Nº 5. Inaugurating its new volume of publications, THE-ICONOMIST presents an unusual thematic dossier built around the verbs “To watch” and “To speculate”. Inspired by excerpts from Michel Foucault’s book “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of The Prison” and William Shakespeare’s poem “All The World’s A Stage”, we explore the complex issues of surveillance in the digital age and the role of security cameras in contemporary society. Instead of creating images generated by artificial intelligence, we decided to delve into the vast banks of digital images available on servers around the world. This method seeks to give new meaning to an often forgotten arsenal of imagery, visually composing this issue with authentic and historically charged material.
Through this volume, we address crucial themes such as privacy and power, violence and social behavior, technology and ethics. In addition, we have enriched our analysis with selected texts by renowned authors such as Octavia Butler, Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, Thomas Elsaesser, Anne Carson, Guy Debord, Marshall McLuhan and Barbara Kruger, among others. This new phase of THE-ICONOMIST is inspired by the curator Scott Watson, who in 1977 noted that “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”.
58 pages, 21x28cm, saddle-stitch binding, with shipping worldwide. Published by zero-Editions.
“PROPOSALS FOR A POST-PORTRAIT”, 2022-2023
seventy-nine digital images, 1024x1024px each
part of the “ARTIFICIAL” collection
