Digital Emotion

‘Digital Emotion’ creates from my conflicted attitude toward the emoji. On the one hand, emoji is the first digital language that is understandable to absolutely everyone in the world and that adds emotive expression to our daily communication. On the other hand, though, the creation of these emotions requires the subjective expression to be converted into a set of numbers and moved from our faces to the screens of smartphones. Given this, I wonder about the fate of our emotions in the future. 

To explore this question, in this work I wanted to shift the focus from the emoji itself as an object to the digital emotions that are hidden within these icons. To do so, I have included encrypted Unicode numbers of the 1000 most popular emojis that can be seen when the work is enlarged. To emphasize this code system, I reduced my palette to only black and white elements with some red elements.

‘Digital Emotion’ was conjured using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and demanded 127 hours to complete. I created multiple dots by Halftone effects and then entered a Unicode number at each dot. It took 30 seconds to fill one dot with text. I then animated this meticulous dot construction to mimic the activated exchange of these icons in our contemporary world.

The artwork has two formats: Digital animated image (GIF) and printed artwork.