Every emoji user has at some time argued about the meaning of at least one character. Is that grimacing face gritting its teeth in pain, or merely smiling hugely? Is that red-faced demonic dude furious, or pouting? Like any digital communication, the 14-year-old pictorial language has more than a few gray areas that can lead to communication breakdowns and misinterpretations.

New York performance artist Genevieve Belleveau is fascinated by these misinterpretations. Her piece, Emoji Autism Facial Recognition Therapy, was one of the most intuitive and thought-provoking pieces at the highly regarded Emoji Art Show in Manhattan. It examines the common misinterpretations people make with emoji and features her Emoji Recognition Chart, a catalog of emoji and their corresponding “emotions” as interpreted by Siri’s accessibility translation (yes, Siri speaks verbal interpretations of emoji characters).

The chart mimics psychologist Paul Ekman's groundbreaking research in microexpressions — the minute facial movements that convey emotion – that is widely used in, among other things, high-functioning autism therapy. During the Emoji Art Show opening earlier this month, Belleveau sat below the poster, a quasi-therapist hosting impromptu sessions with “patients.” She asked people questions based on their understanding of emoji – How would you respond with emoji if your significant other broke up with you right before you were to leave on a trip with them? – and placed them on an “emoji spectrum” based upon how elaborate or interpretive their responses are.

This being an art show, Belleveau's placement of people on her self-crafted spectrum is hardly scientific. But it is nonetheless telling. If you chose the red-faced emoji (which, according to Siri, is pouting) to answer that hypothetical question, you would not land as highly on the spectrum as someone who crafted a detailed reply using the pig, the knife, and the broken heart. Your ability to recognize the meaning of each emoji and sufficiently understand the nuances to string them together determines your place on the scale.

“Literal language is one of the indicators of Aspbergers, so people who were very literal in their interpretations, they answered the question exactly [without much detail],” Belleveau says. “They were on the lower end of the spectrum.”

Belleveau studies social psychology and sociology to inform her work. “One of the underlying causes I was trying to champion was to raise the question of autism and the idea of differentiating normal and non-normal behavior,” she says. “There’s a lot of conversation about the autism spectrum and whether we’re all on it or not. Language is a very rigid means of expressing the infinite emotional capabilities of humans. It’s a human rights question: Do we need to create these barriers and differences, and what can we do to even the playing field?”

It might seem insensitive to make pop art out of an incredibly complex and widely stigmatized disorder, even if Belleveau’s “consultations” at the NYC show included a woman who works with autistic children. That impression comes only if you’ve never encountered her other work. Belleveau, who describes herself as a “soft psychologist,” uses performance and social ritual to build an overarching narrative in which she embodies an alter-ego – a spiritual “healer/social media guru”-type called gorgeousTaps – to explore correlations between the traditional and modern ways we interact with one another. Belleveau once orchestrated an all-digital “reality show” that challenged contestants to be her best Facebook friend and prompted emotional breakdowns among participants. Another work consisted of a series of church services that blended traditional religious rites with internet rites we perform daily without thought. Her next project, an experiment called Mobile Monastery that kicks off next month, will “investigate urban asceticism in NYC by modifying and inhabiting an RV with the goals of personal artistic exploration and community outreach.”

Emoji Autism Facial Recognition Therapy examines our difficulty grasping the meaning of emoji, and draws parallels to the difficulty those living with autism have recognizing emotion. In that regard, it asks many of the same questions posed by her earlier works.

“I’m interested in relationships between people," she says. "Maybe ‘relational aesthetics’ is another way to think of it. At the heart of it, [I focus on] why people want to connect with one another, what they do to connect, and what happens when connections break down?”

In that narrative, Emoji Autism Facial Recognition Therapy connects the dots between our understanding of mental illness and how we use emerging technologies to interact with one another. Turns out, there is a concrete description of each emoji, just as there is a definitive way to read facial microexpressions. So it follows that, in the same way children with autism may use Ekman’s microexpression charts to learn empathy techniques that don’t come naturally to them, perhaps we could use Belleveau’s chart to learn the specific definitions of each emoji character to avoid misinterpretations.

Belleveau’s chart raises fascinating questions about the evolution of instant digital communication, our interpretation of that communication, and how our misinterpretations of it may not be so different from the social traits we often we stigmatize. Belleveau is right alongside us; she says the work only prompted more questions, ones beyond those that birthed the piece in the first place.

“By the end of it, I felt like I was doing rune readings,” she says. “All of this was me interpreting the hopes and dreams and feelings of each participant. It was actually very personal; it didn’t have a cold, clinical psychology. I realized I’m incapable of that.”