“I’m going to ask you three questions,” the artist Genevieve Belleveau said at the beginning of a performance piece called “The Emoji Autism Spectrum.” She was conducting therapy sessions in Chelsea, at the non-profit art and technology center Eyebeam. She sat in a red folding chair with her legs crossed and her hands folded in her lap. Her hair, burnt orange, was cut in the modern five-points style, with a round patch shaved off the top. She asked me, her patient, if I considered my emoji-interpretation skills to be beginner, intermediate, or advanced. A look around the brightly flickering room allowed little confidence; on the opposite wall, a reproduction of a Jeff Koons had been superimposed with typographical symbols of whimsical faces. This was the Emoji Show, an art exhibition and bazaar in tribute to a new form of language that is, by turns, keenly expressive and cheerfully cryptic.
“Emoji” comes from the Japanese word for pictograph, and is both singular and plural. There are roughly eight hundred of them—smiley face, broken heart, flamenco dancer, snail—though the most commonly used emoji, sent as text messages and tweets, can be found among the six hundred or so special characters stored on iPhones. There have been emoji poems, and an emoji translation of a nineteenth-century novel now known as “Emoji Dick,” which was accepted by the Library of Congress, in February. This past summer, Katy Perry released an emoji lyric video to her single “Roar.” Earlier this month, an episode of the “Today” show was transcribed as a live emoji feed. “Our mission was to survey the emoji zeitgeist,” Eyebeam’s Zoë Salditch, who helped curate the Emoji Show, which will run through December 21st, told me. “When you see celebrities using emoji, you know it’s made it.”
Artists and emoji aficionados submitted more than three hundred projects for inclusion in the exhibition, which the curatorial committee narrowed down to twenty-four. During the process of deliberation, the judges tossed around some emoji, but this proved an inadequate means of communication. “We had to do a lot of logistical planning, so I mostly needed to use words,” Salditch said.
The other evening might have been typical of a gallery opening had there not been an emoji nail-art stand—Salditch’s nails were shellacked with emoji faces with no mouths, on top of solid black—or what she described as “the very Internet club-kid type of crowd.” A small television showed scenes from “Melrose Place” with emoji captions (“Melroji Place”). Printed images of tweets with the hashtag “#emojiarthistory” hung from the wall; they described famous works using only emoji. Salditch approached an untitled two-panelled work by Ibon Mainar, which featured an array of emoji dispersed, in a minimalist style, across a white backdrop. “The artist has never explained a narrative meaning,” she said. “He’s asking the viewer to interpret the meaning.” Yet emoji can be quite literal: a teary face means sad, a plate of spaghetti is simply that. Salditch attempted to translate Mainar’s piece into English: “Bamboo, balloon, CD? One beer, two beers, martini?”
Fred Benenson, a data engineer at Kickstarter and a member of the curatorial team, appeared staggered by the swarm of emoji surrounding him. “The more you think about it, the harder it is to understand,” he said. “Removing the context makes your brain hurt a little bit.” Benenson is the creator of “Emoji Dick,” and he told me that he had debated whether or not to include the English text of the original book along with his emoji sequence. Both appear because, he explained, “I wanted you to go through the mental act of translating.” Ramsey Nasser, who co-developed a programming language entirely from emoji, said that “emoji have less cultural baggage than a natural language,” though he conceded that they’re not so efficient for coding a Web site. “The strength of language derives from its malleability,” he added. Across the floor, Matthew Rothenberg, the creator of the Web site emojitracker, which ranks emoji use on Twitter in real time, said, with a grin, “I’m more of a hacker than a linguist.”
Belleveau’s theory is that any ambiguity in an emoji’s meaning comes from the fact that it’s been designed in Japan. “It’s like when you go to a dollar store, and there’s all these weird descriptions of everything,” she said. “There’s something lost in translation.” On the wall above her hung an “Emoji Recognition Chart.” She used this as a visual aid during sessions. “Some people say this one is fury, but according to the chart, it’s pouting face,” she said of a frowning crimson-blushed emoji.
For “The Emoji Autism Spectrum,” Belleveau urged her patients, one appointment at a time, to experience a similarly profound emoji connection. I hesitated at the prospect. Belleveau leaned forward. “Well, you really have to reach down inside.”
“I’m going to show you three hypothetical texts,” she said, and instructed patients to select emoji for three scenarios:
I scrolled through the options—thumbs-up, shooting star, pink bow—and began to understand the appeal: when language poses risk, employ a playful image whose interpretation may be negotiated upon receipt. I picked a brown briefcase. “That’s a masculine emoji. It shows me that there’s an old-man side to you,” Belleveau said. (I’m a woman of twenty-five.) Selection two was a flushed-faced emoji, which “shows a level of empathetic emotional activity,” Belleveau explained. And last: “A yellow heart is a friendly heart. It is a compassionate, understanding heart.” With that the patient had completed her session, and Belleveau gave me a grade: “You’re a healthy eight on the emoji spectrum.”
Above: Matthew Rothenberg’s emojitracker. Photograph by Lauren Thompson.