The-Iconomist’s latest issue is hectic and “suffocating” in its use of online image banks

The-Iconomist 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.

Emerging out of Zero-Editions, a space for publishing in the south of Brazil initiated by Romeu Silveira, the magazine acts as an extension of the artist’s research on the “collection and appropriation of images in the digital age,” and one of the ways he likes to “formalise and distribute these collections in the form of printed objects”, he says. Each edition starts with an action as a thematic starting point – for example in its most recent issue, this action is “to watch and to speculate”. This forms the basis for a collection of editorial content that is made up entirely of AI-generated imagery (issues one to four), or now in the case of their latest issue, photos from online image banks.

Why source editorial content from online banks? Well, the artist “decided to follow this path to try, in some way, to do what an artificial intelligence does, but in a manual and artisanal manner, not in a matter of seconds,” explains Romeu. “It is, of course, a lost cause to compete with a machine, but we realised that this is a much more interesting challenge for us than simply pressing a button and seeing what the machine produces.” An experiment in gathering and reworking these online images, issue five hopes to create a space to reflect on the saturation of visual material that we live amongst, and “how reality can be manipulated through the control of these images” — namely the current rise of deep fakes and AI-generated content.

Back when Romeu was planning the first issue of the magazine in 2022, “the first AI image generation systems like Dall-E and Midjourney were released to the public,” he explains. “As AI image generation tools became increasingly realistic, we began to realise that our focus should return to the ‘real world’ and the saturation of images in which we are immersed. In a way, (with issue five) we have started at the end, because all this accumulation of images feeds these tools in various ways.”

Deciding to work with this “saturation” of images, rather than their AI-generated products, the magazine’s fifth issue is “more chaotic, perhaps even suffocating, in comparison to previous issues because the number of images used is much greater,” Romeu says. “Overlays and conflict are the publication’s guiding principle, the starting point.” These saturated and hectic spreads leave images without credits or captions, allowing the edition to be read as a large, loosely structured photo book. Text is something that comes quite secondary to the images, says Romeu, and is “based on what has been captured in the image research — as if the graphic design were software that gets updated with each new edition, always building on what was done previously,” he explains.

Aiming to dismantle the traditional magazine format, the issue doesn’t include a table of contents, a complete masthead, or any specific sections. One piece of content is simply able to invade another. There is one thing that Romeu takes some editorial inspiration from for the magazine’s loose structure however, and that’s good old fashioned newspapers. This traditional format has inspired the covers to date and the magazine’s current logo. “It's a way of saying that from the moment a magazine is released, it is already dated due to the speed of information nowadays.” he says.

For this new phase, starting with the release of issue five, The-Iconomist is now envisioned as a “chaotic intersection between the early editions of Colors by designer Tibor Kalman, The National Geographic, and Life Magazine.” After years spent in the editorial world (over ten editing the digital magazine U+MAG, and seven for the independent magazine Under Pressure), the artist is now searching for new narrative forms in his appropriation of found imagery. Romeu concludes “I think The-Iconomist comes at a time when I'm trying to dismantle and rethink my relationship with images… their accumulation and ephemerality.”