Emoticon @ The Visual Collective
Emoticon
by Tom Estes
Portrait of Modern Movement
Visual Collective Space,
London
www.thevisualcollective.co.uk
www.artpendeo.co.uk
As much as 90% of human communication is
done without words. Gestures, facial expressions, and posture provide
information about a person's emotions and relationships with others. People
often hold their hands near their faces as a gesture in natural conversation. You’ve definitely seen it at some point. Maybe it was in a
lecture in college. Maybe it was in a TED talk you watched recently. Someone is
trying to explain some important historical connection, drawing up a grand
theory of art or science or human progress, and there it is, as if by reflex:
the hand lifts in front of them like an upturned claw, the fingers slowly
turning an invisible dial. That’s “The Dialectic,” one of the hand gestures
you’ll need to master to become a genuine thought leader.
Artist Tom Estes
is interested in the relationship between machines and humans. In the
performance work EMOTICON, Estes considers the future of biological
intelligence in a world of distributed machine intelligence. Donning the mask
of a Cyberman, Estes questions the relationship between humans and a new
cultural mechanisms capable of eclipsing the analytical capabilities of our own
species. As a starting point the work
explores the sense of disorientation and dislocation as a standard modern
condition. The disenfranchisement of the Other is a constant riff in Estes’
performance work and so here he has begun to explore the idea of ‘the alien as
Other’ through the genre of Science Fiction.
A key potential within the science fiction genre is a combination of growth and renewal that might result from the alien/other experience and thus from the new sense of reality it brings. The science fiction genre itself has long served as a useful vehicle for "safely" discussing controversial topical issues and often providing thoughtful social commentary on potential unforeseen future issues. Presentation of issues that are difficult or disturbing for an audience can be made more acceptable when they are explored in a future setting or on a different, earth-like world. An altered context can allow an audience for deeper examination and reflection of the ideas presented, with the perspective of a viewer watching remote events. Science Fiction offers a possibility of a humankind which might grow to a new maturity, one in which he or she will be able to maintain a sense of that child within, or at least of that childlike wonder and naiveté that are ultimately necessary for opening up to and understanding the human place in the universe.
The title of the work ‘Emoticon’ is a portmanteau or a combination of two or more words into a new word. So for example ‘emoticon’ is a combination of ‘emotion’ and ‘icon’. For his performance artist Tom Estes takes this meaning forward, combining the hand and face gestures that provide visual clues to ‘emotions’ and combine them with the highly stylized or ‘iconic’ hand gestures found in Vogue or Voguing.
An Emoticon is a meta communicative pictorial representation of facial expression. Emoticons have played a significant role in communication through technology, offering another range or ‘tone’ and feeling. Emoticons portray specific emotions by means of providing facial gestures as a visual indicator in cyber communication that is mainly textual.As much
as 90% of human communication is done without words. Gestures, facial
expressions, and posture provide information about a person's emotions and
relationships with others. People often hold their hands near their faces as a
gesture in natural conversation. This can often interfere with affective
inference from facial expressions. However, these gestures are valuable as an
additional channel for multi-modal inference. In the work Emoticon artist Tom
Estes explores the use of depth data in automatic analysis of spontaneous hand
gestures and hand-over-face cues, and highly stylized gestures in as situation
devoid of facial expressions.
As an artist Estes has always leaned toward making Live Art performance work that is participatory or immersive in some way. In his Live Art performance he stages an 'action' and then ask members of the audience to take pictures on a communal camera. In this way, the audience becomes part of the performance, and the pictures are then posted on on-line social networking sites and web sites for another, wider on-line audience.
As an artist I have always leaned toward making Live Art performance work that is participatory or immersive in some way. In my Live Art performance I stage an 'action' and then ask members of the audience to take pictures on a communal camera. In this way, the audience becomes part of the performance, and the pictures are then posted on on-line social networking sites and web sites for another, wider on-line audience.
For me, fantasy and illusion are not contradictions of reality, but instead an integral part of our everyday lives. There is a real Peter Pan Syndrome at play in my work and I suppose I would consider myself to be a carnival sideshow conceptualist, combining a bare-bones formal conceptualism with an eternally adolescent, prank DIY comic-approach.
At the core of this work is an attention to the flickering, fading definition of our lives as dictated by the computer monitor and the rapid reply of instant messaging. I strive, not to break down these introverted, often self-imposed boundaries, but to look at how dataflow from the virtual realm impacts on the significance and symbolism of real-world human senses. But in doing so, I have begun to generate unexpected questions about how art might be able to inscribe itself on the surface of reality- not to represent itself on the surface of reality –not to represent reality, nor to duplicate it, but to replace it.
