© 2025 AIxDesign
© 2025 AIxDesign
© 2025 AIxDesign
Archival Images of AI
Archival Images of AI
Introduction
Archival Images of AI explores how existing images – especially those from digital heritage collections – can be remixed and reused to represent AI in more compelling ways.
Timeline
April 2024 - Present
Team
Project Lead
Ploipailin Flynn
Researchers
Nadia Piet
Dominika Čupková
Ploipailin Flynn
Graphic Designer
Kaashvi Kothari
Communications
Dominika Čupková
Elena Zaghis
Editor
Sofia Vieira
Image Makers
Cristóbal Ascencio
Hanna Barakat
Dominika Čupková
Nadia Piet
Zeina Saleem
Eryk Salvaggio
Advisors
Rasa Bočytė Tania Duarte
Partners
Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision
Introduction
Archival Images of AI explores how existing images – especially those from digital heritage collections – can be remixed and reused to represent AI in more compelling ways.
Timeline
April 2024 - Present
Team
Project Lead
Ploipailin Flynn
Researchers
Nadia Piet
Dominika Čupková
Ploipailin Flynn
Graphic Designer
Kaashvi Kothari
Communications
Dominika Čupková
Elena Zaghis
Editor
Sofia Vieira
Image Makers
Cristóbal Ascencio
Hanna Barakat
Dominika Čupková
Nadia Piet
Zeina Saleem
Eryk Salvaggio
Advisors
Rasa Bočytė Tania Duarte
Partners
Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision
428+
Images created
350+
Participants involved
24+
Workshops facilitated
2
Lovie Awards
Why it matters
Images shape how we think about, understand, and talk about the world. Yet, images of AI are often problematic.
Common visual tropes of glowing brains, humanoid robots, and cascading walls of code create a distorted view of AI, giving it a mystical, almost god-like quality. This skews public and industry conversations around AI. In our project Better Images of Responsible AI, together with AI4Media and Better Images of AI (We and AI), we helped create a set of commissioned images that imagine a more helpful visual language for AI. But after months of work, we ended up with only a small handful. That got us wondering – how can we make it easier (for anyone) to create better images of AI?
Check out Better Images of Responsible AI
How we did it
Building on insights from Better Images of AI: A Guide for Users and Creators, we set out to explore and understand how archival materials could help us craft more meaningful visual narratives about AI.
Insight-driven: We spoke with 10 subject-matter experts whose work helped shape our research hypotheses.
Participatory: We hosted an online community research session to explore how culture-makers navigate archives.
Practice-led: We worked with five image-makers to prototype, test, and refine our results.
Read the better Images Guide
What we made
Archival Images of AI Playbook: Creating better images of AI through digital heritage is a hands-on toolkit for anyone who wants to remix, reuse, and rethink AI imagery.
Whether you’re a journalist, educator, designer, or community organizer, our playbook provides the tools, techniques, and inspiration to create visuals that break stereotypes and spark meaningful conversations about AI.
We invite you to play with Archival Images of AI –
tear it, glue it, or rip it apart.
Be part of the movement
to create better images of AI!
We commissioned image-makers to create 36 images. These images explore topics such as rare earth minerals, digital colonialism, AI fatigue, algorithmic censorship, workslop, and more.
Since then, our better images of AI have been featured in major media outlets, blogs, keynotes, events, academic papers and the Better Images of AI stock library, helping change the face of AI one mindful image choice at a time.
Based on our playbook-making process, we created an interactive workshop that invites participants to critically examine and reimagine the visual language used to represent AI. Through discussion and hands-on collage-making, attendees explore common visual tropes in AI media and collaboratively create more realistic, nuanced, expressive, or thought-provoking images.
We have hosted sessions at Ars Electronica, Beta Festival, Academie Minerva, Noorderlicht, and many more.
Use the playbook and workshop materials to host your own session or hit us up at hello@aixdesign.co to book a workshop!
