IED Student Santi Jonathan Di Paola Creates Futuristic Cover for Artribune Magazine

Santi Jonathan Di Paola, a student in the Master of Arts in Transdisciplinary Design at IED Torino, designed the cover for Artribune Magazine 79. The cover depicts a virtual axolotl roaming among buildings in a futuristic Paris, envisioning 2044 as a time of symbiotic daily interactions between humans and artificial intelligence. The cover image originates from Di Paola's project MnemoOS, which explores themes of future mobility, technology, and sustainability. MnemoOS imagines a fictional company, MNEMO, founded in 2024 as a domestic totem for preserving digital memories of deceased loved ones. By 2044, MNEMO evolves into a global data management corporation that makes ancestral 'movement biographies' accessible in urban 'sacred mobility nodes.' Each user is assigned an AI companion from birth to death that tracks their movement biography and carbon footprint, making environmental impact public and non-negotiable. Di Paola discusses the role of design in creating a better world, emphasizing concepts of anticipation and agency, and warns of the risks of AI making humans lazier and more dependent. The cover is part of the Fragile Surface project, a collaboration between IED and Artribune that showcases student and alumni multimedia works reflecting on contemporary themes inspired by major art and design biennials.