Making Sense of Slow AI: A zine about Slow AI Imaginaries invites you to reimagine what AI is, what it could be, and what it should become.

Created with scissors, glue, and a splash of zine-making magic at the AIxDESIGN Festival, it pieces together 40 pages of eclectic stories on Small AI, Esoteric AI, and Ancestral AI. Three alternative pathways that challenge mainstream AI narratives by asking you to:

• Think small
• Make it magical
• Plan for the past

This special issue is a hot compost pile of creative contributions, exchanges, and discussions from the Slow AI Zine-making Workshop, facilitated by internet teapot, as part of the AIxDESIGN Festival on May 2, 2025.

It builds on a series of zine-making workshops on Esoteric AI, Small AI, and Ancestral AI, hosted by AIxDESIGN + internet teapot throughout 2024 as part of the Slow AI research project.

A big thank you and love to all the workshop participants for their amazing contributions: Hanna Barakat, Jana Reske, Anna Sivera van der Sluijs, Rick Heemskerk, Dominika Čupková, Natalia Stanusch, Rasa Bocyte, Lorena Rege Turo, Lesly, Hessel Tabor, Ana Marques, Elena Zaghis, Chiara Vignandel, Alina Bardavid, Bokar N’Diaye, Avi, Netta, Arimit, and Philo.

The Slow AI project seeks to unpack and reimagine alternative narratives for AI, moving beyond Silicon Valley ideologies. Inspired by countermovements like slow fashion and slow food, it aims to subvert corporate-first thinking by collectively exploring new perspectives as pathways to ‘imagine and craft the worlds we cannot live without, just as we dismantle the ones we cannot live within’ (Ruha Benjamin).

Hungry for more? Learn more about what AI means for “the rest of us“ in [Dis]enchantment: A zine about Esoteric AI, AI for Ants: A zine about Small AI, and Pasts, Presents, Futures: A zine about Ancestral AI.