Asemic Writing

Disrupting Conventions: Asemic Writing and its Connections to Ancient Textual Forms
Adeola Eze

This paper challenges the assumption that asemic writing lacks meaning by exploring its inherent significance and openness to interpretation. Focusing on the visual works of contemporary American artist, poet, and theorist, Cecil Touchon: Asemic Writing: Poetic Structures (2019) and The Cecil Touchon Asemic Reader (2019), it traces asemic writing’s connections to ancient writing systems and presents a parallel with the palimpsest format, emphasising its layered texts and polysemic nature. I argue that asemic writing, with its illegible and undecipherable nature, disrupts conventional notions of meaning, while its polysemic associations within language, symbols, or texts echo the late twentieth-century metaphorical use of the ancient book form of the palimpsest.

The Role of Artists’ Books and Asemic Writing in Decoloniality
Gaby Hernandez

Artists’ books are snapshots of the human experience. Covering surfaces with visual stories and data, beliefs, and memories, opened our imaginary to the world and helped us become curious about “the other.” With time, sequential compendiums of artistic expression, written, and visual information became books—a befitting medium to study, record, and reproduce our multivocal and pluriversal existence. Through writing, scribbling, mark-making, and juxtaposition, artists’ books expose the immense divergence of our cosmovision.

Within this context, the author poses a connection between decolonial design research and artists’ books’ aptness to (re)discover unique visual languages that do not affiliate with canonical aesthetics imposed by Western European imaginaries, focusing on asemic writing as a “visual representation” of orality, gestural, and (plainly) emotional expression that is often difficult to communicate accurately through written language.

Numbering the Word: Smudging and Smushing Linguistic Matter in Allison Parrish’s Ahe Thd Yearidy Ti Isa
Blair Johnson

Poet and programmer Allison Parrish’s generative novel of asemic text, Ahe Thd Yearidy Ti Isa, illuminates how the materiality of the word transforms as it circulates through mathematical systems. The text’s pages are composed of entirely programmatically generated and carefully arranged wordish bodies, in which the visual vocabulary of letterforms drift into the white space around them, smudging their loosely organized boundaries. Ahe Thd Yearidy Ti Isa surfaces the translational encounters underlying digital text, where the number and the word inform and agitate each other, remaining incommensurate systems.

The 2024 Contemporary Artists Books Conference (CABC) focusses on “Artists’ Books as Expanded Literacy.” The CABC planning committee asks: How can the artists’ book expand upon ideas of information and visual literacy, conceptions of language, data visualization, methods of presenting research, and beyond?

The 2024 CABC is supported by Center for Book Arts, with additional support from Deirdre Lawrence and the Grolier Club.