“Silicon Feelings,” a strangely moving creation by Bradley Griffith, displays the emojis people tweet around the world in real-time on a spinning 3D globe.
You won’t see every single emoji that gets tweeted: Griffith uses Emoji Tracker to determine the most popular icons at any given time, and tweets without location information attached get ignored. Still, it’s a mesmerizing app, and watching it, it’s hard to not project your own narrative onto the crying faces, spinning hearts, cats, and smiling shits that populate across the seven continents. Are there more sad faces in war torn countries? Are the people tweeting martini glasses in Islamic nations admitting a transgression? Does thumbs up mean the same thing in Malaysia?
But before you drift into a sentimental reverie, recalibrate your touchy feely human brain by using this random emoji sentence generator, and remind yourself that we live in a chaotic, meaningless universe.
See more of Griffith’s work here.
