With The New Disorder, DSCENE turns its focus to a present shaped by instability, overdesigned systems, and structures that no longer behave as promised. It is an issue concerned with friction rather than resolution, where control and collapse exist side by side, and where clarity often emerges through interruption, failure, and refusal.
PRE-ORDER IN PRINT AND DIGITAL
For the first cover of the issue, DSCENE teamed up with Trey Abdella, inviting the New York–based artist to design an exclusive artwork that could hold the tension of the theme rather than explain it. The result is a cover that feels precise yet unsettled, carefully constructed while visibly resisting polish. It does not illustrate The New Disorder so much as operate inside it.
Abdella’s practice is rooted in experimentation, illusion, and controlled chaos. Working across painting, sculpture, animation, and kinetic elements, his objects often appear caught mid-transition. Materials misbehave. Surfaces sag, bulge, or refuse to resolve. As he explains in his conversation with Vuk Ćuk for the issue, “Once it turns into pure repetition, I lose interest. I need some chaos in there.” That insistence on instability becomes a method rather than a lack of discipline.
The cover grew directly out of this logic. Abdella’s studio, an engine in constant motion, is filled with failed tests, half-formed experiments, and works in various stages of refusal. “Everything takes time,” he says. “Breaking things, fixing them, breaking them again.” In that environment, disorder is not the opposite of rigor, but the condition that makes invention possible.
This sensibility aligns closely with The New Disorder as an editorial framework. The issue looks at how contemporary life is governed by systems that perform control while quietly eroding. Abdella’s work reflects that contradiction. Illusion plays a central role, with viewers often unable to distinguish what is painted from what is sculpted, what moves from what only appears to. “Surprise is the answer,” he notes. That moment of uncertainty becomes a crack in the surface of order.
In the interview, Abdella and Ćuk move beyond the art world, discussing forgotten engineering, neglected Americana, animatronic rides, and spaces where invention survives precisely because no one is trying to validate it. With this first cover, DSCENE introduces an issue that does not seek comfort or coherence. Trey Abdella’s exclusive artwork sets the tone: precise, unruly, and fully alert to a moment where disorder is no longer an exception, but the operating condition.
