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On Asemic Writing
Michael Jacobson

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So what exactly is 'asemic' writing? Michael Jacobson is a writer and artist
from Minneapolis, Minnesota USA. His
books include The Giant's Fence, Action
Personally, I think asemic writing is a wordless, open semantic form of writing
Figures, Mynd Eraser, and The Paranoia
that is international in its mission. How can writing be wordless, someone may Machine. Besides writing books, he curates
a gallery for asemic writing called The New
ask. The secret is that asemic writing is a shadow, impression, and abstraction
Post-Literate, and sits on the editorial board
of conventional writing. It uses the constraints of writerly gestures and the full of SCRIPTjr.nl (http://scriptjr.nl). In his
spare time, he is working on designing a
developments of abstract art to divulge its main purpose: total freedom beyond
planet named "THAT
literary expression. The subcultural movement surrounding asemic writing is (http://thatplanet.blogspot.com)".
Recently, he was published in The Last
international because the creators of asemic works live all over the world. It's a
Vispo Anthology (Fantagraphics), had work
global style of writing we are creating, with the creators of asemic works in the Minnesota Center for Book Arts
meeting up on the Internet to share our works and exchange ideas. exhibit: Directed
(http://www.mnbookarts.org/events/currentMCBAexhibits.htm
and was interviewed by SampleKanon
What does it look like? (http://samplekanon.com/?p=1946).

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.

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
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asemic_writing) 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 (http://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' (https://www.google.com/search?
q=asemic+writing&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-
US:official&client=firefox-a) 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.
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