Moodies / Manifesto
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It’s Messy
Feelings are messy. They bleed and dissipate; they flip and evolve. They exist at the edges of our consciousness and are hard to define. As human interactions devolve to screens, feelings are being condensed and flattened for quick and easy consumption- a practice perfectly crystallized by emojis. We set out to recreate and celebrate the beautiful chaos of emotional complexity as we experience it IRL.
What are The Moodies?
The Moodies is a 7,401 piece generative art project visualizing a wide array of emotions through symbols, references from pop culture, and story-telling. Each Moodie is a portrait composed of five elements. These elements are sampled from a core emotions-group based on a tweaked interpretation of Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions.
Plutchik, a psychologist and researcher, suggested that emotions have an organizing logic like colors on the color wheel: primary emotions can be expressed at different intensities and can mix with one another to form different emotions (wiki quote). They can be complementary, oppositional, and overlap and integrate to develop new flavors. Using a generative algorithm allowed us to mix these core emotions and create unpredictable and playful combinations.
Dream Catcher
We grew up in the 80s. Akira, The Incal, and Blade Runner exploded into our lives simultaneously and changed them forever. We were bound to draw and redraw grim fantasies, a practice which we carry to this day in some form or another. Our mother, a therapist, would interpret our dreams and connect a straight line between motif and emotion. One would have a nightmare, and in the morning, after retelling the remembered fragments, one would be asked to contemplate – which part within himself Darth Vader represents?
Our Work
We made a life of visual storytelling. Asaf won the Eisner for best US edition of international material for The Realist, an autobiographical weekly comic, and recently published I’m Still Alive with writer Roberto Saviano (Gomorrah). Tomer has created multiple covers for The New Yorker and The National Geographic. Most recently he worked in visual development with Netflix and Sony, for live-action and animated projects. His work has been exhibited at the British Design Museum and won multiple industry awards.
We also collaborated on a Graphic Novel (with our friend, writer Boaz Lavie, who is also helping on this)- The Divine, which made The New York Times bestseller list, was nominated for a Hugo, and won the International Manga Award. Publisher’s Weekly described it as «Heady, hellacious, and phantasmagoric». In Addition, we contributed a story to Attack on Titan anthology, published by Kodansha Comics.
The NFT thing
We dedicated our lives to drawing up worlds and stories, and here for the first time, we got to collaborate with a generative algorithm- which afforded us a fascinating experiment in storytelling. The algorithm essentially phrases new sentences using disparate elements (=words) harvested from the core emotions-portraits. Some of these ‘sentences’ are poetic; others are strange and mysterious or completely cryptic. They all evoke that confusing familiarity of trying to recall a dream- a puzzle with an internal logic that doesn’t have answers just raises more questions. The images activate the viewer rather than a riddle to be deciphered, igniting a journey within.
Our mission is to expand the conversation of feelings. These are the anti-emojis. There is an astonishing beauty to the complexity and intricate structures that govern our moods. This estheticquality has been erased by outsourcing our social lives to platforms like Instagram- where FOMO is king, and if your life isn’t as picture-perfect and you’re not ‘happy,’ then something is wrong. There is a place for more emotions, nuance, and ambiguity. For us, this is an idea of beauty worth fighting for.
Looking to the future
The meta verse is a mirror of the collective unconscious.
Road Map stuff.
BIOS
Tomer
New York based Visual artist Tomer Hanuka has created multiple covers for The New Yorker and The National Geographic. Most recently he worked in visual development with Netflix and Sony, for live-action and animated projects. Hanuka’s work has been exhibited at the British Design Museum and won multiple industry awards, including Gold medals from The Society of Illustrators and The Society of Publication Designers. A monograph of his work titled Overkill was published in 2012. The Divine, a graphic novel he co-created was published in 2015 and made The New York Timesbestseller list, was nominated for a Hugo, and won the International Manga Award. Publisher’s Weekly described it as «Heady, hellacious, and phantasmagoric».
Asaf
Tel Aviv based comic book writer and artist Asaf Hanuka has been creating The Realist, an autobiographical comic strip, for the last 12 years. His weekly pages collected into books were translated to over 12 languages, star reviewed by Publisher Weekly as “diverse and fascinating portrait of what life truly makes us”, and won multiple international awards including The Eisner at 2016. Hanuka’s latest publication I’m Still Alive is a graphic novel in collaboration with international best selling writer Roberto Saviano (Gomorrah). A third installment of The Realist – Last Day On Earth to be published later in 2022.
SAGA – סאגה גלריה לאמנות חברתית , רחוב מזל דגים 5, יפו
שעות פתיחה: ראשון, רביעי, חמישי בשעות 10:00 – 14:00. שלישי 9:00 – 13:00
קרדיט דימויים: מאת תומר ואסף חנוכה
Stellusz place 
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