// new media class

How do we communicate emotions digitally when communication takes place without a face-to-face counterpart?

Emoticons are the translation of emotions into simple characters. We know that there are more diverse, complex and confusing emotional experiences than surprise, smile and laughter. But this is exactly what emoticons try to sketch out. They give us digital forms with which we can exchange our emotions. On the one hand ASCII emoticons are limited in their emotions, but on the other hand they are digital and universal. They do not give any information about age, gender, origin of the sender. In this respect all personalized digital emotions are the same.

In this installation the visitors are imitating given emotions, whereby they are no longer triggered by an emotional state, so an ambivalent form of communication can take place. An emoticon is merely an imitation of a human emotion, and here people are asked to imitate the emoticon.