Emoticons, these small expressive icons representing faces, behaviors or places, play a crucial role in the emotional enrichment of our digital communications. Inspired by their simplicity and their ability to transmit emotions, I had the idea of integrating them into a communication system intended for a young American girl with a disability, capable only of moving her thumb.

 

This challenge led me to participate in the “Malia Project”, an initiative aimed at developing innovative communication solutions. My proposal was to use a phone to form words from emojis or emoticons. This idea was not only accepted, but also won the first Maker Prize in the United States. The system allowed this young girl to express herself independently, offering her an enriched means of communication, despite her disability. This was a significant step forward, not only in the field of adaptive technology, but also in humanizing our interaction with the digital world.

The idea that emoticons could become a universal means of expression appealed to me deeply. To explore this possibility, I decided to embark on a daring literary project: writing a novel entirely in emoticons. This approach aimed to test the limits of visual communication and to question the capacity of emoticons to convey complex stories, nuanced emotions and deep ideas, beyond traditional linguistic barriers.

 

This emoticon novel was an experiment in the narrative richness that these simple symbols can offer. The aim was to determine whether, by freeing ourselves from words, we could still tell a captivating and understandable story to a large and diverse audience, bringing together people from different cultures and languages around a form of universal visual communication.

The creation of a novel entirely composed of emoticons was a significant milestone in my artistic journey, gradually shaping an approach that I had not initially considered: that of simplification, of the quest for economy through reduction of effort. Indeed, using an emoticon simplifies the communication process, condensing into a single symbol a range of emotions and meanings that would otherwise have required many words.

 

However, beyond this simplification, I perceived in the creation of this novel in emoticons a resonance with the superposition of quantum states. Each emoticon, similar to a quantum particle, carries within it several possible interpretations, all coexisting until a specific reading reduces them to a particular meaning. This multiplicity of interpretations, although limited by the framework of the image itself, opens up a vast field of narrative and symbolic possibilities. It is this underlying richness, this ability of emoticons to encapsulate various layers of meaning in a single symbol, that made writing this novel not only an artistic challenge, but also a profound exploration of human communication and its nuances.

Writing this emoticon novel proved to be an arduous task, particularly given the technical challenges of the time. In 2005, managing the memory to store each emoticon, each an image, presented significant difficulties. This constraint led to numerous failures and repeated attempts, making the writing process both complex and tedious.

 

My main source of emojis was from the website [http://smilies-emoticons.de/] where most emoticons were available as animated GIFs. A significant part of my work therefore consisted of “fixing” these animated emoticons, that is to say transforming them into static images to integrate them coherently into the manuscript. This process, both technical and creative, required careful attention and great patience, with each emoticon carefully selected and adapted to suit the narrative context of the novel.

In 2017, I undertook the reissue of the “Great Universal Book”, incorporating new emoticons to enrich and deepen the story. This new edition was not just an update, but a reinvention of the original work, marking an evolution in my artistic journey.

By introducing new emoticons, I sought to provide a richer, more nuanced narrative, allowing readers to delve even deeper into the story.