For Digital Flo$$, I wanted to look at a metric of my digital communication to create a wearable.

I had a few false starts. My first idea was to use some data from my e-mail history for parametric modeling. I did some word analysis on my spam folder, but the results were boring: most of my spam was just newsletters, rather than the bot-generated word salad I thought I would find.  Then I collected my G-talk chat logs going back to 2007 (6,489 conversations), and generated a word cloud – which was also pretty boring and predictable.  Maybe with finer tuned analytics it could be more interesting.

So I had to come up with a new direction.  I had been thinking about making rings to play with how fingers and thumbs are the keys to digital communication.  Along these lines, I was also thinking about wax seals and “signet rings” which were used for millennia to seal official letters with personal insignia stamped in wax.

I was also thinking about the movie Night of the Hunter, which originated the iconic image of the LOVE / HATE knuckle tattoos.  I think that duality resonates with the culture of social media, which is obsessed on the one hand with likes and ♥ and, on the other hand, with trolling and hate.

 

 

I realized that emoji carry a lot of that duality of love and hate, and are used kind of like wax seals to finish and personalize digital communication.  I decided to create my own LOVE/HATE knuckles in the style of signet rings.

To personalize them, I took a look at my frequently used emoji on my phone:

I picked out 8 of these that spoke to me about love and hate:

Then I used Photoshop (Threshold and Levels) to create black and white versions of each icon:

Which I brought into Illustrator and vectorized using Image Trace (High Res Photo setting).

I also measured my fingers using digital calipers and created ring outlines based on those dimensions (2 for each finger, to make the ring thicker to support the emoji plates.

 

I cut the rings and emoji plates using gold mirror acrylic to get a two-tone bling appearance.
But I also wanted the rings to be usable as seals/stamps and since I couldn’t etch the front of the mirrored acrylic I cut and etched matching plates in clear acrylic to put on top.  Unfortunately the etching clouded the clear acrylic, so I couldn’t use them without ruining the flashiness of the gold plates.

Gluing them was also an issue: I used super glue to first glue the rings together and then attach the emoji plates.  Unfortunately the super glue can be seen through the etched part of the acrylic, but it’s only obvious with the heart and poop emojis since those are solid icons rather than outlines.  I think in a future iteration I would create a mount structure on the rings, so the plates could be glued on their sides.  That might be best done with 3D printing though lasercutting could work too.