(Re)presenting academic production
Margins, Models, Discourses
Margins, Models, Discourses
Academic Production
Communication
Discourse
Plurality
Dissidence
"Now is a time for such criticality in design education, for identifying what could and should be different, for aspiring and acting toward our preferred future."
Margins, Models, Discourses explores ways of presenting and representing academic production in Communication Design (CD), looking to devise models that can convey the discourse that this production entails. More than cataloguing results, the project aims to highlight the narratives that academic production translates, revealing the themes it addresses and the concerns it reflects.
The project develops as an exploration of strategies and media for the dissemination of academic production. Articulating print and online media, it aims to develop publication and communication models capable of accommodating the diversity of discourses and projectual manifestations of the 3rd year of the bachelor’s degree and the 1st year of the master's. In this process, it values and assumes a critical or even dissident stance, by exploring alternatives to canonical models through their questioning or subversion, while aiming at a permeability to plurality.
Through discursive nodes, or micronarratives, which emerge from the thematic intersections between projects, the macro narratives that the production of the different study cycles creates are drawn. The discursive dimension is highlighted, revealing how Design can find in the academy a privileged space for questioning, or to configure itself as a critical practice that targets the discipline itself or its social and cultural implications.
The project develops as an exploration of strategies and media for the dissemination of academic production. Articulating print and online media, it aims to develop publication and communication models capable of accommodating the diversity of discourses and projectual manifestations of the 3rd year of the bachelor’s degree and the 1st year of the master's. In this process, it values and assumes a critical or even dissident stance, by exploring alternatives to canonical models through their questioning or subversion, while aiming at a permeability to plurality.
Through discursive nodes, or micronarratives, which emerge from the thematic intersections between projects, the macro narratives that the production of the different study cycles creates are drawn. The discursive dimension is highlighted, revealing how Design can find in the academy a privileged space for questioning, or to configure itself as a critical practice that targets the discipline itself or its social and cultural implications.
(re)imaging the imaginarium
Becoming-Image
Becoming-Image
Image
Post-digital
Aesthetics
Wikipedia
Collective Imaginary
"As our culture becomes more and more digitalized, images—like every cultural object—are more open to a potentially global social distribution via the Internet. The digitally produced and distributed images seem to transform our social relations."
Becoming-image explores how the increasing digitization of images and their immediate online circulation transform our perception of reality. Taking as a starting point a set of one hundred images associated with the most recurrent searches on Wikipedia, the eighth most visited website in the world, this project focuses on the potential of images to shape our collective imaginary. It focuses, in particular, on the availability of images under the Creative Commons license, and their susceptibility to appropriation, modification, sharing and dissemination.
Through the creation of a navigable three-dimensional space, the project proposes an exploration of iconic images that serve the visual representation of the most searched topics on Wikipedia. This online visual essay promotes immersion in a landscape of cultural references, in complement to a printed publication that contextualizes and expands the topic, as a verbal essay based on the text The Changing Constitution of the Present, by Jacob Lund.
Through these components, Becoming-image reflects on how cultural archetypes are reinforced and shaped by platforms like Wikipedia, highlighting the role of images in mediating and constructing our collective imaginary.
Through the creation of a navigable three-dimensional space, the project proposes an exploration of iconic images that serve the visual representation of the most searched topics on Wikipedia. This online visual essay promotes immersion in a landscape of cultural references, in complement to a printed publication that contextualizes and expands the topic, as a verbal essay based on the text The Changing Constitution of the Present, by Jacob Lund.
Through these components, Becoming-image reflects on how cultural archetypes are reinforced and shaped by platforms like Wikipedia, highlighting the role of images in mediating and constructing our collective imaginary.
(Re)publishing the hybrid
From Paper to Pixel
From Paper to Pixel
Post-digital publishing
Post-internet art
Hybridity
Processuality
Print-to-web
“Contemporary experiments are [exploring] the combination of hardware and software to produce printed content that also embeds results from networked processes and thus getting closer to a true ‘form’. This ‘form’ should define at the technical and aesthetic levels the hybrid as a new type of publication, seamlessly integrating the two worlds (print and digital) up to the point that despite its appearance and interface, they would be inextricably tied together through the content.”
Having as a thematic motto the influence of the internet in contemporary artistic production, the project From Paper to Pixel explores the dilution of boundaries between physical and digital media, through the coexistence and harmonization of paper and pixel. In operative terms, the project aims at the development of a hybrid editorial object through an articulation of conventions of the printed medium and the online medium.
This editorial object is developed around three central themes that address the notion of hybridity as a particular aspect of a post-digital aesthetic, evoke artistic practices that weave a critical discourse about the Internet and its cultural impact, and refer to post-digital publishing processes and editorial objects that incorporate characteristics of both print and digital media. In particular, the project seeks a counterpoint to the notion of the post-digital printed object, reversing the path from web to print by enhancing and adapting in the online medium the conventions of the print medium.
In this way, From Paper to Pixel is designed as an exploratory and experimental editorial object that evokes the conventions of a printed publication while seeking a harmonious coexistence with the mechanics of the digital medium.
This editorial object is developed around three central themes that address the notion of hybridity as a particular aspect of a post-digital aesthetic, evoke artistic practices that weave a critical discourse about the Internet and its cultural impact, and refer to post-digital publishing processes and editorial objects that incorporate characteristics of both print and digital media. In particular, the project seeks a counterpoint to the notion of the post-digital printed object, reversing the path from web to print by enhancing and adapting in the online medium the conventions of the print medium.
In this way, From Paper to Pixel is designed as an exploratory and experimental editorial object that evokes the conventions of a printed publication while seeking a harmonious coexistence with the mechanics of the digital medium.
(Re)Appropriating Culture
Post-Internet Appropriation
Post-Internet Appropriation
Postproduction
Post-internet art
Appropriation
Cultural Production
Reproduction
“Artists' intuitive relationship with art history is now going beyond what we call "the art of appropriation," which naturally infers an ideology of ownership, and moving toward a culture of the use of forms, a culture of constant activity of signs based on a collective ideal: sharing.”
Appropriation in Post-Internet Art explores the notion of appropriation as an artistic strategy particularly evident in the post-internet era. As Nicolas Bourriaud suggests in his book Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, the notion of postproduction reflects a new cultural landscape in which much of the artworks are produced from pre-existing cultural forms, which are ceaselessly reinterpreted, reproduced, and re-exposed.
The project is developed around artistic practices and concepts that highlight appropriation as a creative method, enhanced by the internet, including notions such as circulationism, compilation, détournement, glitch, postproduction, readymade, transformation, subversion, and versioning. These notions are defined and contextualized with quotes and art projects that translate and illustrate their meaning. Assuming the online context as a privileged context for appropriation, the project's website explores variability in the presentation of content, creating an allegory of the multiplicity that characterizes appropriation as a creative practice.
It thus seeks to incorporate appropriation as a creative method, highlighting its relevance in creating critical discourses about the Internet as a medium, and about its massive impact on contemporary culture.
The project is developed around artistic practices and concepts that highlight appropriation as a creative method, enhanced by the internet, including notions such as circulationism, compilation, détournement, glitch, postproduction, readymade, transformation, subversion, and versioning. These notions are defined and contextualized with quotes and art projects that translate and illustrate their meaning. Assuming the online context as a privileged context for appropriation, the project's website explores variability in the presentation of content, creating an allegory of the multiplicity that characterizes appropriation as a creative practice.
It thus seeks to incorporate appropriation as a creative method, highlighting its relevance in creating critical discourses about the Internet as a medium, and about its massive impact on contemporary culture.
(Re)Prompting Creativity
Creative AI (Whatever that Means)
Creative AI (Whatever that Means)
Artificial Intelligence
Creativity
Myths
Machine learning
Text-to-image generators
“The responsibility toward creative AI is clearly not exclusive to immediate actors such as scientists, entrepreneurs, artists and cultural operators. Beyond consuming hype or indulging in complacency, general public and institutions need to engage in a difficult and uncertain work of demystification and reconceptualization in order to match the conceptual and technical intricacies of AI which has been increasingly intertwined and instrumental in defining the quality of our lives.”
The current expansion of the field of artificial intelligence and increasing democratization of machine learning tools enable the application of AI technologies and machine learning techniques in creative practices. The notion of creative AI arises, which can be understood as the simulation of creativity by machines, just as AI can be defined as the simulation of intelligence in machines. This notion has generated a growing questioning of the meanings of intelligence or creativity in question when we talk about the application of AI technologies in creative practices.
Creative AI (Whatever that means) explores the fuzzy meanings of creative AI, evoking how common conceptions of artificial creativity tend to obscure or mystify concepts inherent in AI technologies and aspects of human cognition or artistic expression that they seek to emulate. Based on a reflection on the "brittle opacity" of creative AI and its “ambiguities” by Dejan Grba, the project is organized around topics that weave a critical discourse on creative AI, alluding to fiction, authorship, aesthetics, meaning, and replacing human capabilities. The website explores the intersection of these topics with sentences generated by Disnovation.org's Predictive Art Bot, an algorithm that turns news headlines into artistic concepts. These phrases are used as prompts to generate images using a text-to-image generator, such as Dall-E.
Evidencing the arbitrariness of concepts and images, the project presents these contents in a dynamic, unstable relationship that seeks to promote critical reflection on creative AI.
Creative AI (Whatever that means) explores the fuzzy meanings of creative AI, evoking how common conceptions of artificial creativity tend to obscure or mystify concepts inherent in AI technologies and aspects of human cognition or artistic expression that they seek to emulate. Based on a reflection on the "brittle opacity" of creative AI and its “ambiguities” by Dejan Grba, the project is organized around topics that weave a critical discourse on creative AI, alluding to fiction, authorship, aesthetics, meaning, and replacing human capabilities. The website explores the intersection of these topics with sentences generated by Disnovation.org's Predictive Art Bot, an algorithm that turns news headlines into artistic concepts. These phrases are used as prompts to generate images using a text-to-image generator, such as Dall-E.
Evidencing the arbitrariness of concepts and images, the project presents these contents in a dynamic, unstable relationship that seeks to promote critical reflection on creative AI.
(Re)Coding Bias
(De)coding
Gender Bias
Gender Bias
(De)coding Gender Bias
Gender Bias
Algorithmic Bias
Facial Recognition
Training Data
Machine Learning
“AI is not a monolithic paradigm of rationality but a spurious architecture made of adapting techniques and tricks. Besides, the limits of AI are not simply technical but are imbricated with human bias.”
Artificial intelligence is a constantly evolving field that has a significant impact on millions of people around the world. One of the most prominent applications is automatic gender recognition (AGR), which is a subfield of face recognition that aims to identify the gender of individuals from images. Despite the existence of efficient neural networks for this task, facial recognition systems are flawed, manifesting gender bias and favouring one segment of society over others. The discussion around this bias has gained prominence in various spheres, such as academia, technology, and politics, highlighting how learning datasets can reflect pre-existing inequalities in society.
(De)coding Gender Bias addresses the social and cultural impacts of this phenomenon, seeking to deconstruct gender bias in facial recognition systems. To this end, it highlights the moments in the process when errors occur, revealing limitations, biases, flaws, fallacies, or vulnerabilities of AI, which are not restricted to technical limitations but rely on social biases.
The project seeks to highlight how machine learning systems can reflect and perpetuate gender stereotypes, echoing Kate Crawford’s words when questioning that "although technical systems present a veneer of objectivity and neutrality" they are often "designed to serve and intensify existing systems of power."
(De)coding Gender Bias addresses the social and cultural impacts of this phenomenon, seeking to deconstruct gender bias in facial recognition systems. To this end, it highlights the moments in the process when errors occur, revealing limitations, biases, flaws, fallacies, or vulnerabilities of AI, which are not restricted to technical limitations but rely on social biases.
The project seeks to highlight how machine learning systems can reflect and perpetuate gender stereotypes, echoing Kate Crawford’s words when questioning that "although technical systems present a veneer of objectivity and neutrality" they are often "designed to serve and intensify existing systems of power."
(Re)Posting Posts
What’s on
Your Mind?
Your Mind?
What’s on Your Mind?
Making Public
Posts
Posters
Feeds
Social Media
“Let’s characterize the experience of living with these platforms now as ultimate smooth flow, a numbing sensation where individual tweets, images, and headlines no longer matter. Rather, we swim through endless feeds and streams that serve up enormous accumulations of information in real time. […] In ultimate smooth flow, we’re left exposed, vulnerable to contextual distortions, losing the capacity for complex reasoning, choice, and nuance.”
In the incessant and frenetic context of the social media feed, the symbolic and aesthetic value of the printed poster is questioned by the immediacy and volatility of the post as a public act. The post can thus be seen as a new digital poster, as a form of expression and immediate sharing of virtually anything that crosses our minds.
What's on Your Mind? is designed as an online visual essay that addresses the feed as a constant and continuous flow of dubious and cumulative information, while exploring the duality between the content and form of the post and poster. The textual content of the project is based on a selection of quotes from texts by Paul Soullelis that discuss the social media feed and the way it places us in a condition of passive consumption, as an “overwhelming condition, characterized by a fluid, stretchy sense of time and space."
The project is configured as a visual feed that explores the duality between post and poster, according to a dynamic and frenetic presentation of verbal and visual content that seeks to highlight the temporality and performativity of the feed.
What's on Your Mind? is designed as an online visual essay that addresses the feed as a constant and continuous flow of dubious and cumulative information, while exploring the duality between the content and form of the post and poster. The textual content of the project is based on a selection of quotes from texts by Paul Soullelis that discuss the social media feed and the way it places us in a condition of passive consumption, as an “overwhelming condition, characterized by a fluid, stretchy sense of time and space."
The project is configured as a visual feed that explores the duality between post and poster, according to a dynamic and frenetic presentation of verbal and visual content that seeks to highlight the temporality and performativity of the feed.
(Re)Telling Narratives
The Infinite Canvas
The feed as visual storytelling
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The Infinite Canvas
The feed as visual storytelling
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Visual Narratives
Temporality
Fragmentation
Social Media
Feeds
“The longer term effects of the filter bubble—a topology that was initially designed to embody ‘relevance’ for a user—now include the scaling up of ideological distortions that were firstly matters of attention and distraction; a user’s occasional clicks and swipes, their micro-durations set against circadian rhythms, and sequences of media seen or unseen. When scaled up, these distortions are all-encompassing caricatures. They are contributing to the sense of a shared reality becoming increasingly fluid […]. So yes, life is always cinema. But who is directing?”
In our daily lives shaped by smartphones and constant connectivity, we incessantly navigate endless streams of real-time accumulations of information. As Paul Soulellis explains, these feeds are flows that undermine the ability to discern any "chronology, context, or value" through an overwhelming accumulation of information.
The Infinite Canvas explores the feed as an infinite and unstable flow of information, focusing on its potential as a visual narrative medium. The project is inspired by Metahaven's reflection on our experience of social media as a fragmentary cinematic experience, whose narrative is ultimately "directed" and controlled by algorithms. In this sense, it evokes Olia Lialina's critique of the gradual conditioning of users according to Web 2.0 paradigms, alluding to algorithmic features of personalization and prioritization of contents that determine the narrative threads of a feed, in platforms like Instagram, Twitter or Facebook.
Through an intersection of fragmentary narratives, which allude to Scott McCloud's teachings on the temporality of visual narratives, The Infinite Canvas seeks to explore some of the visual mechanisms of the feed as a continuous flow of information, highlighting its visuality and narrative potential.
The Infinite Canvas explores the feed as an infinite and unstable flow of information, focusing on its potential as a visual narrative medium. The project is inspired by Metahaven's reflection on our experience of social media as a fragmentary cinematic experience, whose narrative is ultimately "directed" and controlled by algorithms. In this sense, it evokes Olia Lialina's critique of the gradual conditioning of users according to Web 2.0 paradigms, alluding to algorithmic features of personalization and prioritization of contents that determine the narrative threads of a feed, in platforms like Instagram, Twitter or Facebook.
Through an intersection of fragmentary narratives, which allude to Scott McCloud's teachings on the temporality of visual narratives, The Infinite Canvas seeks to explore some of the visual mechanisms of the feed as a continuous flow of information, highlighting its visuality and narrative potential.
(Re)Solving Solutions
Sometimes I Just Need a Break
Solutionism, Social Media, and Mental Health
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Sometimes I Just Need a Break
Solutionism, social media, and mental health
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Technological Solutionism
Appification
Self-help
Mental Health
Social Media
“Many of us turn to these platforms to mentally escape via cute cat videos or to connect with friends in hilarious group chats. And we’ve all felt the surge of serotonin a simple like can produce. But data suggests some people can experience the opposite effect and end up feeling isolated, detached, and, well, sad.”
Sometimes I Just Need a Break proposes a satirical, fictional technological fix to the negative impact of social media on mental health that highlights appification as a specific strand of technological solutionism. The project is motivated by the realization that we turn to social networks for a mental escape, despite the fact that the mechanics inherent in these immediate forms of entertainment and socialization lead us to a growing sense of isolation, detachment, and social pressure. Paradoxically, the need for a break from everyday life then applies to social media.
The project is conceived as a fictional self-help app, presented on a website that exposes its main features and functionalities and that, following the solutionist precepts, promotes a series of additional applications that promise to eradicate human imperfection and promote efficiency.
In this way, it evokes the growing appification that permeates everyday life mediated by smartphones and tablets, as a symptom of the technological solutionism that Evgeny Morozov describes as an uncritical belief in technology as the solution to humanity's problems, leading us to an algorithm-driven world.
The project is conceived as a fictional self-help app, presented on a website that exposes its main features and functionalities and that, following the solutionist precepts, promotes a series of additional applications that promise to eradicate human imperfection and promote efficiency.
In this way, it evokes the growing appification that permeates everyday life mediated by smartphones and tablets, as a symptom of the technological solutionism that Evgeny Morozov describes as an uncritical belief in technology as the solution to humanity's problems, leading us to an algorithm-driven world.
(Re)Pairing Design
Rethink, Refuse, Reduce
Rethink, Refuse, Reduce
Sustainability
Design
Digital Media
Principles
Best Practices
“To 'do design' differently, we need to take into account a range of issues involved. [...] Societal and environmental challenges imply that design practice must change, but it is perhaps less obvious to what extent such change must also come at the level of foundational aesthetic concepts. [...] we cannot articulate a new theory of form without also embodying in it new practices of perceiving, nor can we find conceptual support for new (artistic) expressions in form-acts where these new expressions we are searching for do not clearly emerge. This has critical implications for how design can respond to the call for sustainable development.”
If the internet were a country, it would be the fourth largest polluter in the world, among China, the United States, India, Russia, and Japan; according to 2020 data from the European Union's Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR), which counts anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollution on Earth. Faced with this environmental impact, communication designers find it difficult to reconcile their commitment to sustainability and the demands of their profession.
Rethink, Refuse, Reduce seeks to raise designers’ awareness of digital sustainability through an online manifesto that provides access to a printable publication. The project website introduces 10 ecological impacts of design production and presents 10 ways to minimize or avoid them. The publication, in turn, appears as a way to minimize the energy consumption of the online component, providing additional guidance for sustainable design, or how to adapt design practice to reduce its ecological footprint, namely by combining print and digital media.
This goal is to highlight ways to “rethink” modes of action and production in design, to “reject” poorly sustainable practices, and to “reduce” the environmental impact of design, aiming at a sustainable practice.
Rethink, Refuse, Reduce seeks to raise designers’ awareness of digital sustainability through an online manifesto that provides access to a printable publication. The project website introduces 10 ecological impacts of design production and presents 10 ways to minimize or avoid them. The publication, in turn, appears as a way to minimize the energy consumption of the online component, providing additional guidance for sustainable design, or how to adapt design practice to reduce its ecological footprint, namely by combining print and digital media.
This goal is to highlight ways to “rethink” modes of action and production in design, to “reject” poorly sustainable practices, and to “reduce” the environmental impact of design, aiming at a sustainable practice.