HAK.io emoji stories
‘Crazy-face’ (as siri calls it) with tongue sticking out emoji-bear is a whimsical creation by Jagath, made with emoji post-it note and personal notebook. Emojis are “off the shelf” (Jovanovic and Van Leeuwen, 2018) emotive responses that are ever increasing in number and popularity. According to emojipedia, there are currently 3,664 Unicode Standard emojis with more on the way in 2023. While somewhat banal at times, emoji’s non-linguistic expression can indicate a “sense of energy or mobilisation” (Wakefield and Wakefield 2016, 142) and carry traces of emotion – maintaining an affective charge over time. In HAK.io, we see emojis as a way to tell micro stories about the Anthropocene while making room for what can be complex and contradictory emotions. We know this is important because the young people who attended Hot & Bothered Science Gallery Youth Symposium 2022 have told us so.
Telling micro climate stories with emojis
Having pinpointed an event in which to locate their climate stories, the Science Gallery Bengaluru Carbon mediators set about writing quick micro climate narratives with emoji sticker packs designed by designer-in-residence, Jenn Thy, and key words produced by running the Hot & Bothered Science Gallery Youth Symposium 2022 Report through Voyant. The resulting emoji stories are the product of a playful introduction to the practice of a/r/tographic inquiry, which functions “through art-making and writing, not separate or descriptive of one another but rather working together to create new understandings” (Leggo et al 2011, 240). In this case, these new understandings are wrought through a collective rendering of climate emotions.
In this short video, SGB Carbon mediators share their emoji stories. What is really interesting is how several mediators story climate grief as a multi-stage process comprised of a full gamut of emotions that ‘flow’ across the page. What other patterns can you see?
Take your time to look at this selection of emoji stories up close.
References
Jovanovic, Danica and Van Leeuwen, Theo. 2018. “Multimodal dialogue on social media”. Social Semiotics, 28:5, 683-699, https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2018.1504732
Leggo, C., Sinner, A. E., Irwin, R. L., Pantaleo, K., Gouzouasis, P., & Grauer, K. (2011). Lingering in liminal spaces: A/r/tography as living inquiry in a language arts class. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 24(2), 239-256. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518391003641908
Wakefield, Robin, and Kirk Wakefield. 2016. ‘Social Media Network Behavior: A Study of User Passion and Affect’. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems 25 (2): 140–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsis.2016.04.001.