Comfort In The Uncomfortable
Let’s talk about something that we’ve all experienced at one point or another in our lives — when something unprecedented happens out of the blue, something that you are grotesquely unprepared for occurs and you are lost as to what your next step of action is.
From personal experience, I can tell you that these things always always happen to me exactly when I feel I cannot handle them the most, at a moment in time when I am least equipped to handle some seemingly divine joke that all but flips my life upside down just when I become relaxed and comfortable with my routine.
This is what I choose to call the calm before the storm. In a world that is so consumed with technology, with having every single post be perfect and have just the right aesthetic tone to it, I decided what better way to express momentary chaos than glitch art?
This is the original picture that I chose — a cool toned mountain range, often thought to bring serenity and calmness to a busy everyday lifestyle. (Also, the perfect Instagram post.)
However, once we start to mess up the photo’s data file, the picture goes from a serene wall hanging to a chaotic and uncomfortable mess. The colors change, the scene shifts, the mountains topple. I’ve done this a few different ways, each more chaotic and uncomfortable than the next. First, a toned down one — keeping the cool blues and similar tones, only a little out of order, losing almost the entire bottom half of the photo to a dark blue sea.
This doesn’t make viewers totally uncomfortable…just a little confused as to what is wrong with the picture. I continued with the process, turning the cool blue tones into a lilac — still comforting, yet the image has been destroyed — the mountains are no longer in comfortable alignment, but shown as if someone had cut up the original picture, dyed it, and pieced it back together in an incorrect way.
However, this photo is not something that you’d avoid posting completely, as the lilac is not harsh enough to be considered loud, and you could theoretically still work this into a calm aesthetic. The small splotches and pixels of strong color are not nearly as abrasive as they could be, so this does not quite fulfill the goal of this post — to destroy and modify something to a point where it is still recognizable as the original, but not nice enough for an Instagram post that will keep up with a soft, comfortable aesthetic that many younger ‘grammers tend to gravitate towards today.
Thus, I present to you the final installment of this post — the last image, altered to a point where a new, harsh color scheme is introduced.
Personally, looking at that bright fuchsia-red hybrid color for too long pains my eyes. Remember earlier when I mentioned that the worst events happen out of the blue? While not just a play on words, that is the point that I wish to get across with this photoset. From a calming and relaxing mountain range, a fiery progression of nature was born. The perfect Instagram post turned into something that hurts to look at, and the aesthetic has been almost completely reversed.
The un-comfortability in the photo is something that is meant to highlight the way that life works — it is not something that is predictable, and with one tiny internal systematic error, something uncomfortable and unforeseen is born. However, it is still a piece of art, and within the uncomfortable, we must find comfort.
Glitch Art Help: https://snorpey.github.io/jpg-glitch/
Original Image: http://feelgrafix.com/857400-mountain-range.html
