| I've always wondered about this! Back when I was a teenager I remember playing around with one of the Kai's Power Tools to generate fractal-like images (I forget exactly which one it was, but it had a bunch of presets that would generate cell-like textures). Thing was, I found them MASSIVELY anxiety-provoking and have never been able to figure out why. They'd literally make me panicky. These images are doing the same. Even now, just thinking about them, my stomach is fluttering. It's something about the way they're organic, but I don't know what it is. It's definitely nothing rational. I've never heard of trypophobia; this does seem like it. I wonder if it's closely related to the feeling of disgust; somehow an evolved response to keep us away from rotten food perhaps? Things like bacteria growing on bread, or beehives. Or any food that's started decomposing. There's a cool documentary I remember seeing called "How Art Made The World". One of the things it talks about is how we're driven to make more-than-perfect representations of things in our art. Say we find something in the real world aesthetically pleasing. With art, we can take that aesthetically pleasing stimulus and exaggerate it, resulting in the art being more pleasing than anything in the real world. I wonder if that's what happens here, with the almost-organic images somehow being 'hyper-disgusting' as they coincidentally line up with a hyper-exaggerated version of a stimulus that on the scale of disgusting might be 'slightly unappealing' in the form that we'd encounter it in the real world. |
The image: https://i.imgur.com/Zihujue.gif
And it flashing: http://makeagif.com/i/hHzAiq