Soft serve metaphysics

Mon 25 Jul 2016 04:20 PM

I have been thinking about the question of emoji art for quite some time. I've finally completed a draft of a paper, which I've posted over on my website.

The ontology of 💩

Summary: Emoji are picture characters familiar from smart phone text messages. If a work of art is written in emoji, how should we think about the emoji that constitute it? What is the ontology of such a work? I begin in section 1 by discussing the history of emoji. One of the more notable emoji is the pile of poo which figures in the title of this paper. In section 2, I consider the meaning of emoji and argue that there is no natural language translation for an emoji character. In sections 3 and 4, I discuss some specific works of emoji art: Emoji Dick and emoji poems. In section 5, I argue these works are best understood as specified strings of emoji in much the same way as a work of prose is understood as a specified string of words. In section 6, I conclude by arguing that there are possible emoji works with other ontologies.