trypophilia

Some people see a cluster of holes — a lotus seed head, a honeycomb, the back of a Surinam toad — and their skin tightens. It has a name now, trypophobia, and a small serious literature: the images share a spectral signature with venomous animals, or they look like something infected, and an old part of the brain says away.

Some of us feel the exact same tug and lean in. A pallet of terracotta pipes seen end-on. A crate of empty sake bottles, every mouth pointed at you. Wax gone soft and pocked. The pleasure is in the multiplicity and the address: many openings, all facing you, all asking.

That disposition has no proper name and no literature at all. This is a small home for it.

The images were made with a diffusion model in the first week of June 2023, from one long prompt that kept mutating: black, hyperrealistic, asymmetrical, neural, electron microscope, fractal holes, beehive, drips, melting, sensual, wax. What came back was a material that doesn't exist — part circuit board, part coral, part cooled sugar — and it is, if you are built this way, very hard to stop looking at.

On the science: Cole & Wilkins, “Fear of Holes”, Psychological Science 2013; Kupfer & Le, “Disgusting clusters”, Cognition and Emotion 2018. Hover to look closer. Click to fall in.