Asemic Writing Pt 1
As much as I love literature, in my mind, there is only so much that can be made with the English alphabet. Of course, endless combinations of words and the entire language, although aesthetically there is only so many wines of writing I can fo before it starts to feel the same. This led me to the idea of asemic writing in order to shake things up a bit.
Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing, which means "having no specific semantic content", or "without the smallest unit of meaning". With the non-specificity 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. In basic terms, it looks like writing, but we can’t quite read it. I call works like this “asemic writing”.1 For better clarification of the definition, we also need to move our analysis from the English term writing, indicating on one side the writing itself, on the other hand, the ‘action’ of writing: the process of writing at its early stages, creating itself, however only eventually happening as a graphic event. The term writing, intended as the action of writing, leads to a particular manual skill, to a performing process based on three concepts: first, the gestural process of writing, second, it's never becoming semantic language, and third, the voluntariness of the gesture, as far as the signs are not conventional, like letters or codes.2 In 1997, visual poets Tim Gaze and Jim Leftwich first applied the word asemic to name their quasi-calligraphic writing gestures.[7] They then began to distribute them to poetry magazines both online and in print. The authors explored sub-verbal and sub-letteral forms of writing, and textual asemia as a creative option and as an intentional practice.3
When it comes to asemic writing, many people make imitation writing, often in flowing cursive, such as my image below. My normal penmanship is cursive (often with a fountain pen) so for me, this was a normal motion of movement. Critically looking at this, the expressive movements which can be labelled as both physical or psychic (or psychological) can be read into, exposing the artist (mine in this case) emotions through their mark-making. This includes rough squiggles suggesting speed and haste and smoother lines which can be read as a more controlled concentrated line. Influenced by this I started to make wordless squiggles of symbols, in which I didn't even know the meaning.
Wordless squiggles -
These examples are completely abstracted with the shape of the lines, although they were inspired by cursive handwriting - the up and down motion of my pen. When I looked deeper into these forms I saw shapes of mountains, valleys, streams and hills, as if I had created a visual image with a text, which made me think whether I could do that with more legible texts to create a visual image, be that in the real world or in the mind's eye, the experience of “seeing” it would still be real to the audience regardless. The three with pink lines were to test out how the background colour changed the appearance of the artwork, I like the glitter on the black card. I feel the brown card is the least successful although I believe this is because pink and brown don’t mix well as much.
“Asemic works leave for the reader to decide how to translate and explore an asemic text; in this sense, the reader becomes co-creator of the asemic work.”4
I found inspiration from the quote above as this is what I want the audience to feel with every piece I make. I do not want to create a single viewpoint, with no room to intervene and discover. I want to leave my work purposely ambiguous to leave at least a little wiggle area for my readers. It could be argued that the only way to have a truly personal translation of an artwork is for it to be illegible, as no meaning could also be read as unlimited or rather limitless meanings. If no one knows what it says, then the aesthetics become more important to the audience as well, as that’s the one understandable, recognizable tribute that is left.
This experiment on the other hand is a lot more pictorial than before, creating a language differently. I can imagine these scribbles as decorations, or runes for spells or something. I purposely chose a black paper with a white gel pen as an opposite to regular writing on normal paper. I felt it looked more magical and aesthetic on black cards. I also picked asemic forms as a whole since they can never be recreated, unlike a texted letter (or stamped) where the font make each letter the same, handwriting is not as structured. While my writing is legible half the time each letter is unique which makes handwriting personal in an art sense. Workshops in the future could help me expand on the idea of handwriting versus structured text, as as to create more work quickly. I know if think about things too much, ill outthink the idea and talk myself out of it without giving it a go first, sometimes the best plan is to just GO GO GO.
1 http://www.fullofcrow.com/prate/2009/11/tim-gaze/
2 https://www.electroniccottage.org/francesco-aprile/about-asemic-writing
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asemic_writing
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