Jingye Yao


















   

Let me put it this way
— Emoji Diary


Medium: Web Design
Year: 2021Emoji.Diary is an online platform established for emoji writing. Daily life is recorded in the form of graphic symbology, and the public is invited to perform a second interpretation, generating countless daily texts. This project is more of an exploration based on the potential of graphic language in the online world. It accepts participants' differing imaginations and understandings of emojis, both concretely and abstractly.
In essence this is an act of translation, from limited to infinite, like narrating a text in a hundred ways. As argued by Schleiermacher, the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him. So when I regard these emoji-based texts as an act of translation, I hope to preserve the personalities of all participants and their identities. Hence it becomes an experiment in cross-cultural communication in addition to a means of (re)telling stories in a different linguistic register; moreover, translation is the application of cultural literacy of both a text’ s original context and its new sphere of reception.


Homepage — The introduction and small animation
Catalogue — Displays my diary in chronological order, which is divided into three columns, date/weather/mood, which also means that it provides this retrieval method.
Decoding — Participants can write their own translation and upload it.
Versions & Primal — The collected text and my own version of the day, which can be switched into different languages.



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