The Contrived Self(ie) is a body of work that engages with the selfie genre as a starting point from which to explore, via a kitchen-table engagement with art-making, the fabrication of self-presentation, self-identity and self-narrative. It does so by making and exhibiting a range of ‘self(ie) machines’ that are a creative response to the ordinary materiality of extraordinary self-presentation within the everyday genre of the selfie. These machines create new identities and narratives from appropriated imagery and collaged fragments of existing, familiar and generic images of self. This presentation of fictitious self-identities and self-narratives is explored in the research; a fiction based on the familiar and ordinary that leads to the selfie machines, becoming mini manufactures of contemporary physical versions of generic selfie images.