Asemic Writing

An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting edited by Michael Jacobson and Tim Gaze

What is Asemic writing?

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from the preliterate, beyond the verbal, finally ending in a postliterate condition in which visual language has superseded words.

• wordless
• open
• semantic
• a vacuum of meaning
• reader to fill in and interpret
• deduce meaning from an abstract work of art
• Multiple meanings for the same symbolism
• pictograms or ideograms
• meanings suggested by their shapes
• conception of conventional writing practices
• Reflecting writing
• make the reader hover
• in a state between reading and looking
• unknown languages and forgotten scripts provide templates and platforms
• True asemic writing = creator cannot read their own asemic writing
• Relative asemic writing = can be read by some people but not by everyone
• Influences = illegible, invented, or primal scripts (cave paintings, doodles, children's drawings, etc)
• uses all forms of creativity for inspiration
• Other influences = xenolinguistics, artistic languages, sigils (magic), undeciphered scripts, and graffiti
• records his experiences in calligraphic and palimpsestic code
• abstract graffiti and art documenting the history and decay of urban places
• writing syllabics as a way of creating rhythmic patters unlike traditional metric verse
• trying to lose the influence of eliot, breton and berryman
• you could say that nature, since time began, has been manifesting asemic writing It just needs a human to see the writing, & recognize it
• pushed cursive brush calligraphy to the point of illegibility
• used to get excited after drinking wine, and write exuberant but illegible cursive
• words of a statement of intent are reduced into an abstract design, and then charged with the energy of one's will
• personal spirit writing which he could translate by viewing through a glass of water
• school blackboard on which someone has practiced cursive e's
Asemic animation

by Tony Burhouse and Michael Jacobson.
• long term accumulation of bathroom graffiti
• atomized writing down to the letter
• synthesized writing with visual imagery
• arcane knowledge, secrets and cryptography, time and timelessness
• developed a private written language using 366 individual signs or "idiographic ciphers"
• writes visual stories, not to be confused with graphic novels
• narratives are anything but linear
• aking an art that forces you to confront the mystery
• fascination with signs of all kinds, both real and imaginary
• intricate beauties of the Arabic calligraphic scripts
• symbols, glyphs and ciphers drawn from a wide variety of other languages and cultures
• invention of meaningless, false Chinese ideograms
• brush to move freely and spontaneously across a desired surface to form curved and wavy patterns