Emoji Disorder
2019 | New York, NY
Emoji Disorder is interested in the communicative aspect of architecture and evokes Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's architecture parlante. With the contemporary context of a rising digital and visual dialect, the emojis and the elastic architectural language have the capability to be updated. The duck and the decorated shed are no longer adequate to project meaning on architecture. Emojis fuse both symbols and signages and become “the duckerated shed.” This project attempts to speak with those outside of the discipline so they can better relate to the buildings they inhabit by referencing a familiar dialect.
Beginning with collecting pareidolia images, the faces on inanimate buildings find their milieu in digital platforms such as texting. Here, emojis laminate the semantics further with human emotions. Then, Unicode unifies the dialect into codes and made communication between different operating systems possible. By looking back at both the evolution of the English language and emoji concurrently, human communication comes full circle. That is, a depiction of a “cow” evolves into the alphabet “A.” Now, the emoji of 🐮 harks back to the ancient pictograph of a cow.
The product of the thesis learns from the images, communication modes, and the digital dialect and translates it into architecture. Emoticonstructs translate emojis’ facial features to parts, e.g., the eye becomes a window and the mouth becomes the entrance. This translation appears literal to mimic the immediacy of the emojis. The literal translation might just invite more cultural misinterpretation. After all, 🍆 and 🍑 are no longer just an eggplant and a peach in our digitally saturated world.
Next, a physical context—similar to the texting context for pareidolia and emojis—is introduced to allow the Emoticonstructs to converse with the audience and to each other. This physical site is Roosevelt Island, which sits between Manhattan and Queens. With ferries, highways, and pedestrians traveling with a view of both sides of the island, the site condition allows Emoticonstructs linear readings that formulate many potential sentences.
“😜(Adult Store) conversing with 😘(Strip Club), while 😏(Film Studio) lurks behind.”
Finally, with multiple sentences constructed on Roosevelt Island, Emoji Disorder tries to critique the explosive use of the digital dialect by embracing the phenomenon.
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Collaboration with Doria Miller
Advisors: Greg Corso, Jonathan Louie, Nicole McIntosh
Undergraduate Thesis, Syracuse University