Say "Emoji": Expressions In Emoji by Michelle Cho (Final Project)

 Emojis are used to express feelings and thoughts via text message and online--a form of language (in Japanese, the word emoji literally means picture+word), yet I find them strangely disconnected from real emotions which are unique to each individual. There are some emojis that I can't even identify because I'm not sure what they mean. I do not understand the expressions and cannot connect them to emotions I see in others.

Sometimes, I see online conversations turning into an exchange of emojis alone, which eventually make no sense, or have no direction. The following is an example of how emojis can be at once descriptive and meaningless:



I am not against the use of emojis. I was simply interested in pointing out that, perhaps, this seemingly harmless series of minuscule images may be shaping the way we express ourselves and converse with another--or, contributing to a lack of genuine expression and conversation. My goal was to pose a question about the role of emojis to my audience. Ofcourse, I came to the project with a level of cynicism, but I used everyday scenes, without a clear narrative, to allow the audience to take part in observation instead of being fed a certain perspective. At least, that was my intention.

The three videos were projected side by side at the presentation in an attempt to create an environment. I did not want the first and strongest impression of my project to be that it is a video, which is why I avoided projecting a single screen on the wall. I aimed to create an immersion experience where the most prominent aspect of viewing my project was to be surrounded by the visuals of everyday scenes, people who were hidden by emojis, and the repeated sound of the Facebook notification "ding".

I received a suggestion that the three videos could be more coherent by having the happenings in one video connect with the happenings in another. Another idea by a critic was to think about making a more specific statement. Most people understand that emojis are used for online/text message communication, so where could this project go to make a more specific statement?

Perhaps the greatest sign of success for this project was a comment that watching some of the characters, who are clearly communicating something, was disconcerting because there was no way of telling what he/she was saying. Even if the emoji over their faces were supposed to hint at an emotion, it was not enough information whatsoever to allow an understanding of what the character was saying in the video.