THE WORLD AS A STAGE 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. A film by THE-ICONOMIST, 11m06s, color, sound [watch]
THE-ICONOMIST publications are included in collections such as the contemporary art library at the Beaux-Arts in Paris (France), the Schaulager/Laurenz Foundation (Switzerland), the contemporary collection at the m-AG — Museum of the Avant-Garde (Switzerland), and the photography library at the Moreira Salles Institute (Brazil), among others. In 2023, the magazine was featured in the exhibition The Intelligent Library at PhotoVogue, at Base Milano. In 2025, THE-ICONOMIST participated in Offprint Paris as an exhibitor.
Whywar➝ Memoryscape➝ Mirror:Mirages➝ STAYNONSTOP➝
WhyWar? Memoryscape A Dress Grew Itself and Other Fragments➝ In the waiting room
Memoryscape.mp4 XXXSpace.mp4➝ theWorldAsAStage.mp4➝
“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 “Leafing through the eighth issue of The Iconomist feels like plunging into a dense sea of images drawn from widely different origins and visual regimes. Appropriated, manipulated, distorted, corrupted, cropped, filtered and recombined, these images accumulate into a surface that is intentionally overwhelming, producing a visual field that feels both vertiginous and delirious.” — ELAINE RAMOS