Invited by ‘Writing Machine’ for the exhibtion ‘WMC at Digit@logue’ held in Hong Kong Museum of Art during 15 May – 20 July 2008. Grapheme is a simple electronic device inspired by the ubiquitous emoticons used in our daily on-line chatting activities. This rapidly evolving visual language is quietly forming a new writing system which challenges the position and effectiveness of traditional languages in digital media. Emoticons which were once simple ASCII glyphs only but they are now slowly replaced by visually rich image bitmaps or animations. Grapheme comprises of a blank keyboard, two obsolete PalmOS PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) reprogrammed by the artist and some outdated peripherals. It disables completely the use of regular alphabets, and only allows typing emoticons using the blank keyboard, which will then be displayed as image bitmaps on the color screen and as original ASCII glyphs on the monochrome screen.
Grapheme, from the artist’s Technostalgic project, is a piece of reprogrammed obsolete electronics which the artist created as a response to the evolution of emoticons.
