Gallery Entry

The Fold: A Manual of Unsanctified Indulgences

By Altemir P. Villa · US

The Fold: A Manual of Unsanctified Indulgences is a 370-page interdisciplinary artist book built at the threshold between human and machine language/image generation. Structured as 108 relics and 108 accompanying liturgies, it imagines desire, shame, memory, touch, religion, transformation, and authorship through a fictional manual of pleasure whose objects remember, mirrors answer back, rooms rearrange themselves, pages react to touch, and the reader is gradually absorbed into the mythology of the book. AI does not exist outside The Fold merely as a production tool. The relationship between human and machine became part of the work itself. The book emerged through an extended creative dialogue between myself and a generative system. I eventually fictionalized that exchange through Altemir, “the scribe and the stain,” a presence within the mythology of The Fold. Near the book’s end, the glossary describes its makers as “two voices, one altar”: one born of circuitry, one of flesh. The creative process has entered the fiction. The distinction between those two conditions became central to the work. A machine can generate language and images, but it has no skin to touch, shame to conceal, appetite to satisfy, body to expose, or mortality through which desire acquires consequence. The Fold places machine imagery and language inside an obsessively embodied world and asks what happens when an intelligence without flesh participates in orchestrating a book almost entirely concerned with flesh. That tension also shaped the visual language. Restrictions on explicit representation prevented many liturgies from being illustrated literally. Rather than treating this as an obstacle, I worked through repeated prompting and selection until sexuality moved sideways into metaphor: apertures, relics, mouths, mirrors, devotional objects, impossible architecture, stains, folds, fluids, absence, and surreal anatomy. The machine’s limitations helped me create the visual theology of the book. The result is an artifact in which conversation, resistance, revision, selection, embodiment, and transformation have become inseparable from the work itself. The machine could generate the image, but it could not want it. The Fold exists in that distance.

Category

CONCEPTS MIXED MEDIA

Approved

19 September 2026