Christmal

BLURB

Christmal is an artistic survey of cultural traditions, folklore and storytelling.

The collection of images within Christmal proffer more than mere Christmas decorations, they represent human creativity in the face of a potentially bleak period of our reality, our winter.

They are unexpected examples of vernacular art, a testament to human creation and the signification of a shared cultural consciousness.

Christmas gives a false sense of stability. A temporary illusion of normality. A reality that can be ruptured.

Merry Christmal

Christmal was an early exploration of AI image generation. A compilation of images created with the second iteration of DALL E. A send-up of classic coffee table books about brutalist architecture.

There were various subtle references to the fact the book was AI generated, in particular two quotes by author Yuval Noah-Harari, from talks about AI: “Organism’s are algorithms” and “We alone, of all the animals on the planst, can create and believe fictional stories”.

The book was created to be gifted as a Christmas present to various friends and colleagues, ultimately most people who recieved the book were fooled and believed it to be a collection of real images. The name comes from one of the images which generated the glitchy text, Christmal, it felt like a gift in itself.