Asemic writing

Asemic writing from Marco Giovenale

Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means "having no specific semantic content". With the nonspecificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. All of this is similar to the way one would deduce meaning from an abstract work of art. The open nature of asemic works allows for meaning to occur trans-linguistically; an asemic text may be "read" in a similar fashion regardless of the reader's natural language. Multiple meanings for the same symbolism are another possibility for an asemic work.

Some asemic writing includes pictograms or ideograms, the meanings of which are sometimes, but not always, suggested by their shapes. Asemic writing, at times, exists as a conception or shadow of conventional writing practices. Reflecting writing, but not completely existing as a traditional writing system, asemic writing seeks to make the reader hover in a state between reading and looking.

Asemic writing has no verbal sense, though it may have clear textual sense. Through its formatting and structure, asemic writing may suggest a type of document and, thereby, suggest a meaning. The form of art is still writing, often calligraphic in form, and either depends on a reader's sense and knowledge of writing systems for it to make sense, or can be understood through aesthetic intuition.

Asemic writing can also be seen as a relative perception, whereby unknown languages and forgotten scripts provide templates and platforms for new modes of expression. It has been suggested that asemic writing exists in 2 ways: "true" asemic writing and "relative" asemic writing. True asemic writing occurs when the creator of the asemic piece cannot read their own asemic writing. Relative asemic writing is a natural writing system that can be read by some people but not by everyone. Between these 2 axioms is where asemic writing exists and plays.

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The Asemic Continuum

Influences on asemic writing are illegible, invented, or primal scripts (cave paintings, doodles, children's drawings, etc.). But instead of being thought of as mimicry of preliterate expression, asemic writing may be considered to be a postliterate style of writing that uses all forms of creativity for inspiration. Other influences on asemic writing are xenolinguistics, artistic languages, sigils (magic), undeciphered scripts, and graffiti.

Asemic writing occurs in avant-garde literature and art with strong roots in the earliest forms of writing. An illustrious modern example of asemic writing is the Codex Seraphinianus. In a talk at the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles held on May 8, 2009, Luigi Serafini has stated that the script of the Codex is asemic.

Asemic writing exists as an international style, with writers and artists who create it in many different countries across the globe. One artist, who has been practicing asemic writing since the early 1970s, is Mirtha Dermisache from Argentina. Cecil Touchon, from Fort Worth, Texas, is also an artist who has been creating asemic fragments of writing since the mid-1970s. Another contemporary artist, who has been creating asemic writing for the past 25 years (mid-1980s), is Brooklyn, New York based José Parlá. In China, during the 1990s an abstract calligraphy movement known as "calligraphyism" came into existence, a leading proponent of this movement being Luo Qi. Calligraphyism is an aesthetic movement that aims to develop calligraphy into an abstract art. The characters do not need to retain their traditional forms or be legible as words. A current author of asemic works is Steven J Fowler.

Publications that cover asemic writing include Tim Gaze's Asemic Magazine, Michael Jacobson's weblog gallery The New Post-Literate, and Marco Giovenale's curated group blog Asemic Net. Asemic writing has appeared in books, artworks, films and on television but it has especially been distributed via the internet.

History

Here's a slab quoted from a recent email from visual poet Jim Leftwich (he was explaining himself to an artist named Billy Bob Beamer):

30 years ago i was writing syllabics as a way of creating rhythmic patters unlike traditional metric verse, and trying to lose the influence of eliot, breton and berryman. sometime in the mid-90s, probably 97, a visual poet named john byrum sent me a postcard in response to a series of poems i had sent him. the poems were letteral variations of poems by John M. Bennett. in a ps at the bottom of the card byrum wrote something like "if you continue in this vein you will soon be writing asemic poems". that was the first time i saw the word "asemic". tim gaze contacted me around the same time. i was thinking about purely textual asemia. tim was thinking about a more calligraphic form of writing. my textual work was already letteral, and my visual work was breaking the letter-forms down and becoming a poetry of quasi- or sub- letteral marks. i started making quasi-calligraphic works and sending them around to poetry magazines - and calling them asemic. tim was doing something very similar. that was the beginning of what is now being called "the asemic movement". i promoted the practice (and the word itself) very energetically for several years (8 - 10 years or so). tim has been even more energetic and ambitious, and is still going strong. there is a long and complex history preceding all of this, of course, but this is how the current "movement" got underway. tim can tell you much more about the history of the term itself.

Bruce Sterling comments about asemic writing on his Wired magazine blog Beyond The Beyond:

Writing that doesn’t have any actual writing in it whatsoever. You would think that this must be some kind of ultimate literary frontier, a frozen Antarctica of writing entirely devoid of literary content, but I wonder. What is “beyond asemic writing”? Maybe a neural brain-scan of an author *thinking about* asemic writing. Maybe *generative asemic writing.* Maybe “asemic biomimicry.” Maybe nanoasemic writing inscribed with atomic force microscopes by Artificial Intelligences.

Influences and predecessors

One of Zhang Xu's calligraphy works

• From the Tim Gaze interview on Dogmatika: "you could say that nature, since time began, has been manifesting asemic writing. It just needs a human to see the writing, & recognize it".
• In Tang Dynasty China, ca. 800 CE, two men pushed cursive brush calligraphy to the point of illegibility. "Crazy" Zhang Xu (one of the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup) used to get excited after drinking wine, and write exuberant but illegible cursive. The younger "mad monk" Huai Su also found renown as a writer of loose cursive calligraphy.
• Hélène Smith's Martian.
• Austin Osman Spare, Sigilization. Spare published a method by which the words of a statement of intent are reduced into an abstract design, and then charged with the energy of one's will.
• Henri Michaux's Alphabet, Narration (1927), and intuitive ink drawings, such as Stroke by Stroke.
• Cy Twombly Many of his best-known paintings of the late 1960s are reminiscent of a school blackboard on which someone has practiced cursive "e"s. His paintings of the late 1950s, early 1960s might be reminiscent of long term accumulation of bathroom graffiti. Also see Twombly's series Roman Notes (1970).
• Christian Dotremont and his logograms.
• Lettrisme / Isidore Isou's "idea for the poem of the future was that it should be purely formal, devoid of all semantic content."
• Brion Gysin's calligraphic paintings influenced by Japanese and Arabic calligraphy. A prominent example of one of Gysin's calligraphic paintings is Calligraffiti of Fire (1986).
• Ulfert Wilke and Abstract Expressionism. Wilke was deeply intrigued by the written language, and much of his work was derived from his abstract interpretation of the shapes, colors and meanings of writing that he found in all languages and forms.
• In 1974 the New York Graphic Society released a very influential work to asemic writers, Max Ernst's book Maximiliana: The Illegal Practice of Astronomy.
• Timothy Ely's invented cribriform writing. Ely's work evokes a range of thematic material: arcane knowledge, secrets and cryptography, time and timelessness. He has developed a private written language using 366 individual signs or "idiographic ciphers."
• Xu Bing's A Book from the Sky; "The installation consisted of a set of books, panels and scrolls on which were printed thousands of characters resembling real Chinese ideograms, all devoid of semantic content".
• Roland Barthes contre-écritures.
• Rachid Koraichi, his work is influenced by an abiding fascination with signs of all kinds, both real and imaginary. Beginning with the intricate beauties of the Arabic calligraphic scripts his work is composed of symbols, glyphs and ciphers drawn from a wide variety of other languages and cultures.
• Gu Wenda, in the 1980s, he began the first of a series of projects centered on the invention of meaningless, false Chinese ideograms, depicted as if they were truly old and traditional. One exhibition of this type, held in Xi'an in 1986, featured paintings of fake ideograms on a massive scale.

See also

Nuno de Matos calligraphy works

• Apophenia
• Artist's book
• Automatic writing
• Dada
• Experimental literature
• Glossolalia
• Haptic poetry
• Lorem ipsum
• Nonsense
• Postliterate society
• Visual poetry
• Voynich manuscript

References

• Rosaire Appel, Morpheme Pages. Press Rappel, 2008. ISBN 978-0-557-03591-5
• Rosaire Appel, Wordless (Poems). Press Rappel, 2009. ISBN 978-1441482587
• Rosaire Appel, As It Were: 17 Asemic Stories. Press Rappel, 2010. ISBN 978-1452865102
• Tim Gaze, Writing. xPress(ed), 2004. ISBN 951-9198-86-5
• Tim Gaze, Noology. Arrum Press, 2008.
• Tim Gaze, 100 Scenes. Transgressor Press, 2010.
• Michael Jacobson, The Giant's Fence. Barbarian Interior Books, 2006. ISBN 978-1-4116-6208-7 ([1])
• Michael Jacobson, Action Figures. Barbarian Interior Books, 2009. ISBN 978-1-257-91900-0
• Michael Jacobson, Mynd Eraser. Barbarian Interior Books, 2011.
• Carlos Martinez Luis, Nomadic and Archeological Scriptures. LUNA BISONTE PRODS, 2009. ISBN 978-1-892280-76-3
• Marilyn R. Rosenberg, etceteras. LUNA BISONTE PRODS, 2010.
• The catalog for the first asemic writing exhibit in Russia: [2]
• Asemic Movement 3 published by Mycelium Samizdat Publishers: [3]

External links

• Asemic magazine
• Adventures in Nonism: Asemic art
• The Full of Crow interview with Michael Jacobson
• Asemic Scapes
• SCRIPT Online Journal
• 3:AM Magazine interview with Marco Giovenale
• Cecil Touchon's site