NTU ADM FINAL YEAR PROJECT, 2020 – 2021.

The project takes on the form of an alternate reality game. A narrative that exists on the internet is based around my accumulative experience with dissociation. The project requires an audience to piece together a story by finding out about a fictional, alternate world and by relying on observational sentences made on Twitter (now known as X) by characters.

ALTERNATE

REALITY GAME

Narratives that exist on the internet.

INFO

Undentity explores my experiences with dissociation and self-discovery of my subconscious mind, using an interactive, social media format.

While it does not actively take on the role of an educational art piece, Undentity serves as a platform for others to understand dissociation and dissociative identity disorder – symptoms such as not feeling connected to one’s own body and feelings of taking on different identities. By projecting these dissociative emotions onto an audience, the participants will get a sense of what it is like to experience dissociation daily.At the same time, it the project serves as a model of support for others with similar experiences, to embrace their condition and to encourage them to use art as a means of self-soothing during bad mental health episodes, as I have done throughout this project.

My decided source of social media to work on was Twitter. I decided to go with Twitter because I have been interested in an alternate way of storytelling and world-building through social media. Since everyone now uses social media, we rarely see the other person, particularly if we're conversing with strangers. For example, someone can use a fake identity and roleplay as a cute girl to catfish people. There is a blur between reality and virtual reality, and having fictional virtual characters emulates that feeling where they might or might not exist. The Twitter accounts are handled by the fictional characters as a form of experimental storytelling, in which the audience interacts with the characters I have developed. It requires and relies on the audience to constantly interact and gain new information about the world. They then fit various puzzle pieces of information together to form a bigger, more coherent narrative. The ability to constantly evolve this project is an experimental part of the whole process. The audience's interaction is often unpredictable and will rely on my own ad-lib skills for the narrative to proceed.