Asemic Writing

Started by RyanWreck, June 09, 2014, 10:20:14 PM

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RyanWreck

Asemic Writing/Art shouldn't be incredibly difficult to enjoy for people who appreciate the art of our prefered genres. Black and white grainy images, a xerox mess, degraded and old looking; and where else do we see art like this? I am also a fan of handwriting, calligraphy and fonts, I love the way letters look small or large, thin or bold, print, cursive, etc. The name is a bit of a deceiving because it is not just writing, it's typing, its ugly computer print outs, it's text so maybe "Asemic Text" would make more sense, but "writing" makes it feel more intellectual, I suppose. Whatever it is it's an imaginative and clever little genre, the approach and form, the methods and resourcefulness, simplicity, this is the draw. As with most styles and scenes you get those people, those who try to put their stamp on it and probably ruin it at which point, as history has shown us, they will probably throw a "post-" in front of it as if they are proud that they killed it. Lately in the tiny world of Asemic writing that killer stamp has been graffiti, which is actually kind of silly. I can't see it being a good thing, or maybe I'm just prude. I'm sure there are a few of you who find grafitti a fine art form, and maybe it is, but I don't think it meshes well at all with this. So have a look at these examples and click the links below, return to the thread to make fun of my bad taste:









A little bit more information (emphasis on "little"): http://asemic.net/
And the online magazine, which is great if you enjoy this shit as I do: http://asemic-magazine.blogspot.com.au/

Duncan

This is great, thanks a lot for sharing. I have pretty much no knowledge of this, but if falls very much within things I'm massively interested in so please, any more would be great!!!

NEHPF

Interesting stuff. Exampels posted are aesthetically really pleasing and it's easy to see how it could resemble noise artwork. American Tapes and John Olson's other artwork with his wobbly and hardly readable stylized hand writing on covers comes to mind as a reference.

I can't see graffiti really having anything to do with this, but I have an appetite for it also. And atleast to me it is not really about the visual side but almost exclusively about it being illegal and only interesting to the other few people doing or appreciating it. Off topic though.

Andrew McIntosh

Thanks for the introduction to this, Ryan. First thing I thought of was the Surrealists automatic writing, but taken further.
Shikata ga nai.

online prowler

Interesting. Thanx for the share !

RyanWreck

#5
Quote from: Andrew McIntosh on June 10, 2014, 04:34:44 AM
First thing I thought of was the Surrealists automatic writing, but taken further.

Surrealist automatism was one of the first things I thought of as well. Can't help but not to. That as well as "cut-up" writing, concrete poetry and stream of consciousness all wrapped up in to one but, as you said, taken further. Maybe even mix it in with the quality folk art that is the created alphabets and fake languages nerds make for their Dungeons & Dragons characters. All of this, theoretically, probably seems like it would be a total cluster fuck but instead it's almost an abstraction of said techniques and styles, a lot of this stuff is fairly minimal, with just adequately enough going on. Other's can make quite a mess - imagine if Joyce would have made Finnegans Wake an art piece.


Quote from: Duncan on June 09, 2014, 11:38:01 PM
This is great, thanks a lot for sharing. I have pretty much no knowledge of this, but if falls very much within things I'm massively interested in so please, any more would be great!!!

Did you happen to visit the second link I posted in my initial post? Those .pdf's are packed with the best of it. There is a quiet little community that does this stuff if you google it you should find enough to last you 10 years. There is a small subreddit at /r/asemic, and then there are a few books which may be of interest as well (click on the links to visit the Amazon page):

"An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting" (a short 200 page treatise on Asemic writing and artwork)
"Home Elsewhere"
"wordless (poems)"
"Ground point Bing"
"The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008"

*edit* Actually, yea, I'll post just a few more examples that I like...












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