Mapping Alienation: First Steps

Over the past months I’ve kept circling back to one word: alienation. It wasn’t part of the original plan, but the more I experimented with AI and sat with my own reactions, the more it made sense. Alienation seemed to explain the strange mix of feelings I couldn’t ignore.

It’s not just a textbook concept. For me, alienation is that quiet estrangement you feel when you’re in a room full of people yet somehow apart, or when you catch your reflection in the mirror and it looks almost unfamiliar. With AI, those moments intensify. The machine mimics expression, but doesn’t carry the weight beneath it. We can’t really read its logic, and it can’t feel ours. That closeness-yet-distance is exactly where my project begins.

To solve this, I started sketching with words. I wrote prompts, half-image and half-thought experiments, just to see what alienation might look like if you could stage it.

Psychological Isolation in a Crowd

Sometimes the loneliest I’ve felt has been while surrounded by people. That’s what I wanted here: someone frozen on a busy subway while the world blurs and rushes around them. For me, alienation in this moment isn’t about being alone at all, it’s about being unable to connect, even when life is pressed up against you.

A hyper-realistic painting of a person sitting in the middle of a crowded subway train, yet completely emotionally detached. Everyone around them is smiling and talking in fast motion blurs, while the central figure is in sharp focus, frozen in time, staring blankly ahead. Their eyes show a mix of numbness and quiet despair. Dim blue lighting isolates the subject, and subtle fog surrounds them, symbolizing emotional disconnection and inner alienation.

Surreal Mirror of the Self

Mirrors unsettle me. You look, expecting recognition, but sometimes what stares back feels like someone else. In this scene, the reflection fractures, breaking into puzzle pieces while the figure outside stays blank. Alienation here turns inward: that rift between the person you are and the person you see.

A surreal image of a person standing in front of a mirror in a dark, infinite corridor. In the reflection, their face is fragmented into puzzle pieces floating away, while their real face is expressionless and blank. The background is filled with distant clocks melting into the walls, representing the loss of time and self-identity. Strange shadowy figures watch from afar with featureless faces. The overall atmosphere conveys deep psychological alienation and fractured identity.

Dreamscape of Estrangement

I pictured someone wandering through a dreamlike desert, past floating staircases and windows showing lives they’ll never live. Their body fades to transparency, almost gone. This is how alienation sometimes feels to me, like being present but always just outside, watching through the glass.

A surreal dreamscape where a human figure walks alone through a desert of floating staircases and levitating windows showing memories of other people's lives. The figure has no shadow and their body appears semi-transparent, almost fading from existence. In the sky, giant eyes weep silently. The composition is rich in symbolic imagery: isolation, disconnection from society, and the longing to belong but being forever outside.

Clinical Alienation

Then there’s the colder version: a padded room, a chair, a still figure, and ghostly silhouettes circling without sound. Here alienation becomes systemic, imposed by structures meant to care but instead confining. It’s detachment made clinical.

A stark, minimalist room with white padded walls and a single chair in the center. A person sits motionless in the chair, wrapped in a hospital gown, their eyes glassy and distant. Around them, ghostly silhouettes of people form a ring, whispering silently. The lighting is sterile, clinical, and cold. A medical clipboard floats midair, with the word "alienation" written repeatedly. The image evokes psychiatric detachment and institutional loneliness.

The Drowning Mind

I thought about suffocation, that desperate sinking feeling. A figure underwater, mouth open, bubbles escaping. Broken objects drift past: a torn photo, a phone, a clock. Above, unreachable light. Alienation here is like drowning: you know the surface is there, you just can’t reach it.

A symbolic image of a person submerged underwater, suspended mid-air in an ocean that fades into darkness. Their eyes are open, mouth slightly ajar, as if trying to scream but only bubbles escape. Around them float broken objects: a torn photograph, a disconnected phone, a shattered clock. The water's surface above glows with unreachable light. This portrays emotional drowning, abandonment, and alienation from both self and world.

Urban Surrealism

The city itself can be estranging. I imagined endless buildings with no doors or windows, billboards showing fragments of memory, signs in scripts you can’t read. A lone figure wanders with a cloudy orb instead of a head. This is alienation in its urban form, cognitive as much as emotional, when language itself refuses to let you in.

A lone figure walks through an endless city where the buildings have no windows or doors. Billboards display random fragments of the person's memories. Streetlights cast no shadows. The figure's head is replaced with a cloudy orb that shifts shape. All signs are written in an unreadable script. The scene is painted in a mix of dark indigos and sickly greens, emphasizing a surreal urban hellscape of cognitive and social alienation.

Smiling Masks

And finally, there’s the alienation of inauthenticity. A crowd of people wear identical porcelain masks, each smiling. Only one person is unmasked, visibly shaken. This one hits me hard: when everyone else hides behind performance, being real feels like exile.

A gathering of people wearing smiling porcelain masks, all perfectly still, surrounding a single person without a mask whose expression is of confusion and fear. The masked figures' shadows are twisted and distorted, forming claws that seem to reach toward the unmasked person. The background is an abstract swirl of red and grey. The scene explores the fear of inauthenticity, social performance, and the alienation of being real among the fake.

Where This Leaves Me

When I line these sketches up together, I see a map of alienation. Each one traces a different fracture, between self and self, self and others, individual and system.

But I don’t see alienation as pure failure. I see it as the atmosphere of this moment, especially in how we face AI. Machines don’t feel, and we don’t fully grasp their inner workings. But maybe the gap itself matters. Maybe in that uneasy space between closeness and distance, something new can emerge.