Workshop at KISD – Köln International School of Design

Created on January 16, 2026

2026

Institution: Köln International School of Design (KISD) Date: 16 January 2026 Workshop Materials: GitHub

Latent Vandalism: The Joy of Productive Damage to Text-to-Image Synthesis Pipelines

Text-to-image models have evolved into sophisticated engines of template culture, trained to reproduce standardized aesthetics. This workshop explores the epistemic value of productive damage and AI failure, drawing inspiration from glitch studies.

Participants worked directly with Diffusion Transformers (DiT), focusing on embeddings and image-text correlations from embedding space through latent space into pixel space. Through systematic perturbations and deliberate pipeline damage, participants investigated the model’s implicit assumptions and sensitivity.

This counterfactual and gently adversarial approach positions productive damage as a research method, revealing values, design choices, and visual norms embedded in text-to-image systems.