Sometimes, life feels overwhelming with so many things pulling at our attention—headaches, toothaches, muscle pain, strains, fever. The simple act of waiting for a painkiller to work becomes a quiet meditation. I wait, knowing that in about 45 minutes, the pain will subside, imagining the pill dissolving into the water in my body and erasing the discomfort. This small, invisible transformation fascinates me.

Motivated by this, I wanted to visualize how a painkiller disintegrates, how it "kills" pain in its own systematic way. Engineers at J&J have meticulously designed Tylenol to dissolve within 20 minutes in the body’s water, optimizing its effect. There is a precision, a system here—a quiet algorithm at work.

To explore this, I placed 50 Tylenol pills in petri dishes filled with water, carefully standardizing every input: the same temperature, mineral water, and quantity. Despite these controlled conditions, the outcomes differed—each pill interacted uniquely with the water, creating 50 distinct visual results. In this process, I ceded control to the materials, allowing the pill and water to shape the image autonomously. What emerged were intimate records of dissolution, revealing both the systemic and unpredictable nature of pain and its relief.