragmentation of shared reality in an era of continuous image circulation. Moving from a relatively common visual culture toward a polyculture of personalized information, the issue reflects on how images no longer simply represent the world, but increasingly anticipate, organize, and condition our experience of it. Events arrive through different screens, at different times, producing overlapping yet often incompatible versions of the same reality. The issue unfolds as a provisional assembly of disconnected realities, where every image suggests another possible connection and every act of looking becomes a way of inhabiting the world.
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Nº 3 — To catalogue. Introducing THE ICONOMIST’s latest thematic dossier. This edition takes inspiration from art magazines and catalogues to curate a collection of images that provoke and question our relationship with artwork documentation in the age of artificial intelligence. All the clichés of the art world are represented, the artist’s studio, the the gallery, the white walls, the compositions, the descriptions. We are excited to present a selection of proposals of artworks that are now part of the #theiconomist collection, with complete descriptions and speculations on their materiality. As a complement to this visual content, we have also included selected (and inspiring) texts from authors such as Boris Groys, Hito Steyerl, Georges Didi-Huberman, Man Ray, and more. The film Concrete Lache (2010), which Mark Leckey created about the Milton Keynes Gallery, will be on view in our website in the STREAMING section, which will be updated weekly with new videos and films.
44 pages, 21x28cm, saddle-stitch binding, with shipping worldwide.
This zine brings together images captured by Google Street View along the entire route of the Unidos da Tijuca samba school parade during the 2015 Carnival in Marquês de Sapucaí, Rio de Janeiro. That year’s theme, Um encontro marcado no tempo (A rendezvous marked in time), paid tribute to carnival designer Clóvis Bornay. Here, however, Carnival does not appear as a spectacle or an organised celebration. What we see is a party captured by a system that does not recognise choreography, narrative or festive time. Sapucaí is recorded as a road, infrastructure, route. A path to be mapped. Bodies in motion, floats and crowds are fragmented by an automated, intermittent vision, incapable of keeping up with the temporality of Carnival. What should be continuous appears in glitches, jumps and interruptions. Excess becomes noise. The images do not document the parade; they highlight the limitations of a device designed for empty streets, not for bodies in celebration. In this displacement, Carnival is reduced to data, a route, an operational record. There is no choice of framing, no aesthetic intention, only capture. The gaze does not participate, does not interpret, does not celebrate. It operates. The parade ends up becoming an involuntary choreography between popular celebration and mapping technology, revealing how even a collective, local and ephemeral ritual can be absorbed by global recording systems. This zine observes what happens when Carnival is seen through the eyes of someone who doesn’t know how to party.
13x20cm, 84pp., saddle-stitched binding. Shipping worldwide.
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