Autumn 2023

Editorial Eye 105

At a time when people are seeing Artificial Intelligence as either a get-rich scheme or an existential threat, Marian Bantjes’ article ‘Artificial idiot’ is a useful corrective to the tsunami of commentary. Bantjes has taken the time to investigate the processes required to coax something interesting out of Midjourney, and has found a typically novel way to incorporate the application into her own practice. Along the way she has discussed the issue with other experimenters, notably Pum Lefebure (Design Army) and Jonathan Hoefler, and has come up with some provocative and fascinating observations.

Meanwhile, quizzed by Louise Sandhaus in our Reputations interview, brand supremo Brian Collins has a more Tiggerish take on AI: ‘We must now become as fluent with AI as we are with colour, shape, form, type, glyphs, motion, sound and words.’

Dennis Gould’s practice stems from the early 1990s, a time when a poet could become a printer with the purchase of an obsolete proofing press. As mainstream graphic design entered a turbulent period of adjustment to the emerging digital world, Gould pursued an aesthetic and political agenda rooted in earlier, more analogue (and revolutionary) times.

‘The quiet confidence of Tomoko Miho’ is the latest in Elizabeth Resnick’s series of eloquent profiles from recent graphic design history, while ‘The power of physical books’ takes the temperature of current practice, with a detailed overview of the considered and typographically resonant work of Sonya Dyakova’s Atelier Dyakova.

Dennis Gould’s poster for an evening event staged by the ‘Stroud Football Poets’, printed on a Vandercook flatbed press, 1996. See ‘The creative anarchist’.
Top. Detail from Bouffants by Marian Bantjes, 2023, a ‘sticker painting’ with multiple AI images that Bantjes generated in Midjourney. See ‘Artificial idiot’.

John L. Walters, editor of Eye, London

First published in Eye no. 105 vol. 27, 2023

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.