When it comes to the world of design – what it is, what it represents, and what it is for – Alice Rawsthorn is one of its most internationally respected voices, with a global reach across social networks and debating forums. She has been a critic and columnist for some of the most influential newspapers and journals of our times including the Financial Times, International Herald Tribune and The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of classics such as the widely acclaimed Design as an Attitude. In this exclusive interview for Electra given to design curator and critic Vera Sacchetti, Alice Rawsthorn talks about her life and works, and outlines her views of the world and the future, showing in the process her overarching optimism in the face of the challenges and risks involved, and defending design as an ‘omnipresent force’ and ‘agent of change’.

Numbers are the code of universal harmony, divine creation, magic, and also of scientific rationality, calculation and method. Cryptic knowledge is perfectly expressed in numbers, as if they were the emanation of a mathematical God. Our age pays little heed to numerology, but is obsessed with quantification and statistics, which have become the main tool of governance, rankings, ratings and generalised evaluation as a way of managing human and material resources. It is precisely because numbers are now so dominant and powerful (to the extent that politics has become a mere province of the wider economy), that Electra is devoting the ‘Subject’ section of this issue to this area. Here you will find articles about the philosophy of number, forms of digital art, modern governance through numbers, and the history of algorithms and their function in digital networks. These compulsory stops shine light on a variety of incursions into a vast universe that continues to expand in our age - the digital age. All the images dedicated to Numbers in this issue are by António Sena. Throughout a career that spans over five decades, signs, numbers and letters represent his attempts – successful or not – to interpret the world and everything that happens in it. His work also questions the demands, potentialities and illusions of human communication in all its variety of languages. In inviting António Sena to collaborate, Electra recognises an artist who, through his intellectual research and artistic practice, and integrity and persistence, has created a body of work with a considerable formal coherence that is unique in the world of contemporary art.

Alain Supiot is a professor at the University of Nantes and the Collège de France. He is the author of La gouvernance par les nombres, 2015 [Governance by Numbers, The Making of a Legal Model of allegiance, 2017]. In this article he looks at the long history of governance by law up until the current system of government that is guided by quantification and by numbers – not only in economic terms but also in a social dimension. It is market globalisation and its immanent neoliberal principles that determine the hegemony of numbers in the information age.

This text, written by a professor of Media Philosophy at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, and research group coordinator into Artificial Intelligence, traces the history of algorithmic processes and shows that its history started well before the so-called Information Age. The writer discusses binary codes, algorithms, and digital calculus among other areas and concepts that have now become familiar to many people, despite the fact that only a few understand what they represent and mean.

The American photographer John Divola has prepared a set of unpublished works for this edition of Electra. They are part of an ongoing series located in an air force base in the California desert that was decommissioned after the Cold War came to an end, and which has since remained like a veritable city in ruins. It is not the first time that John Divola aesthetically intervenes in abandoned spaces and then captures the results on film. As Afonso Dias Ramos demonstrates in the following essay introducing Divola’s work, the visual explorations that have been undertaken during this pandemic actually take up the artistic strategies that had marked his early oeuvre, in a surprising throwback of nearly half a century that is also a revisitation of contemporary art history. The images shown in this «Scoop» foreground ruins as a way to reposition photography in direct interaction with painting, sculpture, and installation, and thereby declining any distinctions between the witness or the participant, between the intervention and the document.

Name: Paulo Nozolino. Profession: photographer. We can start with this simple bio. Guided by the interview below, we can then enter the ‘lab’ of this nomadic photographer, who crosses borders and is radically averse to serene places and their tranquil images.

On the seventh centenary of Dante’s death (1265-1321), Antonio Montefusco, professor in Medieval Latin Literature at the Universidade Ca’ Foscari de Veneza, discusses the poet of the Divine Comedy, who ‘invented the figure of the modern intellectual’ and introduced the ‘vernacular’ to poetry in the place of Latin. He looks critically at the ideological and political uses to which official commemorations of earlier centenaries have been subjected since the 19th century.

Ângela Ferreira was a pioneer in bringing to contemporary art topics and themes that are now omnipresent and are driving cultural debate. Having spent over thirty years researching the colonial past, the postcolonial present and the future on the horizon, her art has a consistency and coherence that has achieved national and international recognition. In this issue of Electra, Ângela Ferreira presents paintings made for future memories, based on murals shown at previous exhibitions. In the introductory essay for this portfolio, the curator and art historian Nomusa Makhubu writes, ʻI am drawn to the affective Ângela Ferreira Pan African Unity Mural I-X resonance enlivened by interlaced narratives [...in the Pan African Unity Mural...] re-sounding histories of exile, loss, struggle and defiance [...and also of optimism and hope...]. It is akin to what Tina Campt calls “affective frequencies”. To see what we don’t see, to pay attention to the resonances between each image and object, is to experience how “sublimely quiet images enunciate an aspirational politics”ʼ. The images that Ângela Ferreira shows here are thus a place in which visibility, inclusion and centrality are restored to those who have long inhabited the invisible peripheries of amnesia, exclusion and ignorance.

The writer, journalist, and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach is one of the most intriguing characters of the first half of the 20th century – a period that witnessed both the best (in art for example) and worst (in politics) of things. She visited Lisbon twice, and she travelled widely in Europe, the United States, the Middle East and Africa. Her works reflect the influences of her constant travels around the world. She was an androgynous, freethinking figure who was, despite herself, constantly trying to run away. Her chaotic love life is traced here by Gonçalo Vilas-Boas, who has studied her in depth. Born in Switzerland to a wealthy and influential family, she was educated at top private schools, and there were many doors that were open to her. But her deep inner sense of dissatisfaction ultimately manifested itself through addiction and imbalance. Her brief, tormented life (she died at just thirty-four) was filled with adventure, wars, drugs, suicides and depression; however, it is her charm that will always remain in our memories.

The theme of this issue of Electra addresses a fundamental feature of our times: there is an empire of numbers in every corner of society and politics that briefs governmental managerial decisions, economic measures, cultural programmes, educational guidelines, and scientific research directives. In short: everything around us is inescapably informed by numbers.