For Mediamuseum Beeld en Geluid sound we made a experiential project / game. During the days of the My First Smartphone Festival. Emoji Omaji was active.

Emoji Omaji is a participatory performance-installation about care, miscommunication, and the strange poetry of emoji culture.

Visitors encounter a grandma in the distance behind glass (like a tamagotchi: an elderly woman sitting behind a window, high above the audience, surrounded by her cozy props — schommelstoel, geraniums, cookie tin, and a schoolboard. You can only communicate with her in emoji. She points at what she needs: Play. Food. Care. Attention.

Players respond by building small emoji-rebuses from printed icons. They hold their creations up; Grandma studies them through her binoculars and writes her interpretation on the board.

If they match, she rewards the players with a thumbs-up, a little dance, and a heart. If not, she grumbles and removes a heart. When Grandma loses all hearts, she must be “reset” — pure Tamagotchi nostalgia.

Emoji Omaji transforms digital pictograms into study of misunderstanding, generational gaps, and how we try to care for each other with limited tools. The audience co-creates it.

A tiny intergenerational soap opera game behind glass.

A project by Mathijs Stegink and Michael Veerman, grandma Kameliya Markovska and the volunteers of the mediamuseum. Many thanks to: Arjen Pas.