Alice Fang – Looking Outwards – 06

smiling face withface is a Tumblr-bot that was created by Allison Parrish, a computer programmer, poet, educator and game designer who currently teaches at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. smiling face generates and posts glitchy emoticons, pulling randomly from the open-source SVG files from Twitter’s twemoji project. The randomness, in this case, is obtained from a set data source (Twitter’s emojis, of which there are 2841) , and a Python program adjusts the numbers and paths from the emoji taken. The results are strange amalgamations that are fun, quirky, and very colorful, and most of the time, nearly unrecognizable from the original source. Personally, I think the glitchy-ness makes viewing these emojis more interesting, if sometimes uncomfortable, because you know what it is but there’s something that’s slightly off. Many of them make me laugh, and the project is still ongoing into October 2018, so there’s more to look forward to!