Horoscopes are defined by the relative position of celestial bodies at the moment of birth; these celestial bodies allegedly affect the personality, character, temper, etc. of the individual, the process however that determines this is highly arbitrary. I do not intend to offend any astrology enthusiasts; however, I find horoscopes are like randomly determined predictive text. Any language used in every horoscope column in magazines or newspapers, reads as general and highly applicable to the public. Take the following quote for example (a daily reading for Cancer from Horoscope.com), “If you don’t want to risk a nervous breakdown, calm yourself before it’s too late.” It reads like sensible advice, and if something stressful where to happen to the individual during the day they’d think “wait, my horoscope said this would happen.” That is the concept and context relation that I was attempting to focus on with my creative work, “Emoji Horoscopes: Walter Mojicado.”

This work was heavily inspired by Mark Sample’s “Two Moji” in which he explores the contextual meaning placed within an emoji. This is common with the emoji in popular culture, let’s consider the ? as an example. The literal meaning of the symbol is an eggplant, however its phallic shape has characterized it in texting culture as a symbol for male genitalia. Let’s consider the ?, this is literally a symbol representing a wink and a smile, when combined with the eggplant, ?? suddenly it is a risqué suggestion. In a way this is a Kuleshov-ish experiment for language; we are taking language that on its own carries meaning and randomly placing it with a symbol (that on its one also has meaning), creating a new third combination of meaning.

I had a lot of fun with this project, I enjoy exploring stochastic works. Check out the work here, or if your interested my other generative work here.