Academic to spend a year as every David Bowie persona
In an attempt to gain a better understanding of the icon's mind, cultural studies professor, Will Brooker, is planning to spend a year of his life as David Bowie.
A film and cultural studies expert at Kingston University, Brooker will spend a few months at a time experiencing specific moments of the star's 40-year career - from Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane to the Thin White Duke.
It's not just the outfits however. Brooker is adopting Bowie's eating habits, reading the same books and visiting the same places.
Brooker said: "The idea is to inhabit Bowie's head space at points in his life and career to understand his work from an original angle, while retaining a critical and objective perspective at the same time - a kind of split persona perhaps".
aHe is currently living Bowie's Philadelphia soul period from 1974 and sporting bright orange hair and thick blue eye shadow. He's visited local Bowie haunts such as Brixton, Bromley and Beckenham and plans to go to Berlin next month.
> This has been one of the more unusual days in my academic life pic.twitter.com/e70n3ksRQm > > — will brooker (@willbrooker) July 15, 2015
The professor has been commissioned to write a monograph about Bowie, entitled Forever Stardust, and uses the late 60s as his starting point. Immersing himself in the culture of the time, Brooker is listening to the songs Bowie would have heard, watching the films he would have seen and the reading the books he would have read - from Beat poet William Burroughs to the philosophical works of Friedrich Nietzsche.
"Some of that reading I think does have an effect on your thinking especially if you're doing it without much sleep" said Brooker, "If you're reading some strange science fiction and books about magic you can kind of get into Bowie's head and see it's sometimes quite a strange place. A dangerous place, a place you wouldn't want to live too long."
Physically, Brooker has even adopted irregular sleep patterns and developed an eccentric diet of primarily red peppers and milk.
As a teen, Brooker said he felt an affinity with Bowie, who he felt had achieved a "balance between success and strangeness, between a necessary commercial pragmatism and a core of personal authenticity".
Brooker said in an official statement that he was unsure what Bowie would think about the research, stating: "I hope he would be interested in and amused by my research. I do feel, though, that everything he says and does in public is performance, so if he did hear about it, we would be unlikely to know what he genuinely thought."
A spokesman for the singer was asked to comment on the research during a recent event to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Bowie's first ever number one, 'Space Oddity' - however he politely declined.