Self Portrait: Jose Alvarado

I wanted to approach this self portrait in a way that demonstrates the surrounding idea in my current work which contains a psychological and philosophical relation to the development of identity. I am intrigued by how emotions and experiences effect our perspective on life and how those elements create our identity. However I wanted to experiment the affects of "identity" by adding a mechanical element. In philosophy there is an idea that our actions could be labeled as mechanical, where a mental task only goes from A to B with no detours. This idea interested me because we as humans find ourselves very organic and not machine like at all. Not long after I began looking into biomechanics and the functionality of such a combination. I thought about what would be the dominating factor; would it be the mechanical or the organic. For this project I wanted the mechanical element to take authority creating the dominating identity. I enjoy how the facial expression in the subject could suggest several emotions like anger or fear. Therefore I leave the viewer questioning if the subject is truly in agony or is engaged in a very emotional mental state.