The ‘semantics of donk’ is a collaborative project between artist Nick Sanderson and software engineer Jack Frankland. They have produced a software that reinterprets the Unicode of emojis into sound. Unicode is a set of pointcodes that have each been assigned to an abstract symbol. The output audio was left to be discovered in a pair of headphones, hidden in one of the upstairs bathrooms.

“By interpreting the Unicode values as sound we have found ambiguity and uncertainty in what seems absolute. Then through manipulation and repetition we have created a new, highly personal and subjective object. A software that allows emojis to speak. Yet the sound produced is otherworldly. This distortion is analogous to the common misconceptions of language in the discourses of human society, challenging the ideograph’s original function as a universal communicator - thus signifying there is no such thing as unproblematic communication.”