Cosmic Sans Software is the first zine released under the Institute of Machine Unlearning.

It emerged from a workshop held in Lisbon, where participants collectively challenged the stock clichés and narrow visual tropes through which AI is so often represented. Instead of glowing brains or faceless robots, we cut, pasted, and reassembled images to imagine-otherwise.

The zine gathers the collages made during that session: messy, often humorous, sometimes poetic, and usually critical. Each page is both a work in itself and a trace of the conversations that surrounded it. About recognition and misrecognition, about whose futures AI is built for, about what we want to refuse, protect, or dream into being.

The title, Cosmic Sans Software, hints at a playful refusal of technological seriousness. It is a nod to the cosmic scale invoked by tech hype, and to the softer, stranger, more(-than-)human scales at which we actually encounter machines.

This release is not a polished product but a living document or rather an artefact of unlearning. It sits between zine, workshop debris, and speculative archive. Its purpose is not to define AI but to open it up, to make space for voices and visions often excluded from the way technology is pictured and narrated.

The Institute of Machine Unlearning uses zines like this one as a method: a way to hold traces of ephemeral encounters, to circulate ideas beyond academic desks, and to create objects that invite further eyes.

On Metalabel, these releases will form part of a growing catalogue of unlearning practices, from workshops and performances to critical writing and visual experiments.

Cosmic Sans Software is a small beginning.

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Cosmic Sans Software Zine is the result of Living Room Session #1: Remixing Better Images of AI, a workshop facilitated by Dominika Čupková on 12 July 2025 in Lisbon, Portugal.

This zine and the workshop behind it would not have been possible without the incredible contributions of all participants: Joana, Ana, Rosita, Nico, Cameron, Zohra, and Frederica. Compiled and edited by Dominika Čupková and published in August 2025 by the Institute of Machine Unlearning.

With thanks to AIxDESIGN, where the content and framing of this workshop were first planted through shared research, collaboration and care. <3