The Brief: produce a ‘personal identikit’ describing myself through visual ephemera. The approach needs only to reflect some aspects of identity construction I find interesting, relevant and insightful and can be expressed using own personal aesthetic and taste.
I began this project with the idea that identity was more than simply stemming from simple genetics. Rather, it is shaped from unique weaves of experiences and memories, different for every individual, and forms the backbone for all of our current preferences, tastes and habits, in other words, our identity. Thus, I began with brainstorming my interests: comic and animation style art, skateboard culture, Asian cultures and mythology. Zombies, especially, became a linking theme that became seemingly present throughout my interests. Zombie culture is, in itself, a form of mythology that comment on the human condition or depict a crisis that the human mind is yet unable or unwilling to comprehend. They raise questions about society and what individuals are capable of when pushed to their most desperate measures amidst total anarchy. These stories manifest themselves across many mediums I am interested in, and seem to be the apocalyptic modern day extension of my original fascination with mythology and religion.
The relevancy of zombie mythology became increasingly apparent throughout the course of my research on identity, largely surrounding the concepts of David Miller and Sigmund Freud. Freud’s work on the constituents of identity, that is, the Id, ego and super-ego, was especially applicable. According to this model of the psyche, the Id represents the set of uncoordinated instinctual drives and impulses that act according to the ‘pleasure principle’: seeking pleasure and avoiding suffering without moral judgments. The ego, on the other hand, is the organized, realistic function that aims to please the Id’s drive in practical ways. The super-ego acts as the scruples and plays the role of controlling our moral compass and administering guilt, while also adhering to social rules. The super-ego also ties in with Miller’s theory in Style and Ontology, referencing The Dragon Can’t Dance by Earl Lovelace (1981), in that the substantial part of our personal identity that is shaped by the acknowledgement and approval of others (a sub-section of the super-ego) is no longer present in the zombie mentality.
The zombie mind can be seen as a reversal of the levels of psyche control postulated by Freud, in that the main commander is the Id’s uncontrolled instinctual drive to feed. The super-ego, which includes the need for social approval, becomes the suppressed identity element. The zombie condition is like a most basic and primal setting of their pre-living-dead lives. Thus, the conditions of the exact moment of their deaths (eg. the clothes they were wearing, the things they were holding) become the only and most critical clue to their original identity. It is also the thing that retains a small sense of uniqueness for each zombie. This is the idea that interested me and influenced me the most.
From this, I began thinking about zombies if they were to retain and express their ego and super-ego. Which elements of my identity would survive living-death? If I were to create zombie personifications of my Id, ego and super-ego, what would they look like and how would they interact?
