David OReilly, developer of Mountain and Everything, is now making terrifying Instagram filters.
OReilly creates work that one might call “weird,” as either a compliment or an insult. Mountain is a simulation game in an extremely literal sense. It simulates a mountain, which changes over time, as more and more stuff appears on it and crashes into it. Everything is a simulation game where you can actually be everything, and playing it caused our own Nathan Grayson to have a minor mental breakdown. Now OReilly has taken his talent to Instagram, where he has made a few extremely freaky filters.
Some of them just distort your face in scary ways. One called “It’s Always You” superimposes your face onto a person, then a landscape, and then eventually an entire planet. The one that’s most fascinating to me is called Simulation. It’s hard to describe, but I’ll do my best.
In Simulation, your face is superimposed first onto a fetus:
And then onto a corpse:
Each loop lasts for the exact span of how long you can record a clip through Instagram’s stories feature, but it doesn’t stop there. As the filter loops around, the face of the fetus becomes more and more distorted, and the corpse continues to degrade, eventually crumbling into a pile of dust and bones.
There is an “end” of this filter, though it cycles through its process for around two minutes before starting from the beginning all over again. What this cycle eventually results in was startling enough that it stuck in my head for days, and I don’t want to spoil it. If you want to see for yourself, head over to OReilly’s instagram page, where he’s got a tutorial for how to find and use his filters. Just be prepared to see yourself turn to dust.