artist statement

Ikon: a symbol or visual representation. Emote: to express emotion. Emoticon: a combination of text characters that symbolize emotion.

Interpersonal communication in its purest form encompasses a host of elements, including: verbalization, bodily gestures, and auditory tonality in physical close proximity between two interactants. Today’s host of cyber communications does not always allow for physical contact, which limits the availability of personal emotional cues. Person to person communication through email and chat programs have led to the development of a series of text characters designed to symbolize human emotion. Emoticons were born from the desire to humanize this correspondence, providing visual markers for human emotion.

Each emotional composition is matched with a series of keyboard characters that create an emotional symbol. These symbols evolve into a “danwade” interactive experience by combining medias and concepts represented in art such as portraiture, geometric composition and performance art. It infuses them with new media such as digital photography/prints, animated gifs, Flash and the project’s website www.emoticonman.com. The artist meets actor in defining these symbols as specific meaningful moments in what would be otherwise literal ASCII characters*. danwade is the conduit in which these symbols are expressed. He brands them with his person through performance, technology and a photorealistic form of portraiture.

Emotions are further explored within the “ikons” segment of this project. Digital prints transform emoticon text symbols into geometric compositions. Weight, positive/negative space obscures lines of literal text characters into portraits, landscapes and abstract forms. The prints utilize a strict palette of text characters that are commonly used with standard emoticons.

danwade translates his identity as an active voice through multimedia in order to achieve a new level of emotional electronic communication. He has personally branded these emoticons as extensions of feeling and expression. The restrictions of online communication evolve.

 

*ASCII: n : (computer science) a code for information exchange between computers made by different companies; a string of 7 binary digits represents each character; used in most microcomputers [syn: American Standard Code for Information Interchange, ASCII].