Discussion

2020 was plagued by one of the most impressive setbacks of recent times: the COVID-19 pandemic. With the arrival of the virus, restriction measures in circulation were implemented as an attempt to contain the contagion. in other words: we are all ordered to wait at home as long as possible. After almost 4 months of containment, it is increasingly difficult to remember what the world was like before, it is strange to stop to think about how the world works now and how it worked a year ago.

Staying at home has been a challenge to the mental stability of many people who have been subjected to social isolation. People begin to lose patience after months of staying at home, but the panic generated by an invisible killer also grows. Fear of the virus has led some to assume ridiculous habits of hygiene and consumerism, and has even gone so far as to cause a phobia of public places: agoraphobia.

Technique

The main layer is a style transfer applying a “where’s wally?” cartoon pattern with a mixed color palette. The other layers were different filter dimensions applied in Deep Dream convolutional networks. At the end the image is processed again to apply hue filter, HDR and white balance.

From the artist

The pandemic keeps us alert and waiting for a catastrophe that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives around the world today. The confinement keeps us in captivity and forces us to be calm when all the signs we receive from the outside world invite us to panic and disagreement.

When it occurred to me to create the image I was thinking about how to represent the state of alert from a calm and contemplative position. My cat Pi was nearby and I saw him observing a feather that fell near the outside sidewalk of the house, in front of the living room window. He was lying on the edge of the back of the sofa, without tension in the muscles, but with his eyes wide open in expectation of any uninvited movement. I found it curious that despite expressing a state of persecution with his eyes, Pi’s pose never stopped being that of a sleepy cat.

I took a photo of him and decided to use it as my main template.

Models and references

Models

  • Pi - my male cat