December 2013 issue with a cover design by DIS.
New York-based collective DIS (Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, and David Toro) has pioneered the post-internet aesthetic on their online publishing platform, DIS Magazine. The site hosts essays, interviews, and other critical texts, but also embraces commercial practices, such as corporate branding projects, trend forecasting videos, and the artist-produced stock photography agency, disimages.
Since their founding in 2010, DIS has cultivated a sphere of discourse among artists and critics engaged with institutional critique, cultural interventions, and networked technologies, all of which was articulated in the widely scorned 9th Berlin Biennale, which they curated.
A.i.A. senior editor William S. Smith defended the biennial in the magazine’s September issue writing, “The fictions that DIS offers also represent an attack on those (sanctioned, though largely unacknowledged) fictions underlying all international biennials. These exhibitions are usually presented as serious intellectual efforts that highlight challenging global art; they are always, at the same time, money-soaked tourist attractions organized to bolster national prestige or to benefit the private collectors who fund them directly or indirectly.”
For an overview of DIS’s creative practice and community of collaborators, we have assembled a playlist of videos on our YouTube channel. These range from an early Fatima Al Qadiri music video to an eerily sanitized ad commissioned by Kenzo to promote their fall/winter 2012 collection. Other video works, including the recently released reality show parody Miss Dese Iron Chef, are viewable on DIS’s website.
Visit our DIS Magazine playlist here.
