Anemoticon garden
2015-16
Metal, wood, plants, air blowers
Size variable
About
Anemoticon garden looks at human emotions through the lens of emoticons. Emoticons are combinations of punctuation marks and alphanumerics that, put in a certain order, create pictograms of human faces, mimicking offline facial expressions. Through their extremely simplistic form, they can transcend language and cultures, becoming a universal way to represent deep human feelings.
In Anemoticon garden, the artist turns the happy/sad face smiley into a wind chime and places 50 of them inside a recreated tropical garden to create a kinetic mobile installation. The three-dimensional punctuation pairs hang from the ceiling at various heights while air blowers create a light breeze inside the room, animating the chimes and randomly transforming the mood of the emoticon from happy to sad, quiet, winky or worried.