The OGs

[2025]

A vibrant series of 1,024 digital paintings that remix the language of the internet into art. Blending hand-drawn emojis with generative code, AI and painterly techniques, the project transforms familiar digital symbols into expressive, glitchy relics of online culture.

In an era when communication increasingly bypasses language altogether, FAR's The OGs emerges as a critical meditation on the pictographic turn of digital culture. This ambitious series of 1,024 digital paintings transforms the emoji—that ubiquitous hieroglyph of contemporary discourse—into something unexpectedly profound: a painterly archive of how we feel, connect, and exist online.

The work operates at a fascinating intersection of tradition and innovation. Each piece begins with a hand-drawn emoji, a gesture that immediately subverts the mechanical perfection we associate with digital symbols. FAR then subjects these drawings to generative algorithms, distortion tools, and digital painting processes, creating what might be described as controlled accidents—hybrid forms where human imperfection and computational logic negotiate their boundaries.

The conceptual framework here is deceptively rich. Emojis, first developed in Japan in the late 1990s by Shigetaka Kurita, have evolved into perhaps the most universal visual language since prehistoric cave paintings. They compress complex emotional states into minimal forms, transcending linguistic barriers while carrying the full weight of human feeling. By treating these symbols as worthy subjects for serious artistic investigation, FAR asks us to reconsider what we dismiss as trivial. The yellow face we tap without thinking becomes, under this lens, a cultural fossil—an artifact as revealing of our time as Lascaux's bison were of theirs.

What distinguishes The OGs from mere appropriation is its methodology. The generative processes introduce entropy and decay, transforming clean vectors into what FAR aptly calls "glitchy relics." There is something elegiac in this approach—a recognition that our digital ephemera, despite their apparent immortality in the cloud, are as subject to corruption and loss as any physical medium. The soft blurs and vibrant distortions that characterize different pieces in the collection read as archaeological strata, each layer representing a different moment in the emoji's journey from pure symbol to painterly abstraction.

The collection's twelve rarity tiers—ranging from Common Core icons to ultra-rare Digital Relics—impose a taxonomic structure that echoes both natural history classification and the speculative economies of digital collectibles. This is art that understands its context within post-internet practice, where scarcity and abundance, authenticity and reproduction, exist in productive tension.

Rooted in early web aesthetics yet thoroughly contemporary in its concerns, The OGs represents a significant contribution to the ongoing conversation about what painting means when brushstrokes become algorithms and canvases become blockchains. FAR demonstrates that the question is not whether digital work can achieve the depth of traditional media, but rather what new depths become possible when we stop asking that question altogether.