What happens when a piece of glass in your pocket shifts from an instrument of outward documentation to a machine of real-time identity construction?

In this premier episode of Performance & Props, marketing researcher Rahul Devinder Malik traces the hidden lineage of self-curation back to the winter of 1500. There, a twenty-eight-year-old artist named Albrecht Dürer engaged in a radical act of social theatre, shattering a thousand years of unwritten European tradition by painting a confrontational, face-on self-portrait—a symmetrical gaze previously reserved strictly for religious icons. Dürer wasn’t simply recording his physical likeness; he was utilising an oil canvas as a deliberate identity tool to bridge the gap between his current reality and his ultimate ambition.

Fast forward to the modern Identity Econom ...