In today’s world, complex emotions are increasingly distilled into simple graphics-emojis. These tiny symbols have become an essential part of how we communicate online, used to express everything from joy, love, and surprise to frustration, anger, and sorrow. While emojis are designed to be universally understood and instantly recognizable, their simplicity contrasts sharply with the complexity of the emotions they represent.

In this project, we explore the strange, yet fascinating, role emojis play in our digital communication. We began by selecting our favorite emojis-those that are most commonly used to convey a wide range of emotions. But instead of simply using them as they are, we deconstructed them. Each emoji was divided into four quadrants, and we then reassembled new compositions by combining fragments from different emojis. The result is a series of images that are both familiar and alien-new, hybrid emojis that communicate something entirely different from their original purpose.

This project plays with the concept of how we simplify and package emotions into symbols and questions whether these symbols can evolve into new forms of expression when deconstructed and recombined. By fragmenting these universally recognized icons, we aim to disrupt the clarity of their meaning and invite viewers to explore the complexities of emotion in a more abstract and layered way.

In the same way that social media reduces the nuances of human emotion to a single tap of a button, our work takes this simplification one step further-breaking it apart and reconstructing it to show how easily the meaning behind a symbol can shift. Through this process, we ask: What happens when the clean, defined boundaries of an emoji are disrupted? And what new emotions emerge from these hybrid forms?