XLSemanal Cover Decrypter - November 2022

XLSemanal is Spain’s most widely read Sunday magazine supplement (suplemento dominical). It presented this work as a staged hacking incident and invited readers to recover its contents by typing in the correct phrase (in Spanish). The publisher credits Klingemann with creating both the encrypted and decrypted images with the help of artificial intelligence.

Klingemann wanted the disrupted cover to evoke the contents of a computer’s memory after something had gone badly wrong. Behind it, he imagined a familiar magazine portrait transformed into a person undergoing encryption, their face concealed. Working with Midjourney and other deep-learning tools, he spent a week experimenting, restarting the process around a hundred times and developing roughly twenty versions of the final cover. He described the artist’s contribution as a sustained process of testing, adjusting and selecting among the machine’s proposals until the result felt like his own work.