Archivi categoria: vispo & gif

asemic sibyls @ The New Postliterate now

thanks to Michael Jacobson

“miniature forests”, issue #2-3

“Renegade” / a visual mag

RENEGADE –

http://visualpoetryrenegade.blogspot.com/

the literary revolution is looming…

xerolage 47

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X E R O L A G E 4 7
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Xerolage 47 – iu by John Moore Williams

http://xexoxial.org/is/xerolage47/by/john_moore_williams

What we have here are digital talismanic suggestions. In this series of vispo, design elements construct a place for you and eye to land. The dotted i returns u see. Letterforms conjure humanity in their very simplicity. These compositions rework certain concrete poetic ideas. The letters i and u undergo new permutations. It’s a satisfying jaunt through renewed verbo-visual possibilities. John Moore Williams is part of the next wave of visual poet.

– Nico Vassilakis

I didn’t know who I am before I saw Xerolage 47. I didn’t know what I was, or the difference between I and U. I was continually thinking U were I when you were nothing of the kind. But in this book, in this John Moore Williams book, we discover that I am the mother of U, who is I bent in the middle and whose feet point up to the sky. Sometimes, I am a shadow. Sometimes, I is a change. Sometimes, I am in a pile of U’s and cannot get out. Sometimes, I is a whirling of shapes. Sometimes, I am spare. Because I go on forever, and I end at the end of each finger, each of which is just another I. I is clean. I am dirty. And in John Moore Williams’ hands of ten small I’s, I is everywhere and everything, the letter is examined as a meaning and a shape, the I is made into structures of beauty, and if you read the book you just might know what I am and you are.

– Geof Huth

from the introduction:

We are used to thinking of letters as merely media, as windows through which some message is conveyed without interference. They are the superconductors of significance, channels devoid of impedance or static, through which content is, ideally, passed with crystal clarity. This is perhaps most obviously true of the letter I, which has become so concretely associated with individual identity that it has practically disappeared as its own entity. The shape itself reinforces this disappearance; of all the letterforms it is perhaps the sparest, the most Spartan. Compounding this is the fact that it lends itself so easily to the conflation of form and content—it is, unlike most single letters, a word, and one that abstractly yet forcefully resembles its referent. It is the human form in hieroglyph, a body inscribed.

iu seeks to accept, complicate and reject this conflation, this crystal-clear union of sign and signifier. In accepting the sparest of letterforms as its subject, then attempting to create a wide variety of forms out of this simple cloth, the book embraces the generativity of restriction. At the same time, it attempts to explore the multifarious and complex meanings of identity and individuality through simple, iconic forms. Many of the pieces employ the archetypal forms and arrangements of the comic book, that most lyric and identity-obsessed of popular fiction forms, while others work through more concrete arrangements, attempting to graphically depict the semantic content in much the same way the letterform itself does. Oh, and then there’s the letter U, which our shorthand age has rendered nearly as pictographic as I.

John Moore Williams claims to be a poet and, occasionally, an artist. He also claims, marginally more lucratively, to be a copywriter and editor. It’s fairly certain that he lives in Oakland, California, and that he has authored I discover i is an android (Trainwreck Press, 2008), writ10 (VUGG Books, 2008) and [+!] (Calliope Nerve, 2009)—the last in collaboration with Matina Stamatakis and Kane X. Faucher. He also edits the visual poetry journal The Bleed (avantexte.com/thebleed). His blog is called SinTax (fissuresofmen.blogspot.com).

The primary investigation of Xerolage is how collage technique of 20th century art, typography, computer graphics, visual & concrete poetry movements & the art of the copier have been combined. Each issue is devoted to the work of one artist.

24 pages, 8.5 x 11, $7 includes postage Subscriptions: 4 issues/$20

XEXOXIAL EDITIONS 10375 Cty Hway Alphabet La Farge WI 54639

cosa può essere un’installazione, un testo non assertivo, ecc.

può essere questa rosa [da qui]

ma anche questa cosa [da qui]

come si vede, c’è una rima
(che ovviamente non è quella tra le parole)

xerolage 46

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X E R O L A G E 4 6
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Xerolage 46 – STARINGS by Nico Vassilakis

http://xexoxial.org/is/xerolage46/by/nico_vassilakis

This is what an alphabet does when the books are closed and the
letters are off duty. The characters cavort, mate, replicate,
coagulate, instigate, insinuate, explode… Free of responsibility,
the alphabet dances.

– Rosaire Appel

In Starings we enter into a second universe (macro- and
microcosmic at the same time), where letters and punctuation marks are
every bit as real and hallucinatory, transitory and unerasable
creatures as stars, planets, grains of interstellar dust,
microorganisms or atomic particles are in the first one. They
multiply, interweave with each other and with light and darkness, open
frequently like a zip and what we have inside are themselves again in
a different shape. Their presence is so intense that they (and each
contrapuntal pair of their constellations) would start to speak to us
immediately — if only letters could do that. Listen. This is meaning
in the moment of birth.

– Márton Koppány

Nico Vassilakis’ STARINGS occupies us by combining radically
different registers of meaning — violence and play, destruction and
creation, character and scatter. And we are occupied when we enter
each image, as in taken over or filled up, concentrate on or in, we
have control or have lost control of meaning here. Not that there need
be an either/or in these pages. There is only is. So dwell a while.

– Jenny Sampirisi

Most interesting composition results from the mental equivalent of
crossing one’s eyes, tuning to a place between. Vassilakis hits a
sweet spot with the dynamic works in Starings, their textures,
accumulations, and rhythmic repetitions creating instances of chaos
and clarity, recognition and refusal.

– Lisa Radon

from the introduction:

Dear Alphabet’s Demur,
You take lines and shapes and given possibilities and make alphabet.
You use it to make sounds and you map out trajectories of thought. You
make names and call your children by them. This is done everywhere.
And it’s been done for thousands of years until you became bored with
this method — until you surrounded and suffocated yourself with these
products of your creation.

You go through ubiquitous, unrelenting text — you are altered by text,
by its message. You’ve had to alter how you see. You are forced to
alter text itself. You stare your way through words and into middles
of words. You resolve the noise of your eyes. The information you see,
you seek, to find another nature therein.

REVIEW

“The Noise of Your Eyes” by John Olson on Tillalala Chronicles
http://tillalala.blogspot.com/2010/08/noise-of-your-eyes.html

Nico’s more recent books include: Diptych (Otolith), Askew (bbc
press), TEXT LOSES TIME (manypenny press), staReduction (Book Thug),
Disparate Magnets (BlazeVox), Protracted Type (Blue Lion Books),
Irrational Dude with Robert Mittenthal (tir aux pigeons), West Of
Dodge (redfox press).

With Crag Hill, Nico Vassilakis is editing a major international
anthology of visual poetry, The LastVispo Anthology. Over 130
contributors from over 20 countries.

The primary investigation of Xerolage is how collage technique of 20th
century art, typography, computer graphics, visual & concrete poetry
movements & the art of the copier have been combined. Each issue is
devoted to the work of one artist.

24 pages, 8.5 x 11, $7 includes postage
Subscriptions: 4 issues/$20

XEXOXIAL EDITIONS
10375 Cty Hway Alphabet
La Farge WI 54639