Author: Monumentanea
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Wild Images (Other Douros)
A nostalgia of my own I use generative artificial intelligence to create fictional images of the Douro as an interdimensional region, intersected by extremely advanced technologies, spacecraft, and robots – yet poor, peripheral, and ruined. The aim is not to depict the region as it might have been but to construct images of what it…
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Generative AI and the fear of images
This communication is about fear and response — i.e. iconophobia and iconoclasm. The starting point is online artificial intelligence tools such as Midjourney AI, Dall-e, or Stable Diffusion. These platforms generate images from natural language, the so-called “prompts,” in a “text to image” scheme. The paper is divided into two parts. The first argues that…
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‘Trendy’ – a critical anatomy of the role of trends in graphic design
With some variations, it always goes like this: A designer notices a trend. Many of their colleagues use the same font, or align text a certain way, or employ similar illustrations or images. They get angry. The next step is to declare it a ‘trend’. They complain that nobody thinks about design anymore, “it’s all…
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Design as a morality of form
What had Jan Tschichold and his adversary Max Bill in common? Both equated form with morality. During design’s high modernist phase, it was usual to talk about form in terms of morality, personal but, above all, civic. Good form was a moral and not so much a political objective. On the old form/content divide, politics…
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Forget Design?
This book has a simple, clever, disquieting cover. The book’s author, Andrew Dewdney, believes that the paradigm of photography can no longer explain what he calls «the networked image» — images generated by computers, images made to be used by computers, images produced and used by people whose uses are not aesthetic, etc. Photography can’t…
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Is it possible to go beyond text-based approaches to graphic design?
I am a fan of the magazine Typographica, edited by Herbert Spencer between 1949 and 1967 in two series. The second series was the inspiration for Eye magazine. I ordered the first issue of the first series for an article by Charles Hale about image and text. In graphic design, it is pretty rare to…
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“Design by Accident” review
I published a review of Design by Accident by Alexandra Midal in Inmaterial. Diseño, Arte y Sociedad. Enjoyed re-reading and analyzing it deeply. Thanks to the team, especially Patrícia Cativo.
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Image’s Natural Origins: Tree leaves and banknotes
Banknotes created by Benjamin Franklin from lead matrices printed from a mold of tree leaves. The process was developed to prevent counterfeiting. Horst Bredekamp speaks about Franklin’s banknotes in his book Teoria do Acto Icónico: “These banknotes that […] guaranteed greater resistance to counterfeiting, allowed for the first time a widespread and reliable circulation of…
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Images, Design, and Unexpected Encounters: A Personal Narrative
This is one of the books I like the most. It was given to me under unusual circumstances. In 2017, I went to the Orfeu Negro headquarters in Lisbon to finalize the details of the book that would become ‘O Design que o Design Não Vê’ (The Design That Design Doesn’t See). It didn’t have…
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The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media, Nathan Jurgenson
I just reread “The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media” by Nathan Jurgenson. The title says it all: it’s about the social image, which is no longer just representation, nor can it be evaluated by the standards of artistic or documentary photography. It’s an image that serves to communicate within a network, living on…
Unseen by Design 