/next Nº8 — AFTER-IMAGE

Nº 8  — AFTER-IMAGE. The eighth issue of THE-ICONOMIST, titled To propose / To recreate, takes as its point of departure Édouard Glissant’s notion of the aprèzan: the present as a living interval between destruction and regeneration. From this idea unfolds a reflection on what it means to create in an era where images multiply endlessly, and where visibility itself has become a form of capture. In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, every image we share becomes data; analyzed, categorized, and reabsorbed into vast systems of recognition. Within this landscape, the publication suggests a different kind of response: a digital craftsmanship that moves against automation, exploring how the deliberate act of cutting, layering, and reassembling images can function as both creation and camouflage, a way of disrupting the smooth readability demanded by machines. To propose / To recreate unfolds as a moving terrain of visual thought, which is part proposal, part reconstruction. In addition to experimental texts created by THE-ICONOMIST, the edition also features selected excerpts from authors such as Naomi Klein, Thomas Pynchon, Mark Fischer, Olga Tokarczuk, Fernando Birri, among others.

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WHY WAR? starts from the question posed in the letter Why War?, exchanged between Freud and Einstein in 1932: why does war persist, even in the face of all the rationality we have supposedly achieved? The images gathered here do not aim to illustrate the history of conflicts, but to reveal their permanence — as if war, rather than an event, were a structure that reconfigures itself with each generation. According to recent studies by the Peace Research Institute Oslo, 2024 saw the highest number of simultaneous armed conflicts since the end of the Second World War — more than sixty active wars in thirty-six countries. Faced with this repetition, the images speak less of borders and more of a human condition that insists on not ceasing. This zine is, therefore, an archive of the continuity of violence — and an attempt to ask again, with Freud: why?

Memoryscape, a speculative tale by THE-ICONOMIST, is a plunge into the collapse between memory and technology. A narrator drifts through feeds, notifications, algorithms, and system glitches in search of himself, but finds only echoes, noise, and screenshots of a life mediated by devices. Between buffered dreams, captcha identities, and emotions translated into data, the book unfolds a landscape where memory no longer belongs to the body but to invisible servers. Each forgotten image returns as a symptom, each notification as a shadow, each silence as a corrupted file. To escape one’s own memory becomes, then, an attempt to be reborn outside the records—an ultimate way of continuing to exist.

[145 pages, 11x18cm, brochure, with shipping worldwide]

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.

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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.

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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. 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. 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. 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. 

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This zine gathers images of waiting rooms, those quiet, interchangeable spaces where time folds in on itself. Each chair, each fluorescent light, each artificial plant performs the same choreography of stillness. Nothing happens, and yet everything is about to. The people who pass through leave no trace except the faint echo of anticipation, the weight of suspended moments. Here, waiting becomes a collective gesture, a small rehearsal for all the pauses that shape our days. These rooms hold the hum of lives in between: not yet arrived, not yet gone.

13x20cm, 60 pages, brochure. Shipping worldwide.

Buy in print $15
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XXXSpace shares with Thomas Pynchon’s novel the intuition that military technology is never limited to its military function. In the universe of the book, the V-2 missile is both an object of mathematical precision and an erotic and mystical fetish, an “arc” that crosses the sky as a symbol of desire and death. The zine revisits this same imagery, bringing to light the clash between clinical detail—ranges, speeds, diagrams—and the symbolic weight of a world obsessed with the spectacle of destruction. Just as Pynchon transforms the missile into a metaphor for cultural collapse, XXXSpace confronts the contemporary saturation of explosive and phallic images, shifting the gaze to the tension between pornography, space conquest, and war. If the 1973 novel recorded the transition to the nuclear age, the zine collects fragments of the present as testimony to another historical threshold: the moment when technical violence becomes naturalized on the screen, and the missile ceases to be just a weapon to become language, spectacle, and a promise of transcendence.

13x20cm, 60 pages, brochure. Shipping worldwide.

Buy in print $15
Buy digital version $5.99

F IS FOR FRAGILITY (OF DIGITAL IMAGES). 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.

13x20cm, 60 pages, brochure. Shipping worldwide.

Buy in print $15
Buy digital version $5.99

ACCIDENT & EMERGENCY_This zine presents a visual essay on the aesthetics of ruin and the relentless force of collapse, bringing together appropriated images of crashes, fires, and rollovers—where twisted metal and flames dance in the wake of destruction. Amid charred wreckage and distorted forms, a landscape of chaos and beauty emerges, a vestige of the moment when everything fell apart.

13x20cm, 48 pages, saddle stitched binding. Shipping worldwide.

Buy in print $15
Buy digital version $1.99

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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.

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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.

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