This work explores the fragility of the body in moments of emotional collapse. The image is fragmented, disrupted by glitches, distortions, and visual ruptures, echoing the way grief fractures perception and memory. These broken images are not aesthetic effects alone but traces of destabilization in both body and mind, mirroring how overwhelming emotion distorts reality.

The sound follows the same logic, where noise interrupts silence, sometimes barely audible, sometimes violently present. It evokes suffocation, a breath struggling within an environment that offers no refuge. Image and sound together suggest a state of emotional drowning, where crying itself seems to fail, dissolving before it can fully emerge.

The work was created using a GoPro camera and digital post-production tools such as Adobe Premiere and After Effects. The use of minimal technical means reinforces its rawness, allowing a direct and unpolished expression of its emotional core.

Conceptually, Cry to Die draws inspiration from Bill Viola’s Ascension, where water becomes a threshold between life and death. It also resonates with the surreal materiality of Jan Švankmajer’s Alice and the existential rhythm of David Ives’ theatrical writing, particularly in its treatment of time, texture, and perception. Beyond these references, the work remains deeply personal, emerging from an internal emotional state while extending beyond the self.

At its core, the piece speaks of emotional drowning, a moment where sorrow becomes so consuming that it fuses with the body itself. The glitches, fractured images, and disrupted soundscape do not illustrate this condition, they enact it, drawing the viewer into a space where crying and dying begin to blur.

The work was presented in Platform 101: Glitch Art at Galerie Elahi, Rasht, Iran.