Travess Smalley: Emoji Script
Folia is proud to announce the upcoming release of Emoji Script, a new generative edition by Travess Smalley. Emoji Script will be available for view and minting on Friday, 5 March at 9pm CET.
Smalley is an artist working with computation to make generative image systems, vitally interested in how code and systems can construct, transfer, and disrupt images. For FLA002, Smalley developed a program for generating emoji-like figures he describes as follows:
Emoji Script is a program that rapidly generates portraits.
The portraits are geometric and usually rounded.
They look like avatars.
They are cropped at the chest.
The head is large and close to the center.
The background is solid or radial. The eyes are usually looking directly back at me.
Sometimes they are funny.
Sometimes the portraits are missing parts, like a shoulder.
Sometimes they aren’t portraits at all, but an edge case in the script where
the shapes have merged and what’s left looks abstract or unexpected, or like a picture of a lemon.
Emoji Script is made from various JavaScript instructions for Photoshop. The instructions are things like: set a circle selection, fill a selection with a color, or fill it with a gradient. The colors, dimensions, and placement are pseudo-randomized with parameters I set in my code. Many of the instructions I write are not specifically designed to always happen but are given a chance of happening. For instance: a 25% chance that the eyes will arch upwards, and then a 50% chance that those eyes will be outlined with another color, a 25% chance that outline will be filled with a two color gradient, and so on. The combinations of random numbers applied to the script variables makes each one unique.
Travess Smalley (Huntington, WV, 1986) lives and works in Providence, RI. He holds a BFA from The Cooper Union, New York and studied at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA.