Simulacra Ambassador
Aeva Karlsrud
The contemporary world requires young creatives to market themselves as designers and as individuals to gain employment as well as social capital. Postmodernity—which, according to media theorist Jean Baudrillard, is a form of hyper-reality, or a state in which signs and symbols that represent reality replace reality itself, has distilled personhood to a digital presence. As media has become social, every successful person has become an ambassador of their own “brand”: a mix of tangible symbols and intangible attributes. But how does one become an ambassador of self?
The trickiness of crafting one’s public persona is tied up with the task of figuring out who you are on the inside. Branding has become intimately personal, involving a simultaneous becoming and marketing of self. Simulacra Ambassador is a personal brand book that borrows from 1980’s media theory and aesthetics to address the contemporary intersection of branding and personal identity as they coalesce in navigating the professional and philosophical narrative landscape. Part reference manual and part self-help workbook, Simulacra Ambassador bridges the psychic gaps between the curation of the inner self and the public persona.
Simulacra Ambassador aims to dissect and diagram the ideals that we perpetuate in creative work and life as digital-age designers. It injects the branding manual with an element of the absurd, designed to both celebrate and question the designer’s conception of the ideal and the real as they unite under the modern (and morally ambiguous) hypothesis that authentic nature is a source of profit.