Ball.Room. / 2016

emojiballroom Emoji Emoticon ball installation Art Installation Inflatable Installation

The Prologue:

For the first time in history, in 2015 the Oxford Dictionaries chose a pictogram, to be exact emoji, as the word of the year. Emoji is a Japanese word, the ‘e’ means picture + ‘moji’ means letter / character. The similar sounding English word emoticon (emotion icon) helped the Japanese word to spread.

The history:
The basic element of pictography is a pictogram, which represents objects be using pictures like a drawing of an animal indicating that certain animal. The highest form of pictography is an ideogram. Between the graphical sign and the concept there is an abstract connection.

These simple or abstract signs developed into single symbols which seemingly didn't have a connection with their origins. This is how the alphabetical writing system was born around 800 year B.C. European languages without an exception are using this system: mainly a Latin and a Cyrillic alphabet. Over time the use of pictograms have significantly decreased while the opportunity to learn to write became available for the greater masses.

The conclusion:

It is interesting to observe that communication by pictures has developed the modern writing system. Then 1982 the professor of the Carnegie Mellon University, Scott E. Fahlman has typed the first :-) character sequence while using the university's electronic billboard.* Taking numerous shapes it had later dominated the online and mobile communication of the 1990s.

The emojis spread on the internet to substitute facial expressions, gestures making sure that the context is better understood. Emoticons were pictograms in the very beginning, and they were shaped using punctuations from alphabetic writing, like :-) or ;) etc. In fact, we can call this a reversed phenomenon. Modern writing developed from pictures into alphabetical characters. Then these characters started to form pictures and in 2015 the word of the year has become a pictogram, an image, that originally was created by using characters.

Ball.Room.

I have created 65 different well-known as well as new emojis that have been put on 2015 (that's when an emoji became the word of the year) yellow inflatable beach balls using 14 character sets of different typefaces (Avant Garde Gothic, Avenir, Frutiger, Helvetica, Eurostile, Futura, Courier, Didot, Trajan, Caslon, Baskerville, Garamond, Times, Pistilli). Then I filled up a room with these yellow balls.

Every visitor can take a beach ball home in exchange of a single word they come up with that they place into a box. At the end of the exhibition the word that most people have written down will become the word of this exhibition and will be written down on an empty ball.

The more places this exhibition will be held the more interesting it will be to see the chosen words from that certain exhibition, will it be affected by a nation or a geographical location?

Art history

This exhibition has an art history background like Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds inflatable installation, the dutch Florentijn Hofman’s giant duck, Geraldo Zamproni’s inflated pillows, the inflated FriendsWithYou sculptures, Kurt Perschke’s Redball project or Jeff Koons’s balloon imitating metal sculptures. The visitors can take home a piece of contemporary art. After that the object is no longer an exhibition piece but an everyday object. These beach balls will function as beach balls from then on. At the same time the object itself will stay an art piece and its ownership will belong to the artist.

* The smiley was born in 1963 when Harvey R. Ball, owner of an advertising agency in the USA, came up with the idea to use it to lift the mood of the workers of a recently merged insurance company. The company has paid him 45 dollars for this invention that he never claimed the rights for. However, Nicolas Loufrani has some doubts about the origin - supposedly there is a 4500 years old rock that have been found in a french cave that has a smiley on it.

Location:

Erzsébet tér 11., Budapest, Hungary, 1051

Photo by Emese Kiss

Photos by Bálint Jaksa

The Installation

I have created 65 different well-known as well as new emojis that have been put on 2015 (that's when an emoji became the word of the year) yellow inflatable beach balls using 14 character sets of different typefaces (Avant Garde Gothic, Avenir, Frutiger, Helvetica, Eurostile, Futura, Courier, Didot, Trajan, Caslon, Baskerville, Garamond, Times, Pistilli). Then I filled up a room with these yellow balls.

Every visitor can take a beach ball home in exchange of a single word they come up with that they place into a box.

At the end of the exhibition the word that most people have written down will become the word of this exhibition and will be written down on an empty ball.

The more places this exhibition will be held the more interesting it will be to see the chosen words from that certain exhibition, will it be affected by a nation or a geographical location?