Editorial Design
Rome
2023
with
Gabriele
Nassuato
+
Davide
Paolini
+
Valerio
Paciello
[BHC]
[DETAILS]
[OVERVIEW]
Beyond Human Control is the final output of a wider project on the Anthropocene, the era in which human activity has left a mark on every part of the planet. Within it, the project asks what artificial intelligence might do to the future of the species, and refuses to answer.
The investigation takes the form of two newspapers published as a single pack, The Utopian and The Dystopian. Every article and every image in one has a counterpart in the other: the same subject read twice, once from a hopeful position and once from a defeatist one. One pack holds a future where the technology extends what people can do, and a future where it takes that away. Neither is presented as the likely one, and holding the two side by side is the argument. Both were printed on real newsprint, at the scale and the material of a paper anyone might pick up.
Each newspaper carries an insert built on Persian carpet patterns, their geometry filled with AI-generated imagery: a structure worked out by hand over centuries, holding images that no hand made.
All the text and imagery was generated with AI in early 2023. Building the entire thing that way was a deliberate exercise rather than a celebration: the subject makes the artefact, and the question it raises about who authors what has only grown since.
The investigation takes the form of two newspapers published as a single pack, The Utopian and The Dystopian. Every article and every image in one has a counterpart in the other: the same subject read twice, once from a hopeful position and once from a defeatist one. One pack holds a future where the technology extends what people can do, and a future where it takes that away. Neither is presented as the likely one, and holding the two side by side is the argument. Both were printed on real newsprint, at the scale and the material of a paper anyone might pick up.
Each newspaper carries an insert built on Persian carpet patterns, their geometry filled with AI-generated imagery: a structure worked out by hand over centuries, holding images that no hand made.
All the text and imagery was generated with AI in early 2023. Building the entire thing that way was a deliberate exercise rather than a celebration: the subject makes the artefact, and the question it raises about who authors what has only grown since.
