Free Trade is the second 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.

Free Trade is named after a collage made in this session. It plays on the illusion of scrolling as free exchange: images, opinions, selves, while knowing that nothing about it is free. Attention is traded for visibility. Intimacy becomes data. Feeling becomes unpaid labour. We are asked to give ourselves away, piece by piece, in exchange for belonging.

This zine gathers what was left from that day: collages, half-thoughts, contradictions. Not polished arguments but gestures of refusal. Not solutions but attempts at imagining otherwise. It asks: If this is a world we cannot live within, what worlds can we not live without?

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.

Free Trade is not an answer. It is a question passed from hand to hand.

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Free Trade Zine is the result of Critical Collage Club #1: Remixing Better Images of AI, a workshop facilitated by Dominika Čupková on 4 October 2025 at Levö Studio in Lisbon, Portugal.

This zine was compiled and edited by Dominika Čupková and published in November 2025 by the Institute of Machine Unlearning under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. This zine and the workshop behind it would not have been possible without the incredible contributions of all participants: Anastasiia, Milena, Andrey, and Zolo. Many thanks to Andrey for hosting the first public session of the Institute under the roof of Levö Studio!

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