A PROXY IS A PROXY IS A PROXY ➝

Generative AI + Art Direction: Sonja Camara

╳Generative AI editorial and visual essay.

Madeira is celebrated as the ”Garden of the Atlantic”. The Madeira Flower Festival (Festa da Flor) began in 1954 as a small, intimate event known as Festa da Rosa (Rose Festival). In 1979, the Madeiran Tourism Authority officially expanded the celebration transforming it into the grand, open-air Festa da Flor we know today. It’s the island's largest event. A month long extravaganza of flower displays, parades, market stands and ”flower embassadors”. It’s also non sustainable and zero environmentally friendly. Plastics and polymers are employed for the monthly decorations (fake flower arrangements all over the city, Funchal), with tones of waste and trash created by the parades, cars fumes and ornamentations, thematic costumes, superfluous merch and the general public. An ever growing percentage of the flowers (90%) are imported as the local produce is not the goal and would be insuficent in quantity/exoticism to feed this imense tourist trap/machine.
A PROXY IS A PROXY IS A PROXY is a series of AI images blossoming out of prompts based on real specific flowers (not autochthonous to the island) primed for their flower fest close-up.

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