myEgo
My graduation work, *My Ego*, is a performance video and installation that investigates the gap between how I experience myself from the inside and how I appear when I become an image. The project grew out of my relationship to Krump: a dance form where emotion is expressed with raw intensity, held and amplified by the collective energy of the session. In that environment I can feel fully embodied, my movement is immediate, vulnerable, and raw. But when those moments are recorded and replayed on a phone or laptop, something shifts. The footage turns my lived experience into a small, fixed digital object that invites judgment, comparison, and distance. Over time, repeated viewing can cause what I call “digital fading”: the image begins to overwrite the memory of what the moment actually felt like.
In *My Ego*, I respond to this fading by turning the recorded self back into something physical, uncomfortable, and difficult to smooth into a “nice image.” The central action is simple and transgressive: I wear a paper mask printed with my own face, then consume it. The mask stands for the socially acceptable version of myself, the practiced face I present when I know I am being seen. By eating it, I collapse the boundary between surface and body. An image that is normally meant to remain outside me becomes material: it sticks to my skin, blocks my vision, tears, dissolves, and must be swallowed. The act stages a struggle rather than a reveal. It does not promise a hidden “true self” underneath the mask; instead it insists that identity is negotiated through tension, repetition, and the pressure of the gaze.
Formally, the work is built to be felt, not just watched. Close-up framing removes distance. Amplified breathing, chewing, and swallowing create a sonic intimacy that pulls the viewer into a visceral response before interpretation can stabilize the scene. This sensory intensity functions as an anchor against digital fading: it interrupts passive viewing and reintroduces the body as a site of meaning. The video is designed to loop, emphasizing how repetition changes perception, shock can become familiarity, and familiarity can become another kind of cage.
By combining Krump’s embodied truth with mediated self-observation, *My Ego* treats the screen as an active force shaping identity. The work asks how transgressive imagery and multisensory strategies can reclaim embodiment within a culture where the self is continually flattened into images.
