Archivi tag: theory

‘koko’ – next generation journal, issue #1, “text/image parergon”

KOKO – Next Generation Journal

Text/Image Parergon

Here is the first thematic “space” of KOKO – The Next Generation Journal, a Shared Campus publication.

Text/Image Parergon explores potentials and challenges in the relations of scriptorial and pictorial signs. How do text and image respectively frame an artefact? Does the combination of both constitute an extended value or merely a supplementary by-product that primarily appeals to the visual and other senses? Should such parerga be considered positively as added experiential benefit, or negatively as distractive embellishments of a core? Questions like these are explored in an initial set of academic “Conversations”, through the “Proceedings” of a dedicated conference and in image-with-text “Essays” by researchers working on and across the boundaries of scholarly research and creative production.

Visit Text/Image Parergon

 

Conversations

Proceedings: Distancing – Contemporary Art in Reciprocity with Philosophy

Hosted on 16 May 2019 at the Kunstraum Kreuzlingen (CH) by the Zürich University of the Arts the symposium was set to explore the iconography of philosophical texts – in particular the imagery of Lady Philosophy as first introduced into philosophical tradition by the late antique writer Boethius (477–524) in his work The Consolation of Philosophy (approx. 524). The juxtaposition of medieval thinking, its articulation in illuminations, and in return their impact as challenge for contemporary creative practices, highlighted the need to investigate the mostly unquestioned principal opposition between immaterial thoughts and materialized images.

Essays

Space Editors: Peter Benz & Nils Röller

KOKO Editorial Statement

It is the ambition of KOKO to establish a lively and continuously evolving community of researchers contributing to respective topics; we therefore are always interested to receive feedback and/or potentially new contributions also to already existing “spaces”.
Where the more conventional formats have exhausted their possibilities, artists, designers and/or other creatives may use KOKO to create a metaphorical space for exchange through an externalised conversation between the researcher/creative practitioner and her subject.
 

www.koko-journal.net
www.shared-campus.com

anche in ebook

https://www.bookrepublic.it/ebooks/autore/marco-giovenale/

info: https://www.ikona.net/category/edizioni-ikonaliber/le-forme-del-linguaggio/

from tomorrow: “the re-appearing pheasant”, an encounter of american and italian poets and critics, new york 11-13 nov. 2022

Luigi Ballerini wrote an introduction (https://brooklynrail.org/2022/04/editorsmessage/RADICAL-POETS-OF-DIFFERENT-FEATHERS) to the “gathering of American and Italian poets, scheduled to take place at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò of New York University and at the Italian Cultural Institute of New York on November 11, 12, and 13” (see the images):

camden art centre, london / public knowledge: ‘oei’ / october 27

Camden Art Centre / Public Knowledge: OEI / October 27 / 19:00–21:00

Thursday October 27, 19:00-21:00

Camden Art Centre
Arkwright Road
London NW3 6DG
United Kingdom

This episode of Public Knowledge will comprise of a temporary display of publications and related ephemera by Jonas (J) Magnusson and Cecilia Grönberg.

Jonas (J) Magnusson and Cecilia Grönberg are the founders of OEI, a Stockholm-based magazine for experimental forms of thinking, montages of art, poetry, theory, visual culture, and documents; critical investigations, infrastructural poetics, localities, ecologies, new epistemologies, and counter-historiographies.

To publish a magazine is not only a matter of producing a physical artefact but also of intervening in and acting for an entire ecology of publishing and engaging, where the possibilities of generative readings and encounters have to be created in new constellations and contexts. To edit is to work with what exists, but at the same time to make this into something more, a multi-temporal space, perhaps. Or, as a friend puts it: “What’s at stake with any public address is the creation of a new social space, where strangers would come together – and maybe, become friends, who knows.”

The presentation is accompanied by a talk, whereby OEI discuss the different layers in their work, from revisiting avant-garde archives to fieldworks and local-material knowledge. A layered love.

With special thanks to Paul Finn.

* Continua a leggere→

‘buzdokuz’ #13 is out

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The 13th Issue of Buzdokuz Poetry Theory Criticism Magazine is Out Now.
To order print copies, please contact by WhatsApp: +905517258429
To look at the cover (front and back) of Buzdokuz 13 https://twitter.com/buzdokuzdergi/status/1565291045214117889
Address:
Turgut Reis Cad. 36/5 Anıttepe / Ankara / Türkiye

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on some hypothetical categories of asemic writing / marco giovenale. 2022

Perhaps it is possible, in the field of asemic writing, to distinguish a few —completely hypothetical— categories. I insist that these are mere hypotheses, and that I am not interested in structuring a rigorous theory.

We have (1) concrete asemic writing when only the asemic glyphs and calligraphy, only the asemic letters and sentences are present on the page. No images, no colors.
We can also say asemicrete, a term coined by Michael Jacobson.

We can say we have (2) visual asemic writing when we see the asemic symbols are intertwined, superimposed or when they —in any other way— simply share the page with abstract or realistic images.

We have (3) glitchasemics when an asemic text is evidently disturbed by some kind of glitch: it may even be severely disturbed, but not so much as to make the asemic part completely disappear.

We can say we have (4) abstrasemics when an abstract drawing or image turns itself into something resembling an illegible text, an asemic piece. Or, on the contrary, when a fragment of asemic writing gradually loses any vaguely linguistic aspect and is transformed into an abstract image.

Post scriptum.
At the same time, there are examples of works that marginalize —or do not include at all— an asemic aspect, and I would refer to them as: abstract or realistic paintings (pictorial works, photographs etc.) weirdly called “asemic writing” by their authors; legible alphabets and texts weirdly called “asemic writing” by their authors; monotonous decorations that would hardly be taken for words or sentences.

 

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https://t.ly/tZH_
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https://slowforward.net/2022/08/30/on-some-hypothetical-categories-of-asemic-writing-marco-giovenale-2022/
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https://asemicnet.blogspot.com/2022/08/on-some-hypothetical-categories-of.html
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https://www.platformplee.nl/2022/08/30/on-some-hypothetical-categories-of-asemic-writing-marco-giovenale-2022/
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https://scriptjr.nl/on-some-hypothetical-categories-of-asemic-writing-marco-giovenale-2022/5022#.Yw5GTn1BzMX
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https://differx.tumblr.com/post/694030139131068416/on-some-hypothetical-categories-of-asemic-writing
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https://archive.org/details/on-asemics-categories-mgiovenale-2022/
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https://www.academia.edu/85898197/On_some_hypothetical_categories_of_asemic_writing
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https://puntocritico2.wordpress.com/2022/09/02/on-some-hypothetical-categories-of-asemic-writing/

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asemic writing and the tragedy of the absurd / jim leftwich. 2022

Jim Leftwich

Asemic Writing and The Tragedy of the Absurd
Summer 2022 / Utah

When I say absurd, I don’t mean quirky.
I don’t think absurdity is a variety of comedy.
Finding comedic relief in inconsequential weirdness does not qualify as an experience of the absurd.

Certain styles of comedy monetize a surrealist juxtaposition of clangorous items and/or ideas to elicit Spasms of Guffaw from a naptive audience. As such, they serve a purpose: to disguise the osmotic suffering of those immersed in the petroleus ooze of The Capitalist Ongoing.

The absurd does not organize itself in order to acclimate our minds around any of the currently available varieties of unbearable realities.

The absurd is: a variety of that which is incomprehensible within the human universe.

A mystery is: that which is uplifting because it is experienced as being incomprehensible within the human universe. We celebrate an encounter with mystery.

The absurd is experientially devastating, annihilating, a psychological sparagmos. We may, after a fashion, celebrate the fact that we experienced it and lived to tell the tale.

Asemic writing is capable of embodying, and conveying, the tragedy of the absurd. But only for the those who want that, who want that kind of thing. For those who do not want that kind of thing, asemic writing is also fully capable of being abstract art school dorm room wallpaper and glamping picnic tablecloth design. I know, I am not being very nice, I’m sorry. Did you by chance see Sun Ra and The Arkestra 40 or 50 years ago? They had The Look. Sparkling robes down to the floor, Egyptian Spaceman Hats 3-feet high. Marching around the stage, chanting, gesturing with their instruments towards the ceiling. I saw them with a few hundred other people in 1982 and not a soul was laughing. We’re they absurd? Absolutely. Sublime? Yes.

The Tragedy of the Absurd is experienced as a Magickal Absurdity. Asemic writing is capable of existing along that spectrum of experiences. I learned that in the late 1990’s as part of my introduction to the idea and the execution of asemic writing. I have never been able to want anything else from it.

asemic writing and pareidolia / jim leftwich. 2022


For practitioners and theorists of asemic writing, the perceptual deviation known as pareidolia is an acquired taste and a developed skill. We train ourselves to see alphabetical shapes where there are none, and then we celebrate our inability to read them. This phenomenon could occupy an entire chapter in the Magickal Absurdities Training Manual: The Ecstasy of Asemic Reading.

Personal Perception Management (PPM) is but one of a great many Existential Self-Help (ESH) methods reinsinuated transmutably in The Training Manual. It is known colloquially among The Asemic AntiMasters as PPMESH — Personal Perception Mesh. The tradition, or parade of asemic saints, involved in transmigrating this alchemy of perception from prehistory into the present, includes William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, Emily Dickinson, Aldous Huxley, Diane di Prima and Jim Morrison. Cleanse the doors of perception to Illuminate the arrangement of the senses.

Or the arrangement of the world(s) by the senses.

Let’s say I make a sequence of tangled squiggles…
I sound them aloud, slowly singing their shapes…
Through the processes of transcription, transliteration, and apophenia, I arrive at a deliberate mishearing of a segment from a song sung by Jim Morrison:

meatza pocca hero, Esau funk, awe yeh

The world is a poem. Some of us know that. Know it whether we want to or not. The world snuck up on us when we were young, and planted the cosmic poem-seed at the base of our tender brains.

Asemic writing works as a kind of pagan missionary for The Poem.

Asemic writing is a mutagen.

Pareidolia is one of its tools, one of its schools, a side effect, mutual aid, elective affinities, the ace of hearts up its sleeve, one foot on the other side of the grave still kicking at the pricks, reinsinuated and impoxximate.

We see what we want to see. No. That’s not right. Read what Thou Wilt. We see what we need to see. Some realities are more real than others. Asemic writing is useful, as a kind of anti-linguistic self-medication for the perpetually seeking psyche. Pareidolia is a method of ongoing research. It allows us to discover, investigate and explore provisional realities. The worlds of pareidolia are experientially real, and as such are causal agents — in our thinking, and in our actions as they emerge from that thinking.

As an entanglement with the processes of pareidolia, asemic writing functions for the perennially seeking psyche as a way of practicing reality.

is asemic writing true? / jim leftwich. 2022

The most important and interesting characteristic of asemic writing is its absolute resistance to interpretation.

The value of asemic writing lies in its semantic emptiness, and relies on the genuine frustration experienced during a failed attempt at interpretation, meaning-building, the collaborative construction of meanings.

Success in reading asemic writing implies an inauthenticity, either of the writing and it’s author, or of the reading and its perpetrator.

Authentic asemic writing denies all access to success.

The complete and utter, total failure of an attempted reading is the only acceptable measure of success for any particular instance of asemic writing.

So, to iterate — and reiterate:
1. asemic writing lies?
2. asemic writing re-lies?
3. asemic writing imp-lies?

Please refer to your copy of The Magickal Absurdities Training Manual for answers and/or elucidations.

Asemic writing has a dirty secret, hidden, as usual, in plain sight: it is all a pack of lies, and always has been.

Asemic writing is not a dispensary for recreational truths.

Asemic writing is not a dispensary for medicinal truths.

Asemic writing does not participate in the language game of dispensing truths.

We have a choice where the existential ground of asemic writing is concerned: either we admit it’s non-existence, and celebrate it for not existing, or we lie to ourselves and each other about it’s existence, and through the persistence of our collective effort, bring it — lie it — into being, no matter how provisional, damaged, and ephemeral that being may be.

Today, in the summer of 2022, there is no denying the fact that a great many things in our world are identified by one variety or another of the term asemic writing.

That in itself is good.

The concept of asemic is generative and tolerant. Let’s frolic in its wonderland! With our first mind celebrating it’s ludic absurdity, and our second mind practicing the pleasures it offers in opportunities for critical thinking.

as ex. asemic expressionism, or abstract expressionist writing / jim leftwich. 2022

Once upon a time, long long ago (20 years), in a far far away place (Charlottesville, VA), I claimed to have identified a category of visual poetry called (perhaps only by me) Decorative Expressionism. It was busy, crowded, colorful and noisy. I liked it a lot — for several reasons, one of them being the fact that I was making quite a bit of it myself.

If anyone had asked me at the time (no one has ever asked me), I would have told them that Decorative Expressionism was the exact opposite of asemic writing.

Ah yes, time goes by and with a little “luck of the research and reading” (recollected and ruminated upon in tranquility) maybe we learn a thing or two. How does that old hit single go?
What I didn’t know then
What I don’t know now
.. some other stuff in there, I know… 45 years ago… anyway

I would have been wrong.

That was back in the early days of this current iteration of asemic writing, when some of us still thought the prefix ‘a-‘ meant “without; not having any.” Little did we know that the prefix ‘a-‘ was soon to take on the meaning of its opposite, “poly-“. “Without, not having any” semes came to mean “having many” semes. “Absolutely thwarting the production of meaning” became “open to the invention of all imaginable meanings.”

It was a transformative moment in the history of all things asemic.

When Jackson Pollock woke up in the morning, he already had a lit cigarette balanced on his lower lip. He visited his Jungian therapist every Tuesday at 2pm. They played chess, drank beer, went to Yankees games, and chased the stately, plump pigeons through Central Park.
You’re getting better, Jack, said the Jungian therapist. Getting better all the time.
Thank you, said Jackson Pollock.
Alchemy of the vowels, Tantric Sex Mandala, said the Jungian therapist.
I don’t believe in The Accident, said Jackson Pollock.
He walked down the crowded sidewalk past The Tavern to his studio.
He lit a cigarette, opened a beer, took off his shoes and socks.
He spent the rest of the evening working, late into the night, doing The Dance of the Collective Unconscious, In The Painting.

That’s pretty much how asemic writing is still made today.

So, the next time someone tells you myriad hymnal nightpoets, hurrier, nebula nebula, tell them you know all about asemic expressionism. Maybe they’re living in a book by Donald Barthelme. What do you know? Empathy is all about effort. Let there be no bullshit between Practitioners of The Craft and Sullen Art.

gustav sjöberg: “la fiorente materia del tutto. sulla natura della poesia” (neri pozza, 2022)

https://neripozza.it/libri/la-fiorente-materia-del-tutto

«Un altro modo di comprendere la materia sarebbe, approssimativamente, di trattarla come una produzione di infinite, innumerevoli forme entro un incessante movimento di decomposizione e composizione, dissoluzione e ricombinazione. Concepita in questo modo la materia non sarebbe più un substrato passivo su cui si debba intervenire con un lavoro formale, bensì, al contrario, una molteplicità di forme che genera se stessa e con cui combacerebbe».

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Gustav Sjöberg, poeta, scrittore e traduttore, vive a Stoccolma. Traduce da diverse lingue, tra cui l’italiano, il latino e il tedesco. Ha tradotto dal latino il De vulgari eloquentia di Dante e dall’italiano opere di Andrea Zanzotto, Giacomo Leopardi, Giorgio Agamben, Giordano Bruno, Gianni Carchia. Ha curato molti numeri della rivista svedese “OEI”, tra cui il n. 67/68 del 2015, monografico sulle scritture di ricerca italiane: Scrittura non assertiva!. Due sue raccolte di testi sperimentali, uscite per le edizioni OEI, sono eftre (2013) e apud (2017). Il volume di teoria letteraria ora pubblicato da Neri Pozza è stato scritto in tedesco e pubblicato a Berlino nel 2020 da Matthes & Seitz con il titolo zu der blühenden allmaterie.

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Dalla nota editoriale di Monica Ferrando:

Chi ha detto che la materia è incapace di creare da sé la forma (o le forme)? D’accordo, è stato Aristotele, lo sappiamo. Ma cosa accadrebbe invece se, forzando il maestro di coloro che sanno, troncassimo il legame tra forma e arte perché «mediante un concetto di forma radicalmente altro diventerà possibile una distruzione dell’arte – e, in particolare della poesia – concepita come ambito autonomo, come sfera distinta dalla non-arte, dalla non-poesia oppure come sublime riflessione sull’esistenza. Non sarà che qui si compie una risoluzione dell’arte nella natura?» Non è alla scienza o alla negromanzia tecnologica faustiana che l’autore affida tale compito, ma alla poesia stessa […]

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Una più ampia nota biobibliografica + un’intervista a Gustav Sjöberg traduttore di Zanzotto:
https://www.newitalianbooks.it/it/intervista-a-gustav-sjoberg-poeta-saggista-e-traduttore/

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