Pixelized Sentiments

Unlike today’s environment, in which smartphones keep us constantly connected and reality is shaped through social media, the internet experience of the late 1990s—accessed via dial-up modems—was marked by a clear separation between “cyberspace” and physical reality.

In this early period of the internet, I was in my twenties and kept a publicly accessible online diary on my personal website for eight years. This work emerged from a reflection on the pixelated emotions that began to circulate within online spaces at that time.

Emotions such as anger and surprise are abstracted in red, while sadness and anxiety are represented in blue. These emotional states are rendered as a diptych through a mosaic composed of acrylic mirror tiles. The surface reflects and scatters light, evoking a flattened version of a mirror ball—conceived here as a networked globe, a metaphor for a world connected through the internet.

The work was exhibited together with printed excerpts from the diary, reproduced in extremely small, nearly illegible type. It can also be installed as a pair of folding screens (nikyoku isso), leaning upright in space.

This work was also presented as a stage set for a performance.