DISRUPTING THE JPEG

ORIGINAL IMAGE

This is a photograph of me and my Poppy from the year before I acquired a severe Traumatic Brain Injury. We are enjoying the Williamson Brothers BBQ in honor of my brother's college graduation. We are talking about how the hushpuppies he makes are better and how I really want him to share his secret recipe with me before I graduate. We are happy, without any disruption to either of our cognitive abilities or brain synapses.

DISRUPTED JPG.

This image represents the lives both of us lead now in 2020. I never did get that secret hushpuppy recipe. My Poppy has advanced Alzheimer's disease and lives in the only nursing home his Medicaid and Veteran checks can cover sharing a room with strangers who listen to very loud T.V. and don't know anything about his family or sense of humor and compassion. Due to the threat of COVID-19 his lovely bride of 60 years can no longer visit him. None of his family or friends can come inside and shoot the breeze or shave his whiskers. Poppy looks a little bit different now which is to be expected because he is ten years older. His daily life differs significantly as he lost his ability to stream thoughts together. We no longer converse as easily as we did once before. His nurses take care of many daily activities able-bodied and able-minded adults take for granted.  The lucky part of these changes is that I can relate to him just as easily as I did ten years ago. We laugh and smile when I visit with my daughter, his first great-granddaughter. You see, my brain is struggling too with disconnected synapses and memory lapse.  One year following our family dinner at the BBQ place I sustained the first in a series of severe Traumatic brain injuries. I do not look much different even though ten years have passed, but my life will never resemble the carefree girl discussing secret family recipes with her beloved Poppy. Now I live with my sweetheart and we are raising our baby girl together. There are many things able-bodied and neurotypical adults take for granted that I need help with from my husband and service dog. 
For this project, I disrupted the JPEG to represent how each of us experiences the world now compared to a decade ago.
I altered the coloring of the image to be much cooler in one version as a way to represent the feeling of being frozen in time. I wake up and expect to be 22 dating my highschool sweetheart thinking about our future family. My Poppy wakes up and expects to be about the same age living with his childhood sweetheart and their baby girl, my mom.
The image is slanted with the tops of our heads being the most disrupted and out of alignment because while we are both alive and in good health, for the most part,  our brains have changed and feel "out of whack" or slowed down most days. We can feel like we are trapped inside of our bodies unable to come out and really live. We are the same people represented in the before picture. Our bodies belong to our individual DNA structures, Spirit, and history. However, our lives have been disrupted by brain injury just like this image has been disrupted by moving around the codes. Just like this JPEG image, our brains are filled with unique codes that control movement and initiate thought patterns. Unlike the disrupted JPEG, a Brain injury can rearrange those codes without anything changing visually on the outside of the body. Unlike my Poppy, my brain has taught itself NEW ways of completing old tasks. Some of the disrupted codes in my brain have been rearranged to function much like the original "file".
We are masterpieces. Like a JPEG file rearranged to produce a new design, created out of the same ones and zeros. Some of our codes are missing or rearranged, but we are still whole.