Creative Tech Week

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch's  most ambitious work, embodies the conflicts, humor, darkness and absurdity of human, earthly and cosmological conditions. The current speed of technological advancement suggests humanity and the environment is irrevocably changing, but when we compare the visual vernacular of our day (symbols like Emoji for example), it is amazing to discover how easily they align with the symbology of a prescient artist from 500 years ago. This is not to say that evolution is not occurring, but to suggest that Bosch was one of those unique individuals who created works that transcend time.

One intention of my transcription of his work, in The Garden of Emoji Delights, was to mash up popular historic and contemporary sign systems, and to diversify and expand the Emoji lexicon through this process. Emoji are a contemporary glyph system which offer an emotional shorthand for virtual expression. The pleasurable stylizations are ubiquitous worldwide and across generations. Transcribing visual symbologies of an earlier era using Emoji makes perfect "nonsense-sense" to me, particularly with Bosch’s work, in that his own visual style was so idiosyncratic and remarkably distinct in contrast to his peers. 

In his essay “Digicalyptic Realities or, The Frolic of the Flat : Carla Gannis, The Garden of Emoji Delights” Sabin Bors writes …“What makes the Garden of Emoji Delights unique is that the visual communication language it manipulates is deeply rooted in our reflexive and ordinary communication. A double subversion thus takes place: the subversion of visual communication languages, and the subversion of art history.” – Sabin Bors, 2014