Chris Scarborough is a multimedia artist who is featured in the new issue of art quarterly Hi Fructose. Scarborough’s images deal with anomie and anime. By blurring the lines between the hyperrealized, fetishized and distorted style of Japanese anime, life-drawing, and photography, he cracks open uncomfortable human spaces from strange angles.
Specifically, Scarborough chose to reverse-engineer the uncanny valley, the hypothesis that lifelike artifice produces revulsion (or at least, introspective discomfort) in their viewer. By augmenting photographs off of anime-inspired computer-generated imagery,Scarborough manages reach the uncanny valley from the other side.
Scarborough’s body of work includes graphite drawings of “doomsday clouds”, fluffy, textured clouds that explode into cartoon-like battle scenes, arms and legs akimbo within. It’s hard to tell what’s solid from what is gas, what’s lifelike from what is the product of an uncomfortable, artificial, but manmade world.
