Emoji Dick: The Medium is the Multitude

For anyone in the habit of populating their coffee table with quirky volumes that are more to be seen than to be read, look no further than Fred Benenson's Emoji Dick. This crowdsourced translation of the American classic converts Herman Melville's romantic tome into the pictorial language of emojis, a zeitgeist-pertinent array of colourful icons normally reserved for text messages and tweets. The colossal task was achieved by using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, through which time-consuming tasks can be handed over for quick completion to large numbers of online workers. Melville's tale of Ishmael and the hunt for the big white limb-stealing metaphor was 'translated' by these poorly paid workers into some 10,000 rows of the cute little ideograms we all know and love/despise. Emoji-Dick and Regular-Dick are juxtaposed line-by-line, so one can compare "Call me Ishmael" with the symbols chosen to stand in for that frankly quite forgettable opening line.

You might say the Emoji is a kind of contemporary digital hieroglyph that replaces conventional phonemic rigidity with the ductile significations of pictograms, but then you might discover everyone has stopped listening and wandered off because they simply can't endure your tiresome presence any longer. Either way, the extent to which this 'translation' does the original work justice is not really the point. What's interesting is the army of Mechanical Turks who made this book happen and the Kickstarter funding that paid them. It's a vivid example of how the creative industries are still feeling out the possibilities and boundaries of crowdsourced content, labour and finance. It's also an example of how the energies of entire communities can, hilariously, be expended on huge pointless tasks.

In Emoji Dick's introduction, Paddy Johnson compares the book to artist Francis Alÿs' community-based performance work 'When Faith Moves Mountains', in which five hundred Peruvian students armed with shovels moved a bloody great big sand dune by a couple of inches. This 2002 work indeed remains a shining example of 'participatory practice' and the absurd expenditures of energy possible when a large enough community can be coaxed into action, with or without a political agenda. Thanks to the growth of online content management systems there are now invisible workforces out there willing to carry out your ludicrous demands for mere pennies. If Hamlet hadn't already been translated into Klingon by a pair of cool hunks way back in '96 then you can be sure that today's internet labourers could have turned it around for you in a matter of days.

But what about when authorial control itself is handed over to the faceless hordes writhing in the digital mulch? This question was addressed in earnest by Penguin Books back in 2007. With no formal guidelines set, 1,500 contributors wreaked literary havoc over the course of a month to create A Million Penguins. The result can still be found online, and the parts of its 1,030 pages I skimmed through resembled a Sopranos fan-script that had smashed headlong into a sedated version of Naked Lunch. Much of the rest seemed to be replete with references to pizza or bananas or, oddly enough, whales. I'd tentatively suggest that no one would gain anything from reading the entirety of this book, apart from on Opposite Day, when it would be a masterclass in narrative structure. 

Since then, more controlled approaches towards the same principle have been attempted. Notably the Fifty Shades of Grey parody The Diamond Club, a crowd-authored erotic hoax which made it to number four on the iBookstore chart because you people just seem to love books with bonking in them. Another more sincere attempt by balloon-crazed artist Willy Chyr to create a collaborative 'network fiction' seems to have ground to a halt back in June, apparently due to a lack of interest from would-be collaborators. So much for empowering the audience!

Perhaps therein lies the issue with handing over the authorial steering-wheel to a multitude. Too much democracy afforded in the production of artworks will either result in chaos, or something so lacking in friction that it's just bland. The saying goes that a camel is a horse built by committee, and camels are famously lacking in critical content. To paraphrase continental philosopher and all-round Frenchman Jacques Rancière, there can be no politics without antagonism. Art doesn't operate without implicit exclusions, and great works are often born of unhealthy narcissism. But take comfort: the comments box, the online review, the tweet and the status update – these constitute the great vernacular art form of the early 21st Century, and afford all of us the chance to indulge our inner wordsmith whilst simultaneously co-authoring a dazzling crowdsourced epic about how jubilantly narcissistic, entitled, and prone to petty disagreement we all are. Everyone wins.