A selfie gone wrong.

A selfie gone wrong.

This image did not arrive by intention in the usual sense. It emerged through play, through what might best be described as a ludic process — an act of setting conditions and allowing chance, probability, and association to respond. AI, in this way, becomes less a tool of control and more a field of possibility. You place something into it — an artwork, a prompt, an idea — and you allow the system to throw the dice. What returns is not always what was asked for, but occasionally something far more interesting: an anomaly.

There is a quiet chaos magic in this process. Not magic as belief, but magic as practice. A willingness to relinquish authorship just enough to let something unfamiliar appear. This is where the uncanny begins — not in spectacle, but in emergence. An image surfaces that does not sit comfortably within expectation, that resists immediate categorisation, that feels as though it belongs slightly outside the present moment. Not from the past, not from the future, but from a kind of liminal elsewhere.

What we are increasingly losing, as a culture, is patience for this elsewhere.

Mainstream perception now moves quickly. Images are consumed at speed, sorted instantly into like or discard, legible or irrelevant. Anything that does not resolve itself immediately into meaning is treated with suspicion. The anomalous is dismissed as “weird,” the obscure as pointless, the uncertain as uncomfortable. Time itself has become hostile to ambiguity.

And yet it is precisely within anomaly that new ways of seeing are born.

This image is one such anomaly. A mistake. A misfire. A selfie gone wrong.

The selfie, in its most familiar form, is a gesture of control. It is the careful management of appearance, the presentation of a surface that reassures rather than reveals. It is a performance of coherence. Of being okay. Of being readable. It offers a fragment of the self that is safe enough to circulate, polished enough to be rewarded.

This image does the opposite.

Here, the face does not fully resolve. Light overwhelms structure. Colour bleeds into flesh. Focus slips. The camera seems unsure of what it is meant to prioritise. The result is not a portrait in the traditional sense, but a disturbance — an interference in the act of self-presentation itself.

There is vulnerability here, and that is precisely what makes it difficult to look at. Not vulnerability as confession or exposure, but vulnerability as leakage. Something has slipped through the mechanism that normally contains it. The image shows more than it is supposed to. Not in any explicit way, but in essence. There is an interiority pressing against the surface, and the surface fails to hold.

This is what many people instinctively turn away from.

We are trained to avoid the void — the spaces where meaning thins, where identity becomes unstable, where the self cannot be easily summarised or consumed. The void is uncomfortable because it does not reassure. It does not perform happiness. It does not confirm that everything is in order.

And yet, paradoxically, the more tightly a society attempts to control appearance, behaviour, and expression, the more these ruptures begin to occur. Chaos does not disappear in systems of order — it accumulates. It waits. It finds strange routes through the cracks.

Seen in this way, the image feels less like an accident and more like a symptom. An echo produced by an environment obsessed with containment. An egregore, perhaps — not as a literal entity, but as a collective residue. A visual manifestation of everything that has been excluded, filtered out, smoothed over.

It looks like something from an archive that should not exist. Or from a future that hasn’t decided what it is yet. It feels professional, intentional, composed — and yet its meaning slips away the longer you look at it. It refuses to stabilise. It refuses to behave.

That refusal is the point.

Art has always advanced not through refinement alone, but through error. Through misalignment. Through images that arrive before the language to describe them exists. These are the hidden gems — the moments when perception stumbles into new territory and doesn’t immediately know how to map it.

The tragedy of the present moment is not that anomalies no longer appear, but that we have become increasingly unwilling to stay with them. To explore them. To allow them to reconfigure how we see. We discard the unfamiliar before it has time to teach us anything.

This image asks for something slower. A different kind of looking. It does not demand interpretation; it invites encounter. It asks what happens when the machinery of self-presentation fails just enough for something real, unstable, and unresolved to surface.

Perhaps that is why it feels unsettling.
Not because it is strange — but because it is honest in a way we have forgotten how to be.