Michael Jacobson and Tim Gaze, An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting, Uitgeverij, 2013.
An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting is the first book-length publication to collect the work of a community of writers on the edges of illegibility. Asemic writing is a galaxy-sized style of writing, which is everywhere yet remains largely unknown. For human observers, asemic writing may appear as lightning from a storm, a crack in the sidewalk, or the tail of a comet. But despite these observations, asemic writing is not everything: it is just an essential component, a newborn supernova dropped from a calligrapher's hand. Asemic writing is simultaneously communicating with the past and the future of writing, from the earliest undeciphered writing systems to the xenolinguistics of the stars; it follows a peregrination from the preliterate, beyond the verbal, finally ending in a postliterate condition in which visual language has superseded words. An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting is compiled and edited by Tim Gaze from Asemic magazine and Michael Jacobson from The New Post-Literate blog. Contributors include: Reed Altemus, mIEKAL aND, Rosaire Appel, Francesco Aprile, Roy Arenella, Derek Beaulieu, Pat Bell, John M. Bennett, Francesca Biasetton, Volodymyr Bilyk, Tony Burhouse & Rob Glew, Nancy Burr, Riccardo Cavallo, Mauro Césari, Peter Ciccariello, Andrew Clark, Carlfriedrich Claus, Bob Cobbing, Patrick Collier, Robert Corydon, Jeff Crouch, Marilyn Dammann, Donna Maria Decreeft, Alessandro De Francesco, Monica Dengo, Mirtha Dermisache, Bill Dimichele, Christian Dotremont, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Mark Firth, Eckhard Gerdes, Mike Getsiv, Jean-Christophe Giacottino, Marco Giovenale, Meg Green, Brion Gysin, Jefferson Hansen, Huai Su, Geof Huth, Isidore Isou, Michael Jacobson, Satu Kaikkonen, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Rashid Koraishi, Irene Koronas, Edward Kulemin, Le Quoc Viet & Tran Tr?ng Duong, Jim Leftwich, Misha Magazinnik, Matt Margo, André Masson, Nuno de Matos, Willi Melnikov, Morita Shiryu, Sheila E. Murphy, Nguyen Duc Dung, Nguyen Quang Thang, Pham Van Tuan, François Poyet, Kerri Pullo, Lars Px, Marilyn R. Rosenberg, Roland Sabatier, Ekaterina Samigulina & Yuli Ilyshchanska, Alain Satié, Karen L. Schiff, Spencer Selby, Peggy Shearn, Ahmed Shibrain, Gary Shipley, Christopher Skinner, Hélène Smith, Lin Tarczynski, Morgan Taubert, Andrew Topel, Cecil Touchon, Louise Tournay, Tran Tr?ng Duong, Lawrence Upton, Sergio Uzal, Marc van Elburg, Nico Vassilakis, Glynda Velasco, Simon Vinkenoog, Vsevolod Vlaskine, Cornelis Vleeskens, Anthony Vodraska, Voynich Manuscript, Jim Wittenberg, Michael Yip, Logan K. Young, Yorda Yuan, Camille Zehenne, Zhang Xu, & others.
Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means "having no specific semantic content". With the nonspecificity 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. The open nature of asemic works allows for meaning to occur trans-linguistically; an asemic text may be "read" in a similar fashion regardless of the reader's natural language. Multiple meanings for the same symbolism are another possibility for an asemic work. - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asemic_writing
The New Post-literate: A Gallery Of Asemic Writing
Michael Jacobson
So what exactly is 'asemic' writing?
Personally, I think asemic writing is a wordless, open semantic form of writing that is international in its mission. How can writing be wordless, someone may ask. The secret is that asemic writing is a shadow, impression, and abstraction of conventional writing. It uses the constraints of writerly gestures and the full developments of abstract art to divulge its main purpose: total freedom beyond literary expression. The subcultural movement surrounding asemic writing is international because the creators of asemic works live all over the world. It's a global style of writing we are creating, with the creators of asemic works meeting up on the Internet to share our works and exchange ideas.
What does it look like?
The forms that asemic writing may take are many, but its main trait is its resemblance to 'traditional' writing—with the distinction of its abandonment of specific semantics, syntax, and communication. Asemic writing offers meaning by way of aesthetic intuition, and not by verbal expression. It often appears as abstract calligraphy, or as a drawing which resembles writing but avoids words, or if it does have words, the words are generally damaged beyond the point of legibility. One of the main ways to experience an asemic work is as unreadable, but still attractive to the eye. My point is that—without words, asemic writing is able to relate to all words, colors, and even music, irrespective of the author or the reader's original languages; not all emotions can be expressed with words, and so asemic writing attempts to fill in the void.
Can you tell Asymptote a little about how you got to your present 'asemic' work?
I have been creating asemic writing for about 20 years now, but only seriously for the past 15 years. It is now my main form of artistic expression. I learned the word 'asemic' from the Australian poet Tim Gaze and we have been partners-in-crime ever since. Tim is the calm Buddhist sage of the movement. I am the crazed-astronaut-monk exploring internal-space and cyberspace with the most heavily distorted writing I can muster. My earliest influences, besides my mother reading to me, were the false writing systems in comics and cartoons. In my teen years and early adult life I read a lot of conventional novels and poetry. Then in my 20s I began to create what at first I called 'alien' writing. Around this time I also became interested in the history of writing, especially the more visual forms of writing like hieroglyphs and, to be more specific, the generously beautiful Rongorongo script.
Can you talk about some projects?
Can you sketch a history of this kind of writing?
Yes. There is a long history of people creating unreadable works. One could probably go back to the beginning of time. Tim introduced me to 'crazy' Zhang Xu, a Tang Dynasty calligrapher, who excelled at cursive script. Zhang was creating wild illegible calligraphy almost 1200 years ago. Other older works that I discovered along the way are the enigmatic Voynich Manuscript and the Rohonc Codex, though these works fall more into the category of cipher mysteries than asemic writing. But who knows, Luigi Serafini admitted recently that the Codex Seraphinius is asemic. All of the works previously mentioned I find aesthetically pleasing, and I am fascinated by the prospect that they could turn out to be proto-asemic text—computers will tell!
The twentieth entury brought about many examples of artists and writers creating unreadable wordless writing. Henri Michaux was the Godfather of the form, with his work Narration (1927) being an early example of wordless writing. In the 1950s there's Lettrisme, Brion Gysin, Morita Shiryu and Cy Twombly, all of whom expanded the definition of writing into highly visual and illegible forms. Someone will write a book on all of this, Peter Schwenger, perhaps. The asemic writing Wikipedia article has a list of some of the more notable writers and artists of the past who assisted in creating the asemic platform we may all land upon today. In the 1980s I am thinking of Xu Bing's A Book From The Sky, and the installations of Gu Wenda.
And what about the contemporary situation?
1997 was the year of genesis for the current movement of asemic writing. It's when visual poet Jim Leftwich and Tim Gaze connected and started sending out quasi-calligraphic works to poetry magazines and calling them asemic. I was doing something similar in '98, but I didn't make contact with them until 2005, when I had the resources to officially publish and had gained Internet access.
Today asemic writing is a full-blown movement. There are almost 1800 people in the Facebook group, with 50 or so who are hardcore and madly into it. There is going to be an anthology of asemic writing put out by Uitgeverij out of the Hague, Netherlands, in late 2013. On the backburner is a film about asemic writing, which I am not working very hard on, with Quimby Melton who is the editor at SCRIPTjr.nl. There is Nuno de Matos a.k.a. Matox and José Parlá a.k.a. Ease who have brought graffiti into asemic writing, there is also a robot that performs asemic writing live, and there are architecture models which incorporate asemic writing in the design process.
What about the future?
Recently, life has been as blurred as my asemic writing. I am getting set to send out my asemic kinetic film/novella Mynd Eraser (2012) to the London Underground film festival, and I get to spend the summer with my children. If anyone is interested in showing asemic writing at The New Post-Literate, I am always on the lookout for great new work from people I have never heard of. And just google the term 'asemic writing' if you would like more information, or do an image search. There is a great mountain of asemic work on the web and it is all just a click away.
Personally, I think asemic writing is a wordless, open semantic form of writing that is international in its mission. How can writing be wordless, someone may ask. The secret is that asemic writing is a shadow, impression, and abstraction of conventional writing. It uses the constraints of writerly gestures and the full developments of abstract art to divulge its main purpose: total freedom beyond literary expression. The subcultural movement surrounding asemic writing is international because the creators of asemic works live all over the world. It's a global style of writing we are creating, with the creators of asemic works meeting up on the Internet to share our works and exchange ideas.
What does it look like?
The forms that asemic writing may take are many, but its main trait is its resemblance to 'traditional' writing—with the distinction of its abandonment of specific semantics, syntax, and communication. Asemic writing offers meaning by way of aesthetic intuition, and not by verbal expression. It often appears as abstract calligraphy, or as a drawing which resembles writing but avoids words, or if it does have words, the words are generally damaged beyond the point of legibility. One of the main ways to experience an asemic work is as unreadable, but still attractive to the eye. My point is that—without words, asemic writing is able to relate to all words, colors, and even music, irrespective of the author or the reader's original languages; not all emotions can be expressed with words, and so asemic writing attempts to fill in the void.
Can you tell Asymptote a little about how you got to your present 'asemic' work?
I have been creating asemic writing for about 20 years now, but only seriously for the past 15 years. It is now my main form of artistic expression. I learned the word 'asemic' from the Australian poet Tim Gaze and we have been partners-in-crime ever since. Tim is the calm Buddhist sage of the movement. I am the crazed-astronaut-monk exploring internal-space and cyberspace with the most heavily distorted writing I can muster. My earliest influences, besides my mother reading to me, were the false writing systems in comics and cartoons. In my teen years and early adult life I read a lot of conventional novels and poetry. Then in my 20s I began to create what at first I called 'alien' writing. Around this time I also became interested in the history of writing, especially the more visual forms of writing like hieroglyphs and, to be more specific, the generously beautiful Rongorongo script.
I had been a bad conventional writer and a not-so-great painter. I just wasn't very satisfied with my creative work. I was writing a novel about some patients in a hospital who formed a religion around chloroform. I would write a hundred pages and maybe have one good page at the end of the day. Anyway, slow going. To make a long story short, I began to experiment with lines in my painting and shapes in my writing. Then I had an epiphany; I created a 16-page chapbook with a textual body of newly invented symbols and a glyph for the title. I made a hundred chapbooks on red paper and gave them away at bookstores, tattoo parlors, and record shops. They all disappeared. Feeling successful, I began to work on a longer piece. I can remember where I was: it was Little Falls, Minnesota, at a park on the banks of the Mississippi River. I was sitting by myself making up symbols in a 6 x 9 inch notebook, and some kids came up to me and asked me what I was writing. I showed them my work. They thought my symbols were "super cool!" So I decided then and there that I was going to do a longer piece. This was in 1999.
Can you talk about some projects?
In 2001 I finished an 80-(infinity & nothing) page calligraphic monster of a manuscript, which at first I entitled Jatulintarha (named after a Finnish labyrinth) and eventually settled on its English translation The Giant's Fence. 
The Giant's Fence was put out as a chapbook in 2001. A few years later, in 2005, I released it as a perfect bound book. Forward to 2008, when I created my second novella Action Figures, which is a book of asemic hieroglyphs. I call my books novellas because they do tell my story in an abstract way, or my lack of a story. Lots of pain and joy anyway. 2008 was an important year for another reason: I began to publish asemic work at my blog gallery The New Post-Literate. Tim had been publishing Asemic Magazine since 1999, but I was looking to have a platform which would publish full color asemic works in real time. Some of the early artists I posted were Derek Beaulieu, Tim Gaze, Henri Michaux, Luigi Serafini, Marco Giovenale, Sheila Murphy, Timothy Ely, Cecil Touchon, Jean-Christophe Giacottino, and Mirtha Dermisache and many others. I named the gallery The New Post-Literate because I believe in the evolution of writing, and I feel that asemic writing is the next logical step after conventional literacy. Asemic writing is never going to replace words, but I believe that it does pose an interesting challenge and rivalry to purely verbal communication.
The Giant's Fence was put out as a chapbook in 2001. A few years later, in 2005, I released it as a perfect bound book. Forward to 2008, when I created my second novella Action Figures, which is a book of asemic hieroglyphs. I call my books novellas because they do tell my story in an abstract way, or my lack of a story. Lots of pain and joy anyway. 2008 was an important year for another reason: I began to publish asemic work at my blog gallery The New Post-Literate. Tim had been publishing Asemic Magazine since 1999, but I was looking to have a platform which would publish full color asemic works in real time. Some of the early artists I posted were Derek Beaulieu, Tim Gaze, Henri Michaux, Luigi Serafini, Marco Giovenale, Sheila Murphy, Timothy Ely, Cecil Touchon, Jean-Christophe Giacottino, and Mirtha Dermisache and many others. I named the gallery The New Post-Literate because I believe in the evolution of writing, and I feel that asemic writing is the next logical step after conventional literacy. Asemic writing is never going to replace words, but I believe that it does pose an interesting challenge and rivalry to purely verbal communication. Can you sketch a history of this kind of writing?
Yes. There is a long history of people creating unreadable works. One could probably go back to the beginning of time. Tim introduced me to 'crazy' Zhang Xu, a Tang Dynasty calligrapher, who excelled at cursive script. Zhang was creating wild illegible calligraphy almost 1200 years ago. Other older works that I discovered along the way are the enigmatic Voynich Manuscript and the Rohonc Codex, though these works fall more into the category of cipher mysteries than asemic writing. But who knows, Luigi Serafini admitted recently that the Codex Seraphinius is asemic. All of the works previously mentioned I find aesthetically pleasing, and I am fascinated by the prospect that they could turn out to be proto-asemic text—computers will tell!
The twentieth entury brought about many examples of artists and writers creating unreadable wordless writing. Henri Michaux was the Godfather of the form, with his work Narration (1927) being an early example of wordless writing. In the 1950s there's Lettrisme, Brion Gysin, Morita Shiryu and Cy Twombly, all of whom expanded the definition of writing into highly visual and illegible forms. Someone will write a book on all of this, Peter Schwenger, perhaps. The asemic writing Wikipedia article has a list of some of the more notable writers and artists of the past who assisted in creating the asemic platform we may all land upon today. In the 1980s I am thinking of Xu Bing's A Book From The Sky, and the installations of Gu Wenda. And what about the contemporary situation?
1997 was the year of genesis for the current movement of asemic writing. It's when visual poet Jim Leftwich and Tim Gaze connected and started sending out quasi-calligraphic works to poetry magazines and calling them asemic. I was doing something similar in '98, but I didn't make contact with them until 2005, when I had the resources to officially publish and had gained Internet access.
Today asemic writing is a full-blown movement. There are almost 1800 people in the Facebook group, with 50 or so who are hardcore and madly into it. There is going to be an anthology of asemic writing put out by Uitgeverij out of the Hague, Netherlands, in late 2013. On the backburner is a film about asemic writing, which I am not working very hard on, with Quimby Melton who is the editor at SCRIPTjr.nl. There is Nuno de Matos a.k.a. Matox and José Parlá a.k.a. Ease who have brought graffiti into asemic writing, there is also a robot that performs asemic writing live, and there are architecture models which incorporate asemic writing in the design process.
What about the future?
Recently, life has been as blurred as my asemic writing. I am getting set to send out my asemic kinetic film/novella Mynd Eraser (2012) to the London Underground film festival, and I get to spend the summer with my children. If anyone is interested in showing asemic writing at The New Post-Literate, I am always on the lookout for great new work from people I have never heard of. And just google the term 'asemic writing' if you would like more information, or do an image search. There is a great mountain of asemic work on the web and it is all just a click away.
Henri Michaux Narration (excerpt) 1927
It looks like writing, but we can't quite read it. I call works like this "asemic writing".
Asemic writing seems to be a gigantic, unexplored territory.
Asemic writing has been made by poets, writers, painters, calligraphers, children, and scribblers, all around the world. Most people make asemic writing at some time, possibly when testing a new pen.
Educators talk about children going through distinct stages of "mock letters", "pseudowriting" and so on, when they're learning to write. Many of us made asemic writing before we were able to write words.
Looking at asemic writing does something to us. Some examples have pictograms or ideograms, which suggest a meaning through their shape. Others take us for a ride along their curves. We like some, we dislike others.
They tend to have no fixed meaning. Their meaning is open. Every viewer can arrive at a personal, absolutely correct interpretation.
Asemic writing has been presented by means of books, paintings, scrolls, single pages, mailed envelopes, walls, cinema, television and computers, particularly via the internet.
Henri Michaux, who wrote the piece up above, was a poet and a writer and a painter.
If you’re curious to discover more works in this tradition of illegible writing or wordless writing, please try any of the following in your favourite search engine:
abstract calligraphy
asemic
asemisk
Guy de Cointet
Concrete Poetry
controlled scribble
Jean Degottex
Mirtha Dermisache
doodles
Christian Dotremont
Jean Dubuffet dessins
earliest writing
Max Ernst Maximiliana
escrita assêmica
experimental calligraphy
Gedewon
Brion Gysin
ideograms
illegible writing
Inism
jazzwriting
Marvin Jordana
Kandinsky shamanism
Tom Kemp
Paul Klee
Rashid Koraichi
Kruchenykh Kruchonykh zaum
Ungno Lee letter abstracts
Lettrisme
Mail Art
André Masson automatic drawings
Georges Mathieu
Henri Michaux alphabets narrations
Joan Miró
mock letters
Morita Shiryu
J B Murray J B Murry
pseudowriting
scrittura asemantica
Hélène Smith Martian
Austin Osman Spare sigils
Taoist magic diagrams
Antoni Tàpies
Mark Tobey
Cy Twombly
Vinča script
Visual Poetry
Made Wianta calligraphy period
Ulfert Wilke
Wosene Kosrof
Zhang Xu Crazy Zhang wild cursive
Written by Tim Gaze- asemic.net/
MICHAEL JACOBSON Works & Interviews 1999-2014
This book is a collection, by visual novella writer Michael Jacobson, of his asemic works: The Giant's Fence, Action Figures, and interviews from the years ...
Michael Jacobson Interview by Michael Jacobson and Quimby Melton
In addition to your curatorial work with The New Post-Literate, you've written two of your own asemic texts: Action Figures (imgs. 1-5) and The Giant's Fence (imgs. 6-9). Do you see your work as part of a cryptotext tradition that includes the Voynich manuscript and Codex Seraphinianus?First, I have to say I'm a terrible cryptographer. Readers should know that if they're going to look for codes in my work. Nevertheless, I can say, with some confidence, that the Voynich manuscript is more relevant to my asemic writing than the Codex Seraphinianus. I'm much more familiar with that text and have been since I began developing my personal calligraphic style. Tim Gaze, of asemic.net and SCRIPTjr.nl's editorial board, introduced me to the Codex Seraphinianus a few years ago, and it's a very interesting book. But the Voynich manuscript seems more significantly proto-asemic to me. That is, I think the text may very well reveal its secrets if one studies it in terms of visual aesthetics rather than semantics.
Part of me hopes the Voynich will never be deciphered, but who knows? Maybe it's written in an extinct European language that could be translated if we found the right Rosetta Stone. Undeciphered languages, in fact, influence my work a good deal. The Giant's Fence, for example, was influenced by Rongorongo and illegible graffiti.
Even if you're not actively engaging in cryptography, would it be inappropriate to suggest Action Figures and The Giant's Fence are cryptographic?
My asemic novels are cryptographic to the extent that their language is obscured and hidden. But while the general aesthetics of cryptography and secret writing have always fascinated me, my asemic texts are less encryption-focused and more akin to sigils, wherein the text is abstracted and charged with energy, and xeno/exolinguistics.
Not only is "illegible alien wizard graffiti" a good description of my penmanship, it might make a good topic for a future SCRIPTjr.nl special section.
Why not throw in some extra-terrestrial haiku for good measure?
Some Edmund H. North-meets-Bashō, perhaps:
A large, scary 'bot.
Klaatu barada nikto.
The earth lives again.
Oh, my!
Getting back to your work, if it formally has more in common with sigils, ancient Pascuense script, and exolinguistic haiku, where would you ground your work's sensibility?
In terms of sensibility, I have more in common with the French symbolists and lettrists than with codemakers and codebreakers. Like all these groups, I'm acutely interested in exploring what happens to language when meaning is intentionally obscured. But unlike the latter two, I'm uninterested in providing a decoding mechanism or trying to reverse engineer an objective cipher.
How would you say broader contemporary post-literate writing relates to cryptotexts like the Voynich and the Codex Seraphinianus?
This is the information age, and we route almost all our information through DARPA's internet. In the post-9/11 security climate, I wouldn't be surprised if most, if not all, emails coming into and going out of the US aren't recorded by the NSA: America's Big Brother.
In fact, investigations by news outlets like PBS suggest exactly that.1
No one likes to be spied upon or even think they're being spied upon. Post-literate writing and texts like the Voynich manuscript and the Codex Seraphinianus offer readers and writers an oasis in such a climate. They allow us to communicate using semantically undecipherable signs.
In that sense, asemic writing and cryptotexts have a subversive quality to them in that they challenge government authority over communication. Thinking beyond political concerns and moving back into the realm of aesthetics, they offer readers and writers a more or less impenetrable subjective shelter. Since they usually cannot be "broken" -- that is, translated into objective carriers of meaning -- one can interpret asemic texts as the ultimate encoders of personal insight and reflection. Everything from little sister's journal to the rape fantasies of a poetic psychopath could be safely housed in asemic glyphs.
I have put some of my ugliest and most beautiful thoughts into my asemic texts, and that's where I'd like these thoughts to stay. The unknown author of the Voynich manuscript may have felt a similar need to express him or herself as completely as possible but without giving readers overly-easy access to the inner sanctum of his or her naked thought. Luigi Serafini, author of the Codex Seraphinianus, claims the Codex is asemic, but maybe that's just to throw the crypto-dogs off the scent.2
It's fascinating to think of asemic writing in this way: as a sort of locked vault one shares with the world while withholding the key or combination (sometimes even from oneself).
Since we've covered form and sensibility, let's move on to method. Do you write your asemic novels in semantic language first and then translate or do you arrange abstract signs independently of any semantic meaning?
I start my novels at the semantic beach, where meaningful and meaningless language converge. I'm particularly interested in exploring the moment when a simple line on a page begins to have meaning, when the content of a gesture is sufficient to scream, "I exist!" Ultimately, though, I've come to the conclusion that it's very hard to write a gesture completely devoid of meaning or to write a gesture that's completely filled with meaning.
The Giant's Fence, my first book, attempts to push written, symbolic communication to the breaking point and create a sort of "trans-symbolism," that is, signs transcending symbolic communication. My second book, Action Figures, is probably my most gentle and accessible text because it's a collection of street hieroglyphs. The Paranoia Machine, my peripheral vision reading machine (img. 10), is concerned with internal and external psychological conflict and with the problem of artist-as-survivalist in a contemporary society that has devalued the role of creator. My recent asemic animations (below) simply seem to scream, "Holy shit! Life!"3
What about materials? Nico Vassilakis, for example, composes work like Language Is Hell on an iPod touch. The Paranoia Machine notwithstanding, do you use contemporary technology and gadgetry to create your asemic typefaces? The Giant's Fence looks hand-drawn.
All my work begins as pen-and-paper sketches. I like to use this low-tech approach to document the modern American high-tech environment because I think it's an interesting, and ironic, way to capture today's ultra-technical reality. When I begin an asemic text, I will either do some automatic writing or snatch a shape from the surrounding environment. I start simply and develop complexity. Usually the signs begin as recognizable symbols that, through subsequent generations, become abstract designs whose origin eventually becomes obscure even to myself, the creator of the piece.
Though the defining characteristic of asemic writing is its muted semantic meaning, in what ways do you consider yourself a "a creator of meaning," "a communicator," and/or "a storyteller?"
Through my own work, and by curating The New Post-Literate, I'm trying to tell a story of change and (r)evolution. I'm interested in texts whose form remains constant, but whose meaning evolves over time and in the individual mind. Asemic writing is somewhat like dramatic writing and even entertainment script forms: the text stays the same, but individual performances change from night to night, from production (event) to production (event). As I see it, asemic writing is a means of scripting the world. Each reader-writer-viewer breathes unique life into asemic texts and individual signs like actors.
Interesting metaphor. It, of course, makes the conjunction of asemic texts and screen/teleplays in SCRIPTjr.nl seem all the more congruent.
I also write to stay ahead of death. I know I'll be caught sooner or later, but in the meantime, I'm trying to stay a step ahead. Social media may make it possible to live on in ways previously unimagined. For example, I recently watched a YouTube video featuring Arthur Rimbaud. The creator, Jim Clark, has animated a childhood picture of the poet and overdubed a Frenchman reading "Ophéle."4 Maybe this is our future: we'll live on, one way or another, whether we want to or not.
Based on some of the points you make above, within or without the current new media context, the radical subjectivity of asemic writing almost ensures writers a sort of eternality. The potential life span of an asemic text is really only limited by the durability of its plastic media. Unlike other forms of literature -- whose meanings change and that go in and out of fashion and popularity and always risk functional erasure as a result of linguistic extinction -- asemic writing is virtually timeless. This is true whether, like your work and the Codex Seraphinianus, a given text was intended to be asemic or, like the Rongorongo tablets and possibly the Voynich manuscript, becomes so over time.
What other advantages, if any, do you think asemic writers have over semantic writers? You could answer the question in reverse too, if you'd like.
Like the French symbolists' complex metaphors, asemic writing's main advantage lies in its ability to express difficult and complex emotions in ways that aren't easily essentialized or finalized. I'm not much of a verbal communicator, but I do have a sense that asemic writing captures new experiences as they happen. It has a certain immediacy that semantic writing lacks. The latter seems to record experiences after the fact, but asemic writing focuses on the future-as-it-happens. Its meaning comes into, and goes out of, existence as the reader-writer-viewer negotiates with it.
What are the most constructive methods for approaching, that is "interpreting," asemic literature?
One must have an explorer's spirit to interpret asemic texts. They aren't bound by anything except the limits of one's imagination. I also think asemic texts offer readers access to the author's raw life experience. Because the text is undecipherable, an asemic author is likely to put down thoughts and emotions that don't exist in standard written communication. What the reader does with this nexus of communication is entirely up to him or her. I recommend "reading" an asemic text in various places, in various orders, and in various contexts so the glyphs can interact with the environment and always seem fresh.
What are the roots of post-literate culture, and how has it developed during your relationship with it?
Post-literate writing has probably existed for almost as long as conventional literacy has. There are examples of what I would consider post-literate writing in various ancient cultures around the world. Nevertheless, the term "post-literate" was first used by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960's,5 and that's as good a place as any to start. Multimedia was beginning to saturate American society, and a standard definition of "post-literate" is "occurring after the introduction of the electronic media." One of the reasons I chose to name my online gallery "The New Post-Literate" is because it exists in a purely electronic environment.
Really, I consider any form of writing post-literate if it goes beyond conventional literacy, if its expressions move beyond traditional literacy. As such, the discourse can include cryptography, visual poetry, asemic writing, rebuses, hypergraphic super writing, xenolinguistics, graffiti, comics, &tc. I should note too that this evolutionary tension between traditional literacy and post-literacy seems to be playing itself out on the internet and via new (e)book forms. I suspect this is why, even though people are reading fewer and fewer traditional books, it's still an exciting time to be a writer.
What exactly would you say are the core goals and/or interests of contemporary post-literate writing?
Post-literate writing is the next stage in the evolution of writing. In the same way Dada gave birth to Surrealism, asemic writing will create a viable, self-sustaining post-literate writing culture. Like all asemic writers, I just want to know where the human literacy story will go next. Of course, selling a few books would be nice, and I'd like to see some arts funding roll in.
While a robust mercantile spirit is unavoidable and even admirable in the arts, be careful what you wish for concerning the latter. As Foucault reminds us, care is most certainly control, and institutional prisons have etiolated many an artist, artwork, and arts movement. Post-literate culture's independence and noble poverty are two of its strengths. Currently, the movement's destiny and "power structure" -- as it exists -- lie in the hands of a decenterd, populist network of like-minded enthusiasts, and it seems to have flourished in this climate, under what I once heard the critic Dave Hickey refer to as "the warm sunshine of benign neglect."
On that note, I do find it interesting that post-literate/asemic writing culture has developed without an official marketing department, as it were. It's maintained its independence and even become centrally ungovernable. Additionally, most, if not all, asemic texts are self- or micro-press published.
As I suggested in the introduction to SCRIPTjr.nl's legacy issue 1.2, it's impossible to over-state the revolutionary importance of this aspect of contemporary literary culture. Within asemic and vispo culture specifically, independent 'zines like Tim Gaze's Asemic Magazine and publishers like Arrum Press, Xexoxial Editions, xPress(ed), and Andrew Topel's Avantacular Press need all the plugs and support they can get.
If asemic texts remain independently published, and find a sizeable, paying audience, they could help revolutionize the writing and publishing industry.
Absolutely agreed.
Hopefully, SCRIPTshop will help asemic writers and artists sell their work more easily.
Moving on, who would you say are the major artists working in the field? Who, in your opinion, are especially effective asemic writers?
There are a lot of great asemic writers and artists out there. I don't think I could pick out any favorites from the current post-literate generation. The New Post-Literate showcases new work every week so interested readers can decide for themselves.
The New Post-Literate is another resource that can't be plugged enough. And I suppose your reluctance to use your position to dole out favors or influence opinion speaks to the movement's nebulous democracy at present.
Be that as it may, I think asemic writing is still too new to decide who history will remember. Tons of great asemic works still need to be written. A robust post-literate culture still needs to be built. The asemic writing movement is still trying to find its wings.
Thinking about this development, where do you see post-literate culture in a decade or two?
I'd like to see post-literate writing programs pop up at colleges and universities. Much of what we're doing today will seem rather dated by then, though.
And that's why it will reside there. The academy is an aesthetic and epistemic archive. It's not really designed to be a generative dynamo of new movements and thought.
The next generation of asemic writers will probably emit telepathic vispo and use jetpacks to create asemic skywriting.
That gets you an "Oh my" of my own!
Back on the ground, I'd like to see libraries and bookstores dedicate sections to asemic writing. Amazon and WorldCat already categorize asemic texts in their own right, and I'd like to see other entities like the Library of Congress follow suit.
Class P, subclass PN and Class N, subclasses NC-NE and NX are just waiting, aren't they? The LOC gives "Anacreontic literature" its own call number (6233-6238), and I bet no one reads or writes that wine-soaked nonsense anymore.
My fundamental hope, however, is that generations of asemic writers will perpetuate the tradition of international cosmopolitanism that defines the culture at present, bring millions more people into the fold, and help them discover how interesting and challenging asemic literature is.
Two of my wilder ideas:
I'd like to develop a martial arts style based on asemic calligraphy, and I'd like to travel the world in an old Chinese junk disseminating asemic writing.
You could be the Caine of asemic culture.
Here's hoping.
- scriptjr.nl/special-sections/cryptotexts/michael-jacobson-interview#.VDZh_GeKBjo
Asemic:
- SPAMTEXT
by Mauro Césari and Quimby Melton "Considero la escritura como registro de las potencias de los cuerpos, genitoras de posibles contra los modos seriados de producción de subjetividad que se inscriben sobre ellos y los despotizan." ("I consider writing to be a registry of the power of bodies, generators of potential liberation against the production of serial subjectivity and despotism that fall upon and envelop them.") - Satu Kaikkonen
by Satu Kaikkonen and Quimby Melton "Asemic texts, as it were, serve as a projection of humanity's desire to reconnect with the mythological root of all languages and, by extension, one another." - Language Is Hell
by Nico Vassilakis and Quimby Melton "To me, asemic writing facilitates the endless creation of new alphabets. It's the creation of the pre- or post-word, never the word itself, the ascent toward the physical formulation of a word or the disintegration of its parts after achieving 'wordness.' It's the constant rebirthing of new alphabets and the place where alphabets remain drawn and not written."
- VVIISSIIOONNS and Other Selected Work
by Andrew Topel "My art is an exploration of possibilities, an exploration in the beauty of the shapes of the alphabet. It is a way of thinking and viewing that embraces unity rather than division, for the way I see it, writing alone, or art alone, is like walking into a bakery while holding your nose, unable to experience the richness of all five senses working together." - Selected Work
by Carol Stetser "Lacking duration, outside the oral tradition, without grammatical structure, often asemic, the visual poetry of the 21st century is truly without boundaries or restrictions. It too is global in scope but without any need for language translation. It is experienced all at once, in a flash, intuitively before intellectually." - Selected Work
by Constantin Xenakis - Selected Work
by Dmitry Babenko - Selected Work
by Ebon Heath - Selected Work
by Fernando Aguiar - Selected Work
by Hassan Massoudy - from Threshold
by Allison Urban and Quimby Melton June 2009 art installation at the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. - Dero Abecedarius and Other Selected Work
by Klaus Peter Dencker Dero presents the [Statue of Liberty], a sort of public-relations symbol, in several variations. This allows me to explore the theme of freedom -- poetically and theoretically -- as it relates to the somewhat absurd representations of it that abound in consumer culture.
Asemic Magazine
Asemic Writing: An International Perspective at Bright Stupid Confetti
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