Category: Image
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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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Why the aversion to self-reflexive design?
W.J.T. Mitchell developed the idea of Metapictures in the book “Picture Theory” (1994). These are images about images. They can be cartoons about cartoons, photographs about photography, cartoons about photography, and so on. They can even theorize about images – hence “Picture Theory.” Magritte’s painting “The Treachery of Images,” commonly known as “This is not…
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The Non-Visual Origins of Corporate Image
It is likely that “corporate image” is the most famous use of the word “image” within graphic design. However, this concept is startlingly non-visual. In their Graphic Design History, Johanna Drucker and Emily McVarish discuss the role of Kenneth Boulding’s 1956 book, The Image, in promoting graphic design among corporate managers: «The idea of value…
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The roles of neglecting images, form and style in graphic design’s political discourse
It is not that designers avoid images. The issue is that they don’t speak about them — particularly when compared to the attention to detail devoted to typography. Conversations about form or style are infrequent and often vague, primarily consisting of labeling as “trendy” work and designers you disapprove of. This widespread avoidance of discussing…
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Defining social, moral and political Borders: the Text/Image divide in Graphic Design
One of the crucial social functions of graphic design is enforcing the boundaries between text and image. These limits form a profound political, social, moral, and religious frontier. Within the field of graphic design, the demarcation lines separating text and image are crucial in defining what falls within the discipline of graphic design and what…
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Exploring Design’s Shift Away from Image
In my last piece, I argued that design shifted its focus away from images at a time when these are all-pervasive. It is plausible to suggest that graphic designers embraced a greater specialization in typography to avoid obsolescence. If everybody is now an image-maker, we could care for the “rest.” While we may perceive our…
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Design and image?
How can you tell if an Instagram account belongs to a graphic designer? While most people use the platform to display photos, graphic designers show letters: fonts, logos, posters, magazines, books, or websites. Even more fascinating is their use of a social network made for showcasing for photos to share little textual slideshows. This tendency…
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Beyond Vision: graphic design and the shapeshifting vine
Boquila trifoliata is a climbing vine that mimics the appearance of plants around it. Scientists are trying to figure out the process behind this mimicry. Can this vine be sensitive to chemicals or even DNA collected from nearby plants? Surprisingly, experiments showed that the vine could also replicate plastic plants. Somehow, it can “see” its…
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Paragraphica
Paragraphica is a device developed by Bjørn Karmann. Resembling a photographic camera, it doesn’t have a lens. It’s a context-to-image camera: it gathers online data about its location and feeds it to an AI to create pictures. The most invisible lesson of this lens-less camera is not about artificial intelligence but about photography. We still…
Unseen by Design 