An Archetypal and Mythological Approach to iamamiwhoami

15

Category : Food for Thought, Interesting Facts

One of the best things about this viral campaign, for me, is the fact that it reminds me of everything I was taught in college. I’ve learned to look at images and sounds in a different way, and I can’t be happier that I have the occasion to apply my knowledge to almost everything in this world, especially to such creative products as iamamiwhoami.

We’ve been given a discourse (any artistic product is a discourse, it doesn’t have to be a verbal one exclusively) and we’ve also been given a system of codes to decode this discourse. However, as the majority of people consider the only codes we have at hand are the numeric ones (numbers for letters), there are other instruments with the help of which we can decipher what the author of this work intends to transmit to us, readers.

I’m perceiving iamamiwhoami from an archetypal and mythological approach in this article. That’s because everyone can see we’re heading towards this direction whenever we try to relate clues.

Somebody mentioned on the iamamiwhoami main board that they should be ashamed of stealing someone else’s work and that person said that the author of the virals was clearly inspired by Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. I replied that pattern recognition is a technique we all apply in the act of perceiving. And thus we get to the concept of the archetype.

An archetype is an original model of a person, ideal example, or a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated; a symbol universally recognized by all. It is a symbol or image that bridges up the mystic and the intelligible world and it may take the form of a character, concrete object or symbol, or a narrative pattern: the dangerous or devouring female, death and rebirth or any human experience, elements of nature, any type of human act expressing man’s curiosity, or search for and assertion of self.

To give you an example, water is one of the most well known archetypes. It is considered to be the source of life, of generating new forms of existence, and this is the shape in which we encounter it in these videos as well.

Strongly connected to archetypes, myths narrate the way in which reality came into being, relating events that took place in primordial time. Among others, myths explain the origin of the world/part of the world and involve the exploits of supernatural beings and events.

Even though the first impression is that archetypes work on the emotional level of a human being, they are actually reaching for the unconscious level. The basic archetypal patterns (belonging to the ‘collective unconscious’) enter consciousness as images whose power of signification makes them be used in an infinite variety of forms bearing the mark of their author’s originality. Thus us being able to relate images or events happening at one moment with images we’ve already encountered in the past. Sort of pattern recognition.

To me, iamamiwhoami is based on the collaboration of more types of myths: myths of creation, of rebirth and renewal and of transformation.

Myths of creation refer to the beginning of things and the main archetypes connected to them are: water (as source of life, of course), the egg, the sky and the earth as parents (supported by opposites such as darkness vs. light) and so on. I am sure you have recognized them all as present in the videos.

Myths of rebirth and renewal imply a conception of the world, nature or man in terms of cyclic time. The basic motifs supporting this type of myths are birth and cyclic patters of the seasons or existence. They are more than obvious with iamamiwhoami.

Last, but not least, myths of transformation refer to rites of passage, meaning rites accompanying birth, attainment of maturity, all implying the idea of transformation. I shall be talking more about this in my next article – The Journey of the Mandragora Officinarum.

REFERENCES:

- decoding iamamiwhoami – the beginnings

- A Closer Look To iamamiwhoami’s b Video

iamamiwhoami’s o video

- u-1

- u-2

- n from Nature/Natural

- T – back in the kingdom we were Kings and Queens

- And this is Y all that’s left is Hope

- Iamamiwhoami – 20101001 – Volunteer

- Identity in Iamamiwhoami

- Iamamiwhoami – The Book Of Changes – Hexagram Theory

- Iamamiwhoami – Semiotics UnderCover

- Iamamiwhoami – Media Coverage

Identity in iamamiwhoami

10

Category : Food for Thought, Interesting Facts

The only thing we haven’t established as certain about iamamiwhoami is the identity of the author. However, iamamiwhoami’s discourse is full of identity related clues, even direct statements. Maybe, just maybe, we already have the answer to ‘whoami’, but we refuse to accept it’s anything else but a commercial product.

For now, there are as many I’s as many ‘readers’ of this discourse are in this world.

We must start with the name itself, even though the road is long in the act of naming.

Iamamiwhoami

I am going to part this word into:

I am. Am I? Who am I?

I don’t intend to go towards I am Ami. Who? Ami. Simply because I don’t want to go there, it doesn’t make the subject of what I intend to analyze in this article. It would be too simple. I am. Am I? Who am I? definitely fits the picture because it screams the whole concept of the viral.

  • I am. – Statement, not question. Synonym to: I have been born, I exist, I came into being. I am is the response to a direct question establishing identity. Example: Who is Dariana? I am.
  • Am I? – Question. Strongly related to the existential interrogation of the human being: do I exist? The first thing a baby does after having been born is to figure this Am I by touching his fingers, moving his feet and so on. Whoever has a baby knows this is what it does in the first months of his life.
  • Who am I? – in the same extent, an existential question, but this time applied throughout a being’s existence. I might as myself “Who am I?” at the age of 80, as I have been asking myself at puberty. This who am I is equivalent to all questions regarding the establishing of one’s identity as a person: name, social status, group belonging and so on.

The natural thing I am going to do next is to go further and analyze the titles of the videos, as they have been given to us by the author:

  • I am – same explanation as in the above
  • It’s me – This is going deeper than I am. It’s me leads to the separation of this individual from others. It’s me, not other.
  • Mandragora – This is my genus. Even deeper than It’s me. I’m not a chicken, I’m a plant belonging to the Mandragora genus .
  • Officinarum – Not just any plant, not just any type of Mandragora. I am a Mandragora Officinarum. My species.

Now place the name of the ‘author’ and the names of the videos in face to face, up to now:

  • I am – I am (the acknowledgement of having been born, of being alive)
  • Am I? – It’s me. (yes, I am and it’s me, not other)
  • Who am I? – Mandragora Officinarum (I have a name and this name not only differentiates me from others, but gives me a sense of belonging. I belong to the Mandragora genus and I’m a MO)

Of course, I strongly suggest you look at iamamiwhoami as to a concept, as to an artistic product, not as to a person or a… plant. MO is just a sign, a thing that points to something, a thing that shows and means something else.

Now you may ask yourself why I am going so deep into this, you might say hey, no one is going this far for a viral, but I am asking you: why not? The author has the possibility and the resources (I’m referring to knowledge, not money), he might as well have the drive. He did prove it by portraying this MO myth quite beautifully!

Getting back to the sign theory (it’s the linguistic sign, let’s have that cleared one more time). A sign has two components: a mental representation (meaning) and a physical one (shape). The shape of the MO as a sign is this muddy blond woman, its meaning stands in the decoding of the myth itself. You’ll see how everything relates in the Archetypal and Mythological approach I am currently working on.

One’s identity is established through the act of PERCEIVING, which, in its turn, consists of a chain including SEEING, UNDERSTANDING, COMPREHENDING and, finally, APPREHENDING.

Up to now, we have seen the sign and we understood its meaning by simply analyzing its mythological shape. But we also have to comprehend this sign, meaning understanding it in relation to other signs – differentiating it from others and establishing similarities between them – and also apprehending it, as in accepting its individuality, seeing it as something new, able to convey meaning by itself.

For those who expect me to offer a personal guess upon the author, I hope you enjoy disappointment. I’m not interested in that. I will be delighted when I do find the answer, no matter what it is, but this whole thing could continue for ages without a reveal from my point of view!

REFERENCES:

- decoding iamamiwhoami – the beginnings

- A Closer Look To iamamiwhoami’s b Video

iamamiwhoami’s o video

- u-1

- u-2

- n from Nature/Natural

- T – back in the kingdom we were Kings and Queens

- And this is Y all that’s left is Hope

- Iamamiwhoami – 20101001 – Volunteer

- Iamamiwhoami – The Book Of Changes – Hexagram Theory

- Iamamiwhoami – Semiotics UnderCover

- Iamamiwhoami – Media Coverage

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