Centurypede

A sketch inspired by Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. In it the main character Billy Pilgrim becomes "unstuck in time" and experiences past and future events out of sequence over the course of the novel. At one point he is kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore and exhibited in their exoplanetary zoo. The Tralfamadorians just so happen to see things in four dimensions and have already witnessed every instant of their lives. They believe in predestination and say they cannot change anything about their fates, but are able to concentrate upon any moment of their choice.

So to elucidate further, they describe a human life as seen in the fourth dimension to be like a centipede of countless arms and legs stretched out from birth to death. Every moment and movement captured as fragments densely crisscrossing and interacting with countless other centipedes. Too much to grasp in its entirety, so I simplified the concept into a collection of faces that begin at the fetus on the tail end and gradually grow older, finally culminating with a grimacing skull. The swirled ripple around the fetus and portal in the eye of the skull are a linked vortex, representing the process of reincarnation.