Emoticon by Tom Estes
Portrait of Modern Movement
Visual Collective Space,
10 Vyner Street
London
E2 9DG 

www.thevisualcollective.co.uk
www.artpendeo.co.uk

As much as 90% of human communication is done without words. Gestures, facial expressions, and posture provide information about a person's emotions and relationships with others. People often hold their hands near their faces as a gesture in natural conversation. You’ve definitely seen it at some point. Maybe it was in a lecture in college. Maybe it was in a TED talk you watched recently. Someone is trying to explain some important historical connection, drawing up a grand theory of art or science or human progress, and there it is, as if by reflex: the hand lifts in front of them like an upturned claw, the fingers slowly turning an invisible dial. That’s “The Dialectic,” one of the hand gestures you’ll need to master to become a genuine thought leader.

Artist Tom Estes is interested in the relationship between machines and humans. In the performance work EMOTICON, Estes considers the future of biological intelligence in a world of distributed machine intelligence. Donning the mask of a Cyberman, Estes questions the relationship between humans and a new cultural mechanisms capable of eclipsing the analytical capabilities of our own species. As a starting point the work explores the sense of disorientation and dislocation as a standard modern condition. The disenfranchisement of the Other is a constant riff in Estes’ performance work and so here he has begun to explore the idea of ‘the alien as Other’ through the genre of Science Fiction.


A key potential within the science fiction genre is a combination of growth and renewal that might result from the alien/other experience and thus from the new sense of reality it brings. The science fiction genre itself has long served as a useful vehicle for "safely" discussing controversial topical issues and often providing thoughtful social commentary on potential unforeseen future issues. Presentation of issues that are difficult or disturbing for an audience can be made more acceptable when they are explored in a future setting or on a different, earth-like world. 
An altered context can allow an audience for deeper examination and reflection of the ideas presented, with the perspective of a viewer watching remote events. Science Fiction offers a possibility of  a humankind which might grow to a new maturity, one in which he or she will be able to maintain a sense of that child within, or at least of that childlike wonder and naiveté that are ultimately necessary for opening up to and understanding the human place in the universe. 



The title of the work ‘Emoticon’ is a portmanteau or a combination of two or more words into a new word. So for example ‘emoticon’ is a combination of ‘emotion’ and ‘icon’. For his performance artist Tom Estes takes this meaning forward, combining the hand and face gestures that provide visual clues to ‘emotions’ and combine them with the highly stylized or ‘iconic’ hand gestures found in Vogue or Voguing.

An Emoticon is a meta communicative pictorial representation of facial expression. Emoticons have played a significant role in communication through technology, offering another range or ‘tone’ and feeling. Emoticons portray specific emotions by means of providing facial gestures as a visual indicator in cyber communication that is mainly textual.  

As much as 90% of human communication is done without words. Gestures, facial expressions, and posture provide information about a person's emotions and relationships with others. People often hold their hands near their faces as a gesture in natural conversation. This can often interfere with affective inference from facial expressions. However, these gestures are valuable as an additional channel for multi-modal inference. In the work Emoticon artist Tom Estes explores the use of depth data in automatic analysis of spontaneous hand gestures and hand-over-face cues, and highly stylized gestures in as situation devoid of facial expressions.


As an artist Estes has always leaned toward making Live Art performance work that is participatory or immersive in some way. In his Live Art performance he stages an 'action' and then ask members of the audience to take pictures on a communal camera. In this way, the audience becomes part of the performance, and the pictures are then posted on on-line social networking sites and web sites for another, wider on-line audience.