Synapse: what do you know about cyberpsychosis?
About it
This piece is a speculative project and an exercise in expression. It is a deliberate step outside my comfort zone. I wanted to illustrate a neuron, but through a completely different visual language. At the time, I was watching Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, and its palette stuck with me.
The Challenge
Borrowing someone else's visual world is easy to do badly. The risk is pastiche. The challenge was to take the Edgerunners palette and aesthetic and use them to say something genuine about neuroscience, identity, and the line between body and machine, while still pushing my own style into unfamiliar territory.
The Process
The colour palette came first: instead of reaching for the tones I usually work with, I locked myself into the one defined by the series. Those fluorescent colours don't come naturally to me, so I had to rethink contrast and mood from the ground up.
There's a conceptual layer behind the choice of subject, too. In the world of Edgerunners, cyberpsychosis is a dissociative disorder caused by overloading the body with cybernetic implants, stripping away identity and empathy and pushing people toward extreme violence. The neuron felt like the right entry point into that idea. The cell at the very core of who we are and how we think, rendered in the aesthetic of a world where that core can be overwritten by too much chrome.
That concept is also why I pushed the movement so hard. I wanted the neuron to feel less like a textbook diagram and more like something alive and on edge, twisting and coiling like a snake mid-strike. What's normally a static structure suddenly looks dangerous, closer to the unstable, overloaded mind the story warns about than to a calm scientific illustration. The whole piece leans toward impact over subtlety. We look at something striking and bold that grabs attention before it explains anything. More than a strictly didactic image, it's a test of how far I can take my own style while borrowing someone else's visual world and using it to say something about ours.