Archivi tag: asemic writing

‘asemica’: diffusione ad oggi

<Asemica> è stata archiviata presso la Bayerische Staatsbibliothek di Monaco, una delle più importanti biblioteche d’Europa.

<Asemica> è un aperiodico dedicato alla scrittura e all’arte asemantica in veste di assembling magazine. Nel primo numero il testo critico “Verso la scrittura asemica” di Cecilia Bello Minciacchi e opere di Francesco Aprile, Julien Blaine, Antonino Bove, Cristiano Caggiula, Giuseppe Calandriello, Federico Federici, Giovanni Fontana, Marco Giovenale, Lamberto Pignotti e William Xerra.

<Asemica> è archiviato anche presso Mart – Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, FONDAZIONE BONOTTO di Colceresa, Vicenza, Biblioteca della Collezione Maramotti di Reggio Emilia, Fondazione Berardelli di Brescia e Biblioteca d’Arte del Castello Sforzesco di Milano.

https://opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de/title/BV048321946

new from post-asemic press: “possible gardens”, by jaap blonk

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1734866284/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Jaap Blonk (born 1953 in the Netherlands) first became known worldwide for his performances of sound poetry. He has performed and taught on all continents. From his sound poetry scores he gradually developed an independent body of visual work. This new product of his abundant phantasy is a book of colourful and playful drawings, adding new dimensions to writing. Myriads of little beings populate each page. As in the artist’s 2019 book “111 Recipes” they are distant descendants of Blonk’s earlier phonetic signs. From the introduction by Canadain writer, artist and scholar Derek Beualieu: “Each possible garden is a harvest of sound and image, of script and performance, which asks the reader to be open to a new menu.” One element here is the depiction of a struggle between restriction and freedom as a reminder of the recent lockdown periods: in each drawing some of the tiny beings are boxed, while many others roam freely. Sometimes the images look like scientific illustrations from an unknown world, depicting mysterious interactions and behaviors. But always there is poetry in these protozoa as they squirm and swim though a microscopic linguistic field, ebbing and flowing, gathering and fracturing – a constant dance of interplay and restriction. This edition fits the history of Post-Asemic Press beautifully, as a publisher of novel ways of writing. Asemic: no semantic meaning in the word sense, abstract, but with a lively and abundant musical expression. Small wonder with Jaap Blonk’s background as a world-renowned sound artist.

“These asemic poems move fluently between language, design and illustration, creating informational graphics where the information remains unknown, inviting diverse interpretations. The suggestion that these are scientific illustrations from an unknown world depicting mysterious interactions and behaviors—animal, vegetable, chemical—does little to make their uncomfortable strangeness more familiar. If anything, the sense these are poetic explanations of processes and activities brings their alienation more fully into consciousness.”
—Michael Betancourt

“Stare gently at each possible garden Jaap Blonk has sown here until it begins to vibrate, layer by layer, lifting off the page, two dimensions shifting into three then four. Keep staring and the gardens and landscapes and maps will move and grow and glow into and through and with your eyes. Continue to stare and they will become your eyes and then your ears. To reap the tactile possibilities Blonk has generously cultivated, stare longer, and listen closely (listen as if you are the soil), page after page. When and if you are ready to eat, gently shake the pages onto the tip of your tongue (no seasoning or dressing needed). Enjoy the harvest!”
—Crag Hill

via negativa and asemic writing / jim leftwich. 2022


Mysticism, whether atheistic or otherwise, has always welcomed a spectrum of experiences valued primarily for their absurdity and futility. The experience of asemic writing, whether one is attempting to write it or attempting to read it, is fundamentally a mystical experience. It is The Face That Is No Face, the Via Negativa.

Let’s say I make a sequence of tangled squiggles, with baggy loops here, jagged-edged bulges there, poncruated with curatorial punctuation marks in the form of randomly tilted ascenders and descenders, moving suggestively from left to right on the foundation of an imaginary baseline. It looks like writing, but we can’t read it, says the entry at Wikipedia. It must be asemic writing, says a contextualized leap of faith.

What if it is, in theory and in practice, experientially, a kind of quasi-calligraphic drawing?

This is not the Via Negativa. It is direct experience of the mystery. Direct Experience of The Mystery. There is no wrong reading, judged and condemned by official authorities on the matter. There are no Official Authorities on the matter. And there is no range of acceptable interpretations of the experience, no spectrum of permitted discourse about the acceptable interpretations.
There is no attempt at reading, not of any variety, and therefore there is no writing, of any variety, asemic or otherwise.

Asemic writing, in its absolute failure to exist, can function in our lives as a kind of pagan spiritual discipline, one designed to give us greater access to the experience of experience.

asemic writing and the absurd / jim leftwich. 2022

To the extent that The Absurd is a characteristic, or even at times a category of the historical avant garde, it can be asserted that asemic writing functions as a continuation of the theory and practice of the avant gardes (plural, at least since the end of WWII) in the form of a self-actualizing multitude of willful absurdities.

If the absurd is the incongruous, as Albert Camus asserted in The Myth of Sisyphus, then the simultaneous presence of the written and the unreadable is a classic example of absurdity, in its most uncontestable, experiential form.

Whereas absurdity under normal conditions requires a clash of juxtaposed items or ideas, asemic writing only requires itself, as a self-contained absurdity.

A self-contained absurdity is a Magickal Absurdity. It offers itself as a reality, of a type that should not exist. It troubles the stability of the psyche, as if for a fleeting moment there is no distinction between Sisyphus and Icarus, as if both are merely variations on the theme of Tantalus.

Desire, as often as not frustrated, thwarted, derailed, detoured, imbricate and futilitarian, anachronistic, impoxximate, inverted — invertebrate — involuntary, and/or joylessly reinsinuated,

stands,

sits,

lies

at the unsettled center of all considerations concerning the function of absurdity in everyday life.

In the case of asemic writing, we desire for that which is certainly not asemic to nonetheless function in our everyday lives as if it clearly is asemic and nothing else.

Absurdity is a very particular and peculiar variety of desire.

We want the world to be not only other than what it is — we want it to be precisely that which it can never be.

That variety of desire is precisely the allure of asemic writing. It is the distilled quintessence of its magickal absurdity.

That is not only why, but how, the practice of asemic writing reinvents itself, over and over, across centuries and cultures, one generation after another into the present.