I have been sketching out ideas for the next installment of my book series for some time now and have come to a few good points on which to start. The first is the development of an entirely new as…
For several years, I have found myself drawn to the practice of asemic writing (artistic, meaningless writing, which has the appearance of a genuine language). However, I didn’t know there was a specific term for the practice – or that it belonged to an artistic trend – until quite recently. When drawing, or just mindlessly…
Today I gave my poetry workshop an exercise in asemic writing. First time I’ve tried it & they done good. Here’s the exercise, with prelims. (And, at the end, some asemic resources.…
This weblog explores asemic writing in relation to post-literate culture
‘It looks like writing, but we can’t quite read it’ This comes from www.asemic.net a website about this practise that has potential as an intriguing way of adding …
I have been sketching out ideas for the next installment of my book series for some time now and have come to a few good points on which to start. The first is the development of an entirely new as…
I have long been fascinated by the artistic drive to create imaginary languages. Countless numbers of them exist. And some of them have made their way into public consciousness since they have been integrated into the fictional worlds and universes portrayed in popular books and television shows. These fictional languages include Elvish in the works…
I have been sketching out ideas for the next installment of my book series for some time now and have come to a few good points on which to start. The first is the development of an entirely new as…
Asemic WritingDo you remember when you first heard about asemic writing, and what impelled you to take it up?I have been making asemic works long before there was a name for it since as far back as the 1970's. An…
collage from my book "WRITTEN WEED" hein elferink
Asemic WritingDo you remember when you first heard about asemic writing, and what impelled you to take it up?I have been making asemic works long before there was a name for it since as far back as the 1970's. An…
This weblog explores asemic writing in relation to post-literate culture
I have been sketching out ideas for the next installment of my book series for some time now and have come to a few good points on which to start. The first is the development of an entirely new as…
This weblog explores asemic writing in relation to post-literate culture
I have been sketching out ideas for the next installment of my book series for some time now and have come to a few good points on which to start. The first is the development of an entirely new as…
I have been sketching out ideas for the next installment of my book series for some time now and have come to a few good points on which to start. The first is the development of an entirely new as…
I have been sketching out ideas for the next installment of my book series for some time now and have come to a few good points on which to start. The first is the development of an entirely new as…
Today I gave my poetry workshop an exercise in asemic writing. First time I’ve tried it & they done good. Here’s the exercise, with prelims. (And, at the end, some asemic resources.…
Asemic WritingDo you remember when you first heard about asemic writing, and what impelled you to take it up?I have been making asemic works long before there was a name for it since as far back as the 1970's. An…
The Cecil Touchon Asemic Reader is finally available for purchase at Amazon! Cecil best explains his book here: "The current permutation of The Reader, originally envisioned as a black and white book, expanded in size and breadth to its current full color version to take into account the range of expression in Touchon's asemic explorations spanning forty years of works on paper including images from Touchon's unpublished sketchbooks. The first section of the book primarily contains palimpsest based asemic writing originally intended for mail art correspondence in which Touchon overwrites texts as found in 19th and early 20th century antique poetry books, a book of sermons, farm journal pages, a postcard, a grade school autograph book page, a sheet of music, a page from a vintage high school chemistry workbook and old invoices. Using these found papers collected for possible collage material, Touchon retains and uses the structure on the page and the patinated paper as inspiration for these asemic works often overwritten with india ink and quill pen. Following these are selected typographic abstraction works from the Fusion Series, Touchon diary-like ongoing series of collage works begun in 1983 and continuing to the present. In these works Touchon uses a wide ranging body of materials, approaches and techniques to produce these poetic works that explore figure and ground relationships and a variety of compositional strategies. These collages become studies for Touchon's paintings. In the midst of this group are a series of asemic 'songs' on torn brown paper using colored pens, pencil shading and white pencil highlighting that express the idea of visual musicality. At the end of the typographic collage works there is the image of a labyrinthian network of overlapping white lines over a black void that seem to float on multiple levels. This opens the way to a set of works of brush and ink from 2009 on the pages of a single antique journal where the markings are painted onto the leaves of paper and after a few moments the pages were held under running water in the kitchen sink. Whatever ink had dried remained on the page leaving gray ghost marks where the ink had been washed away. The book concludes with a variety of works from the late 1970's examining Touchon's early mark making based on language or visual musicality. Taken as a whole, this sampling of works across forty years of Touchon's oeuvre reminds one of a quote from the 1949 'Lecture on Nothing' by John Cage: "I have nothing to say and I am saying it..." but in Touchon's case he possibly is saying nothing about Something; perhaps a something so transcendent that common words cannot speak of it, something so vast that words crumble into gibberish and collapse into an unutterable silence. Some of the titles of previous exhibitions of Touchon's work suggest this such as: 'Beyond Words', 'Reduced to Silence' or 'The Unspoken Remains'. Yet Touchon's works are not nihilistic in nature. They could be said to be meaningless though clearly not purposeless. Touchon has said that his interest is in expressing 'the underlying universal harmony of all things'. One has the impression when studying these works that literary meaning has been removed or obfuscated but in Touchon's view he sees his work as liberating language from its work as bearer of meaning and by extension liberating the reader from the work of deciphering meaning and from the obligation of being literate when enjoying the works purely for their aesthetic value. In a world whose population is engulfed in a deluge of information that we must continually navigate, these works offer a small oasis in which one might be refreshed along the seemingly endless journey over the shifting sands of data on the horizons of which can only be seen mirage and simulacrum." Paperback: 126 pages Publisher: Post-Asemic Press (August 22, 2019) Language: English ISBN-10: 1732878897 ISBN-13: 978-1732878891 Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.3 x 9 inches Shipping Weight: 8.6 ounces Price: $30.00 Click here to purchase The Cecil Touchon Asemic Reader A torrent of creative dynamism, The Cecil Touchon Asemic Reader comes at you in three waves: asemic overwriting of print, usually on antique pages; the elegant typographic collages for which Touchon is best known; and layered linear screens that seem to exist in a receding space. Through these variations, the book challenges us to rethink in depth our conceptions of surface, a thinking accompanied by wordless pleasure. —Peter Schwenger, author of Asemic: The Art Of Writing Touchon’s Asemic Reader is an important and inspiring book, and it calls to all schools of thought. The invitation here is to experience new dimensions of the present moment. Touchon’s captivating letter play and use of asemic writing makes him a true explorer of the invisible script. —Sam Roxas-Chua 姚, author of Echolalia in Script (Orison Books), and Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater (Lithic Press) The three layers/styles which build this book are as different as the reader or viewer’s reactions and observations which the layers imply & help create. The first series of works deals with an intriguing enigmatic silhouette, a shape and idea of time past. The calligraphic lines or typographic erasures or deleted music notes tell us intricate stories and talk to our perception according to the antiquity of the paper they’re written on. The second series shows broken letters, cut ones, like in a labyrinthine re-/de-organization of a stray alphabet of imagination. These well known and highly appreciated works by Cecil Touchon proudly belong to a tradition one can maybe connect to the names of Adriano Spatola and Edwin Schlossberg. A third little series introduces the viewer to an even wider range of codes, involving abstract movements of curls, curved signs, naturally evolving from the previous pages, as to mark a fascinating link between the fragmented alphabet letters and numbers, and a liquid set of traces impossible to grasp, yet still grasping our eyes. —Marco Giovenale, author of GLITCHASEMICS (forthcoming from Post-Asemic Press, in Spring of 2020) The Cecil Touchon Asemic Reader is available worldwide on the following links: Amazon USA Amazon Australia Amazon Brazil Amazon Canada Amazon France Amazon Germany (Deutschland) Amazon India Amazon Italy (Italia) Amazon Japan (日本) Amazon Mexico Amazon Spain (España) Amazon United Arab Emirates Amazon UK Here are some sample images from The Cecil Touchon Asemic Reader: Cecil Touchon (b. 1956) was born in Austin, Texas; grew up in Saint Louis, Missouri and currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Touchon, who enjoys an international reputation as a contemporary artist, founded the Ontological Museum and its publishing arm: Ontological Museum Publications. Aside from his artistic career, Touchon curates art exhibitions, writes poetry and publishes books. Touchon's interests and associations include the Collage/Assemblage community, Fluxus, Massurrealism, Neoism, Post-Dogmatism and the Mail Art community.
These poems are created using vernacular sources for materials such as restaurant receipts, poetic structures Touchon made with spam email, pages of lists from magazines as palimpsests to then overwrite the texts on the pages using the existing texts as prompts for his asemic writing. Touchon also used various authors' poems whose structures he liked in the same way by printing out the poems on white sheets and then overwriting the texts. Some of the poets included e. e. commings, David Drew, Vito Acconti, documents from Sigmund Freud, some pages from Mathematical Manuscripts of Karl Marx, etc. In short, any sort of page composition that Touchon could exploit with the use of asemic writing.
This weblog explores asemic writing in relation to post-literate culture
I have been sketching out ideas for the next installment of my book series for some time now and have come to a few good points on which to start. The first is the development of an entirely new as…
The heated comment thread on HTMLGIANT that came up when Michael Jacobson’s new book, The Giant’s Fence, was mentioned, raises a great point about how we approach language. Jacobson advocates a form of writing that he calls “asemic writing”—that is, writing with no semantic content. No one stares at a canvas of abstract art expecting to “read” a message. But when a book of asemic writing is presented, some people gripe and blow it off as a gimmick because there is nothing
Page 1 from The Giant's Fence/Works & Interviews Works & Interviews collects Michael Jacobson's dynamic asemic writing and his thoughts on the current asemic movement in art and literature. Included in the book are his asemic "stories" The Giant's Fence, Action Figures, A Headhunter's Tale, PΩz, THAT: A Plan(et), and The Paranoia Machine. The text also contains 9 interviews he has given to various online journals over the years such as at Full of Crow, SCRIPTjr.nl, Samplekannon, Asymptote Journal, Slova, Twenty-Four Hours, David Allen Binder, 4 Questions with Marco Giovenale, and also includes a previously unpublished interview with Jacobson by poet and journalist Volodymyr Bilyk. Works & Interviews documents the evolution of an early 21st century artist, writer, and publisher who uses science fiction calligraphic scripts to explore the locus of manuscript art in relation to technology and internet culture. Since 2008 Michael Jacobson has curated the influential blog/gallery The New Post-Literate: A Gallery Of Asemic Writing, and in 2017 he was a guest curator of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts exhibit Asemic Writing: Offline & In The Gallery, which was the first large-scale group exhibit of asemic writing in the United States. In 2013 he co-edited with Tim Gaze An Anthology Of Asemic Handwriting, which collected over one hundred asemic scribes from around the world and is the most definitive collection of asemic literature published so far. In 2017 he founded Post-Asemic Press to publish asemic writing, experimental literature, post-graffiti, abstract comics, visual poetry, Lettrisme, abstract calligraphy, etc. He currently lives in Minneapolis, is a father, an avid cyclist, and posts most of his asemics, art, and gif animation pohmz to his online ELLO studio: @asemicwriter. Click on the following links to purchase Works and Interviews: Amazon USA Amazon Canada Amazon France Amazon Germany (Deutschland) Amazon Italy (Italia) Amazon Spain (España) Amazon UK Amazon Brazil (Brasil) Amazon India Amazon Japan Amazon Mexico Amazon Australia Michael's Bio: Michael Jacobson is a writer, artist, publisher, and independent curator from Minneapolis, Minnesota USA. His books include The Giant’s Fence (Ubu Editions), Action Figures (Avance Publishing), Mynd Eraser, The Paranoia Machine, his collected writings Works & Interviews (Post-Asemic Press), and his autobiographical collection of senryu poems Hei Kuu (Post-Asemic Press); he is also co-editor of An Anthology Of Asemic Handwriting (Punctum Books). Besides writing books, he curates a gallery for asemic writing called The New Post-Literate, and sits on the editorial board of SCRIPTjr.nl. Recently, he was published in The Last Vispo Anthology (Fantagraphics), and curated the Minnesota Center for Book Arts exhibit: Asemic Writing: Offline & In The Gallery. His online interviews are at Utsanga, Full of Crow, Schizoaffective, SampleKanon, Asymptote Journal, Twenty Four Hours, David Alan Binder, and at Medium. In the past he created the cover art for Rain Taxi’s 2014 winter issue, and as of 2017 he has become a book publisher at Post-Asemic Press. In 2019 he was written up in the book Asemic: The Art of Writing (University of Minnesota Press) by Peter Schwenger; it has an entire chapter dedicated to Jacobson's calligraphic work. He also founded and administers the asemic writing Facebook group. In his spare time, he is working on designing a cyberspace planet dubbed THAT. His Ello studio can be found here: @asemicwriter.
