On the left: "new" distorted emoji on iOS 26.4; On the right: "Heaven Of Gamers", published on September 9, 2022. (link to the post)
In March 2026 Apple released iOS 26.4, a minor update to the operating system for iPhone and iPad. Several new emojis are released, among them one especially caught my attention for having seen it before. After a few seconds I finally remembered exactly where, I looked to the side in my study and saw it immediately. In physics, the only physical piece in fact that I have on a physical canvas, is the same one with the now called distorted emoji.
In "Heaven Of Gamers" this emoji is distorted (crushed), and with slightly different eyes. The original emoji I took before editing surely comes from Picsart's huge library of stickers/pngs, an app that I use a lot and from which I have taken a lot of material for my collages/edits. The expression, however, is for me without a doubt the same, the vibes and the very meaning of this new distorted emoji are a reversal of the very emoji that was already circulating on the net in 2022.
On emojipedia.org I found the following description about the emoji that Apple premiered on iOS 26.4 (quote translated): "🆕 Approved in September 2025 as part of Emoji 17.0. It is expected to reach the platforms at the end of 2025 and throughout 2026.
A smiling face with big, bulging eyes looking up, as if it were distorted or deformed. It resembles a fisheye lens effect and can be used figuratively to represent shock, amazement or anguish, according to a visual trope seen in anime and manga. It can also be used more literally to represent an inflated or crushed face. Some platforms include raised eyebrows, while others omit them."
"After its release in a beta version for iOS 26.4 for developers, some media compared this emoji to a scene in "Crush!" 2024 from Apple. iPad Pro ad, where a rubber emoji toy is compressed by an industrial press.
Distorted Face was approved as part of Unicode 17.0 in 2025 and added to Emoji 17.0 in 2025."
When watching the aforementioned video I do find that the familiarity is much greater in this case, the frame in which we see that crushed emoji in the Apple commercial finally confirms my suspicion: Apple stole the distorted emoji from me. *Side jokes*, the truth is that in fact it has little relevance to me that said emoji has been taken from my work or from any other place where said emoji or preliminary versions was already circulating. It is clear today perhaps more than ever the common in the creative field such as theft inspiration plays a fundamental part in the creative process of many (either consciously or unconsciously).
Vaporwave, a complete aesthetic and musical genre that inspired much of my work, is based on the premise of modifying existing music and distorting it to the point of creating something completely unique and different. Much of my work is based directly on the use of popular drawings from Nintendo, Disney and others for my creations, and I feel that in fact it was partly thanks to that type of creations for which at some point I achieved a certain "virality" on social networks.
Whether or not it is an intentional theft, I think that there can never be something totally new and original and then, whether by accident, inspiration or directly conscious theft, every creator starts from the knowledge of existing previous creations and simply reimagines them and reorganizes them in a different mixture that will pretend to be something new, and that in the future will serve as a reference for new remixes.
Since I can remember I do what I do on the internet from a freedom to do and create without the intention of pleasing or that people understand, ignore or criticize my work. If I feel it with my heart and for me it makes sense to create an image in a certain way, I don't hesitate to do it. One of the great things about the internet is the fact that we can upload almost anything we want. I simply like to observe, mix, distort, transform and create from what I see and think without thinking too much about the effect that this will produce. It is the responsibility of the watcher to decide what to see and how to see it. I am not entirely a conceptual artist, nor do I intend to give instructions to read my work, it has never occurred to me, because even I do not have them.
Example 2 of background of the "new" distorted emoji. Collage without title, posted on August 20, 2025 (link to the post).
When Diana Millan (Artist and researcher I met in one of my self-managed creative digital art laboratories) suggested me to write an article for the blog of her research project Internet Core at first I was going to write about the glitch, about the random and about some ideas of what I have been developing for almost my entire career, what I have been calling digital anti-art.
Improved version of a wallpaper I found on Pinterest (unknown source). Reminds me of the classic Windows XP wallpaper "bliss". It is not, but the vibrations, composition and aesthetics are quite similar and logically give a very similar impact. (PS: You can download this one if you want, it's high quality and free 🙌
Sitting down and finally starting to write is exactly for me like starting to work on a digital image. You start with an idea or sometimes without any specific, but immediately you have to be willing to flow when investigating and making that first idea and finally you find yourself sailing and playing in a sea of ideas, words, shapes, concepts and colors. In this case, in the end I chose to start this article by writing with the affirmation that gave the title to this humble writing: Apple stole my distorted emoji 😯
The title is just another silly internet hook, and Apple didn't steal that emoji from me because from the beginning it was never my invention. I think that emojis as well as icons or memes are really the property of those who use them, that is: of everyone. It is a curious and interesting fact to think about those who propagate, distribute or devised some of them but even more interesting is to see where they reach and what meanings they produce.
What defines for me what I call Digital anti-art (to which I referred by several names in the past as digicore or crazycore) is mainly its nature of the random. The random (in Spanish: random) is precisely that conditionality that anything can coexist in a digital anti-art work. Or at least 'almost' anything, because the second determining factor of what can define digital anti-art is the 'aesthetic' factor.
The 'aesthetic' in digital anti-art should not be confused with the simply 'visually pleasing', or belonging to some 'core aesthetic' necessarily, nor directly as the conception of the 'a e s t h e t i c ' of the vaporwave (concept prior to the popularization of the term). The aesthetic in digital anti-art means that which tells the perception that something works and has a coherence and beauty of its nature. Something that although it can be beautiful and pleasing to the eye (either because of its colors, shapes and/or composition), at the same time it can and should be able to be intriguing, disturbing, strange, challenging to the eye.
The third factor that defines digital dada has to do with the inherited condition of Duchamp's anti-art. If at the time it was necessary to question the technique, authorship and beauty in art to make way for any form of previous conceptual art, and affirming that anything can be art if an artist (or anti-artist) so decides; in anti-art or digital dadaism the technique is only one: digital, authorship is shared and anyone can create something by taking resources from anywhere, and beauty is between the 'aesthetic' and the capacity and individual free interpretation of a work.
Returning to the idea that everything is a mix: Each thing invented is based on something else, or it is a reinvention, a remake, a reboot, etc etc... and about this it has already been written again and again. Kirby Ferguson explores this perspective in depth in his documentary "Everything is a remix". Ferguson popularized this concept through a series of short documentaries produced between 2010 and 2012, where he exposes that creativity does not arise from nothing, but is based on three fundamental steps: copy, transform and combine.
The reboot and the remix do not promise us a novelty without reference, they start from the idea of confessing that this is based on something that already exists. For good or for worse, we have all been watching it over and over again without stopping both in the movies and on the internet. Movies and series that return in reboot versions, fashions and old styles that return to being a trend in mainstream culture or to arouse the interest of subcultures or specific niches.
The culture of the core, of the nostalgic, of all that leads us to think distant realities of the past or even sometimes of the future take relevance then. The idea of digressing around other realities and times, and of remembering, remastering, reviving, reimagining something has become almost a perfect formula to sell almost anything. But also to invite us to rethink what we left incomplete yesterday or what could have been. It invites us to think once again about the possibilities of a past idea, of a second chance for it. Finally offering us an alternative vision of a world that thanks to this variant becomes somehow better, more beautiful, more interesting, or simply fresher... But in addition, being closed and delimited systems, the internet cores offer us the chance to understand things in a simpler and clearer way (although no less interesting) compared to the notion of a chaotic and complex present.
The diversity of these cores and aesthetics of the Internet are, on the other hand, countless like the niches where they circulate. On Aesthetics Wiki we find literally hundreds of them, making us again overflow the possibilities of the present. If a decade ago it was simply retro or vintage, now there are endless variants from internet cores or internet aesthetics.
"Remove Friends" (2022, Nik Pespi).
The random, appears in the forms of anti-digital art that I speak of as an echo of all this amalgam of variants of cores, ideas, concepts, thoughts and aesthetics of the Internet. It is in the random where the lines between one system and another are blurred, and the influence of different aesthetic nuclei can coexist in chaotic harmony. Beauty is not in simplicity and order as in minimalism, but neither in the absolute chaos of a raw maximalism. But in the suggestion that such harmony exists precisely in the contrasts. The ying and the visual yang existing between the gore and the cute, the trash with the aesthetic, the glitch with the liminal, the dreamcore with the weirdcore, etc, etc, etc... And of the relationship between concepts and worlds that can be interposed being similar, opposite and/or complementary: such as the dark with the bright, the clean with the dirty, the calm and the noisy, etc, etc...