the next thing that happened to writing (or the death of the emoticon)

What is this?: Everything, my final project

Year: 2013

This is my prophecy for future writing. I developed intuitive tools to give emotional information to lettershapes in realtime. So, for example you can use the tone of your voice or body movement to visually modify text. As a foundation of this prediction I analysed writing from its beginning until now and visualized the evolution of lettershapes in 3 dimensional sculptures. With my project I want to show that there is a huge potential for writing in new media, and it is still to be explored.

Death to all emoticons. I hate them. If I watch people using them, they often wear cold, grumpy stone faces while letting a laughing yellow face roll around the screen. I think that this is stupid and I believe that with new media type itself can be used as a carrier of emotional information and that is, of course much more exciting. When new media will be fully understood and used properly, it is going to be amazing. And even if several experts think differently, I predict a blooming future of writing. But before I could make this prediction I wanted to really know what I am talking about. So I looked at how the Chinese and Latin Script behaved from their point of invention until now, just to get a solid foundation for my prophecy. I was very much interested in the evolution of shape and its relation to media, tools and social environment. To embody this evolution I created 3 dimensional sculptures, which makes sense since a lettershape has two dimensions and leaves the third available for time. The three dimensional space we live in is therefore perfect for my purposes: the visualization of the evolution of letter shapes throughout time in 3dimensional sculptures. I looked for a system or pattern throughout the years which I can then apply to modern media.

These findings I extrapolated into experiment and prophecy. Because I believe that now is the time to make as many experiments as possible to explore the potential of new media. That's why the length of our communicating texts will be shorter, while the expressiveness of what we want to share becomes even greater. The shapes of letters are definitely expressive enough to be able to communicate the whole mélange of human emotions. We just need a good and intuitive interface. Looking for this, I developed ways of controlling letter shapes with body movement and the voice. Then you can bring a great variety of emotion in text without having to design, or even think about it. My programs analyze audio and image and translate them directly into lettershapes. When you're angry, your text is angry. When you're sad, the text is too. You could even recognize your friends by their lettershapes. My research and experiments shows us that a new kind of dynamic typography is not only possible, but a logical and inevitable step. And emoticons.. well.. you can forget about them.