Archivi categoria: vispo & gif
2 jim leftwich’s desemantized pieces in “lost and found times”, n. 39, nov. 1997, pp. 18-19
a brief note on desemantized writing / jim leftwich. 2021
Desemantized Writing
For me, the practice of asemic writing began in processes I was using in the mid-to-late 1990s to write textual poems. Beginning with a large variety of source texts, those processes included syllabic and phonemic improvisation, varieties of cut-and-paste recombination (of letters, of morphemes, of words, of phrases, of sentences, and of paragraphs), varieties of misdirectional readings-as-writings (moving through paragraphs from right to left, from top to bottom and vice-versa in columns, reading multiple lines in wave patterns, reading paragraphs and pages diagonally, etc), and formulas for extracting, replacing and/or omitting letters from poems and paragraphs. The poems and paragraphs I was writing during those years were constructed, we could say, for reasons other than that of producing meaning.
Sometime late in 1996, I was warned that if I continued on the path I had chosen I would eventually wind up producing asemic texts.
In January 1998 I wrote the following to Tim Gaze: “An asemic text, then, might be involved with units of language for reasons other than that of producing meaning.”
If I had known the term “desemantized writing” at that time, I would certainly have used it, rather than “asemic writing”. The term ‘desemantized writing” is much more accurate, much clearer, much more precisely descriptive of the processes from which my “asemic writing” emerged.
Again, let me emphasize that this little note is accurate in relation to my own processes and practices, and I am fully aware of the fact that it does not apply to the relationships
that many others have with the theory and practice of asemic writing.
If I had known the term “desemantized writing” in the 1990s, rather than the term “asemic writing”, then Tim Gaze and I would have been using the term “desemantized writing” in our correspondence. The term “desemantized writing” would have been used in our international exchanges through the mail art and small press poetry networks. Chances are that Tim’s magazine would have been named “desemantized writing”. Then, sometime around 2005, when Michael Jacobson encountered the magazine and the word, maybe instead of “asemic writing” he would have used the term “desemantized writing” in his interviews and essays.
It’s interesting (again: speaking only for myself) to rewrite this imaginary history, but unfortunately, here and now, in 2021, it is only a kind of game. I didn’t learn of the term “desemantized writing” for another decade-and-a-half, when Marco Giovenale told me about its use among Italian verbovisual poets in the 1960s and 70s.
jim leftwich
05.18.2021
cos’è un’installance e come mai il 23 agosto 2010 ne ho scritto
il “cos’è” sì. ma il “come mai” forse non si trova qui; tuttavia quella pagina, quella strana specie di manifesto che ho scritto in quella data, la riscriverei ora: https://mgiovenale.medium.com/installance-aug-23rd-2010-755e30d8e3ba
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installance #0156: asemics on plastic hook
aggiornamenti costanti, differenze e ripetizioni su t.me/slowforward e mgiovenale.medium.com
Aggiornamenti sulle scritture di ricerca, segnalazioni di reading di prosa (e poesia), conferenze, recensioni, critica letteraria, traduzioni, immagini, video, audio, gif, politica, polemiche, mazzate al mainstream, osservatorio di poesia contemporanea, mostre di arte attuale e incontri, materiali verbovisivi, glitch, scrittura asemica, musica sperimentale, collage, cut-up, flarf, googlism, scrittura concettuale, installazioni verbali e visive, archivi della ricerca testuale, artistica e musicale dal Novecento a oggi.
Post pressoché quotidiani su t.me/slowforward (anche indipendenti da https://slowforward.net, e spesso legati a https://mgiovenale.medium.com).
Differenze, ripetizioni, ritornelli, brand new stuff e molto altro.
Poi non dite che non vi avevo avvertito, e che Hejinian vi suona nuova, Tarkos non lo conoscete, l’asemic writing è un gateau di semi e i non assertivi sono un progetto Marvel.
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epigenetic poetry / giovanni fontana / cipm / video
esagerare (mg pure su medium)
siccome non mi faccio mancare niente,
ho aperto un canale – diciamo un canaletto –
pure su Medium:
https://mgiovenale.medium.com/
rita raley: “the asemic at the end of the world” (uc santa barbara, digital cultures and new media, 2017)
Rita Raley, “The Asemic at the End of the World,” presentation at the Modern
Language Association Convention, Philadelphia (January 7, 2017):
https://escholarship.org/content/qt8847v06r/qt8847v06r.pdf
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installance #0154: asemic sheet
geof huth’s new book: “in chancery” (red fox press)
In Chancery by GEOF HUTH.
A sequence of photographs of records of the long-defunct New York Court of Chancery, presented as visual poems.
The Rescued Pieces of In Chancery
My paid work focuses on government records from the 1600s to today, those encoded in bits and thrumming through wires and air, and those on paper and parchment. When working with the oldest of these, which usually bear signs of decay, I face the pleasure of the archives, or how an old document carries into the present the words and actions of the past, though always changed, always transmogrified by time. The old records I oversee have been stored poorly sometimes for centuries, so their cotton-fiber paper, which would have retained its bright whiteness if stored properly, has devolved into shades of tans and browns. The records also bear the manners and markings of their times, making these routine papers magical to the 21st-century eye. Seals and ribbons, intended to convey authenticity, festoon the documents, as do arcane phrases and ornate penmanship. Even the name of the court I chose to document so heavily, the Court of Chancery, carries the scent of a faraway past, as do the papers themselves. As I processed these, I recognized some of them as inchoate visual poems and photographed hundreds of them, to capture their verbo-visual delights for myself and you.
Geof Huth
“oei”, april 10 and 11: moving mountains & mounting transitions
Moving mountains & mounting transitions
2 days on “editorial thinking” with OEI at Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation
This event will be live-streamed via Index’ Twitch channel: www.twitch.tv/indexfoundation
Saturday April 10 and Sunday April 11, 14:00-17:00
On the occasion of the exhibition Editorial Thinking at Index, OEI magazine organizes a two-day event, inviting artists, editors, publishers, writers, and scholars to reflect on the notion of “editorial thinking” in relation to their different practices. Each day will comprise two sessions and will be live streamed via Twitch. The talks take in conversations around editing and publishing as artistic and literary practices, as well as focusing on new and latest publications by OEI.
Guests include Alice Centamore, Pierre Paulin, Michalis Pichler, Nils Olsson, Sezgin Boynik, Lytle Shaw, Axel Andersson.
Saturday 10 April, 14:00-17:00
Addressing “(im)proper places for other books”, Michalis Pichler will talk about historical and recent initiatives of artists who have tried to break out of the process of cultural confinement of their books. This talk will be followed by a short lecture by Nils Olsson on editorial practices taking its cue from Walter Benjamin’s “The author as producer”. Joining us from Paris, Pierre Paulin and Alice Centamore will focus on editing and publishing through the lenses of art, poetry, archives, and curating.
Sunday 11 April, 14:00-17:00
After an introduction to some of the complexities between fieldwork and editing by Jonas (J) Magnusson & Cecilia Grönberg, Lytle Shaw will talk about his new book New Grounds for Dutch Landscape (OEI editör), where he uses an experimental, site-specific method to demonstrate how 17th century painters Jan van Goyen, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Meindert Hobbema did not so much represent the newly made landscape of Holland as re-enact its reclamation and ongoing threats to its stability.
Axel Andersson presents his new book Negative Geology – A Cultural and Technical History of Early European Mountaineering (OEI editör), on mountaineering before Romanticism, which traces the interconnected developments in literature, visual arts, philosophy and technology contributing to the continent’s intense interest in mountains. Sezgin Boynik, the guest editor of the latest issue of OEI, #90–91: “Sickle of Syntax & Hammer of Tautology. Concrete and Visual Poetry in Yugoslavia, 1968–1983”, tackles the question of how to edit avantgarde archives while introducing this new OEI issue.





