Dissection
QingYing (Mimi) Guan
What would it look like if I uploaded my brain to the web? This was the question I started to think about as the pandemic shifted our collective relationship to technology, mediating our communications and controlling our desires through predictive algorithms. Perhaps, as futurist Robin Hanson proposes, our memories and personalities will one day be uploaded to the cloud too?
Dissection is a project exploring the concept of a hyper-personalized space on the internet. Housed within an interactive website, the workings of my mind are represented as links to symbolic dreamscapes. The style used throughout the site is a strange mixture, integrating medical illustration, psychedelic art, doodles, and childhood snapshots.
I can never see the chaotic flux of my own mind because it is impossible to find a neutral vantage point from which to view it. All I can do is build a working model, which may or may not be useful. While Freud’s taxonomy of id, ego, and superego is meant as a universal structure, Dissection is specific only to me. I organized my personality into a series of interconnected zones based on my memory and experiences throughout my life relating to my upbringing in Australia & China and 2000s memorabilia.