A Great Wave of Emoji is a work from Diamojism — an original art form I conceived and built, in which images are reconstructed entirely from emoji. Each of the thousands of diamond-shaped tiles is individually selected by a custom rendering pipeline I developed, evaluated against the source image for color, edge structure, and spatial complexity. No generative AI is involved at any stage. I control all parameters and make all aesthetic decisions.
Symbols that speak to the subject emerge from a field of emoji chosen purely for color and structure — selected not by intention but by survival. I configured the pipeline to bias selection toward symbols whose meaning relates to the subject, drawn from seaside and atmospheric vocabulary, color terms for Prussian blue and cobalt, and the visual language of Japanese woodblock printing. The system selects for color and structure first, meaning second — and a tonally superior candidate will always displace a thematically apt one.
This work reconstructs Hokusai's c.1831 woodblock print using 15,525 mosaic tiles of 628 unique emoji across a 24 × 16 inch canvas at 512 DPI. One of the most recognized images ever made, reassembled from the symbols of contemporary digital communication. The wave survives the translation.
