Rob Walker investigates the work of Sophia Le Fraga, who translates classic 20th-century absurdist literature into emoji:
“TH3 B4LD 50PRAN0” [above] takes the form of a video that lasts a little less than 9 minutes. It’s another reworking of a celebrated play for the new-media era — a Gchat “performance” inspired by Eugène Ionesco’s play The Bald Soprano. That play is in no small part about the nature of dialogue, communication — and the failure to communicate. Le Fraga’s interpretation shows us a texting exchange on a desktop — where there’s also an open browser, and occasional pop-up alerts that an operating system update is available.
The onscreen commotion only adds to the disconcerting nature of the back and forth between two apparent strangers who may or may not be more connected than it first appears. To come up with these dialogues, Le Fraga rereads the source play and works up a script that she sends to her sister; they massage it “to make it read more like the way it would if these characters were chatting” digitally. Then Le Fraga has the actual exchange with a willing confederate (her roommate, in this case) and records it. That part can be tricky — “TH3 B4LD 50PRAN0” took three tries.
“My approach to poetry and art has always been about trying to underline what’s relevant currently,” Le Fraga tells me. (We conversed via email, the phone, and Gchat.) Like a lot of people, she spends a good deal of her day texting and Gchatting, and hijacking those forms to revise classic dramatic texts pulls together her interests in everything from basic structures of syntax and grammar to “sociolinguistic” behaviors at work, however we choose to communicate.
The Dish 