The first ever Emoji Art Show is about to open in New York.  Yes, Emoji, as in the now-ubiquitous little characters people like to sprinkle into text message conversations. But while it’s easy to be snarky ("What do you mean, 'art'?"), consider this: The US Library of Congress accepted an Emoji translation of Moby Dick for its archive last February.  For our latest Status Update, we caught up with Fred Benenson, the man behind the modern classic himself. Benenson, though not an artist per se,* is an early pioneer in the small-screen world of Emoji art. (*Benenson is, in fact, a data engineer at Kickstarter.)  Way back in 2009, texting with the small set of Japanese emoticons called "Emoji" was still an insiders game. It required downloading an app and then hacking it to enable the keyboard for everyday texts. You couldn't just go into your iPhone Settings like you can today.  Benenson and friends were early adopters, and they quickly began to make up increasingly complex stories in their pictorial messages. Eventually, someone wondered aloud whether you could write a whole book using just Emoji characters. While that challenge seemed overly difficult, it gave Benenson an idea: "maybe instead I could translate a whole book into Emoji."  So, he started trying to find a book available in the public domain book that he could translate. "And I thought, 'OK, what would be totally inappropriate? What would be an amazing juxtaposition between this really simple, constrained language and classical literature,'" he said.  After briefly considering the Bible, he settled on Melville.  The book, which now exists in tangible form ($200 for the hardcover), is translated line-for-line from English to Emoji.  Benenson enlisted a couple of thousand willing strangers to work on the project through Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing website where you pay anywhere from a couple of cents to a couple of dollars for humans to complete defined tasks, like transcribing audio, identifying photos, or translating a book into Emoji. (“I could have tried to translate the whole book myself, but I would have gone crazy,” Benenson said.) He also raised the funds to pay his army of translators via Kickstarter, where he now works in a less Emoji-centric capacity, though he did not at the time.  The famous opening line "Call me Ishmael" became:  "I think I was super interested in pushing the boundaries of both crowd-sourcing and also of Emoji – to see how far can you take it," Benenson said, looking back to his Emoji Dick project. "I think a lot of the pieces in this upcoming show do that."  To note, Benenson isn't just a one-hit wonder. His other piece in the upcoming Emoji Art Show – also a few years old, and maybe a few years before its time – is an all-emoticon version of the New Yorker’s famous Eustace Tilly cover. The mock cover, which was submitted to the magazine but never featured, will be printed for the first time in the show’s Pop-Up Market. Benenson will also speak on a closing panel Saturday afternoon, titled "I Have No Words: Emoji and the New Visual Vernacular". Other artists featured in the show include Kyle MF Williams, Genie Alfonzo (of the Emojinal Art Tumblr), and more.  Of course, Emoji art – like Emoji Dick – isn't for everyone. "That’s astoundingly useless," one commenter wrote on a BoingBoing piece announcing the initial book-translation Kickstarter in 2009. "Herman Melville should be rolling in his grave by now", wrote another, with a third adding: "Why?". But whether we like to admit it or not, emoticons and other visual representations of language have become a part of the way many people communicate today. So is it any wonder artists and technologists have adopted the little icons too?  "It's really interesting how much diversity there is with how people talk about Emoji. Some people are like 'Is it the future of communication?' [laughs] I mean, I don’t know, maybe. Other people think it’s just this thing in the cultural moment," Benenson said.  "Is it art? is Emoji Dick art? These are hard questions to answer, but I do think everyone’s got an opinion about Emoji right now," he continued. "It's becoming a part of our cultural conversation and I think that's exciting."  The Emoji Art Show will be on display at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in Manhattan this Thursday through Saturday.  In the mean time, we had Benenson fill out our Status Update survey:  paste1030, I think. Though I had a ton. I just thought ‘paste’ was a funny screen name, and 1030 was my birthday, so … I was young and it was AOL, okay?  From screen names to worst day ever, huh? How about most recently? My apartment sprung a leak (technically the roof of my building), and I had to have an emergency root canal in the same week.  Baked bread or oysters – but not at the same time.  Adam Savage, or Thomas Keller, assuming he was cooking for us.  The Negroni. Bittersweet and a little hard to get to know, but loyal.  Cold pressed coconut water, seltzer, chicken stock. Everything else gets cooked quickly.  Writing code for a side project.  It was from the contractor who is fixing my apartment, telling me he was on his way.  Sasha & Digweed’s Renaissance: The Mix Collection
The early Emoji art pioneer talks about what went in to his now (in)famous version of Herman Melville's classic: Emoji Dick