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Fjord was right
Tag Archives: asemic
The Codex Seraphinianus
The disturbing implication of this last page, and of every page of the Codex Seraphinianus, is that the real as we see it cannot contain everything.
Other possibilities are continually generated by the imagination , and generated above all in images. Perhaps it is not as important as we thought to determine whether the images generatedare those of the artist, the dreamer, the fantasist or the hallucinator; for these species belong to one genus.
“Codex Seraphinianus: Hallucinatory Encyclopedia” – Peter Schwenger
The Codex Seraphinianus was written and illustrated by Italian graphic designer and architect, Luigi Serafini during the late 1970’s.
The Codex is a lavishly produced book that purports to be an encyclopedia for an imaginary world in a parallel universe, with copious comments in an incomprehensible language. It is written in a florid script, entirely invented and completely illegible, and illustrated with watercolor paintings. The Codex is divided into a number of sections (each with its own table of contents, the page numbers are in base-21 or base-22!) on subjects such as plants, animals, inhabitants, machines, clothing, architecture, numbers, cards, chemical analyses, labyrinth, Babel, foods… There are panoramic scenes of incomprehensible festivals, and diagrams of plumbing.
The Codex is to that imaginary world what Diderot’s Encyclopedia is to ours. Obviously, Serafini was not just attempting to create a consistent alternate world. Rather, the Codex is sort of an elaborate parody of the real world.
The invented script of the book imitates the Western-style writing systems (left-to-right writing in rows; an alphabet with uppercase and lowercase; probably a separate set of symbols for writing numerals) but is much more curvilinear reminding some Semitic scripts. The writing seems to have been designed to appear, but not actually be, meaningful, like the Voynich Manuscript.
Etsuko Ichikawa: Traces of the Molten State
Etsuko Ichikawa writes with hot glass on paper. They’re called glass pyrographs.
In the words of the artist:
“I see this process as a metaphor of my daily life in terms of encounters and impressions relating directly to my work. Meeting someone, seeing some event, hearing a piece of music – these encounters are fleeting moments, but sometimes the impressions of these moments take on their own lives.”
Hat tip: Forrest Loder
Inverted Commas: Satu Kaikkonen on asemic writing
As a creator of asemics, I consider myself an explorer and a global storyteller. Asemic art, after all, represents a kind of language that’s universal and lodged deep within our unconscious minds. Regardless of language identity, each human’s initial attempts to create written language look very similar and, often, quite asemic. In this way, asemic art can serve as a sort of common language — albeit an abstract, post-literate one — that we can use to understand one another regardless of background or nationality. For all its limping-functionality, semantic language all too often divides and asymmetrically empowers while asemic texts can’t help but put people of all literacy-levels and identities on equal footing.
Since asemic writing emphasizes the visual, representational quality of language, it creates a unique dialogue between the writer/reader and the world of signs, one that allows for multiple, subjective acts of decoding. This paradoxical, cosmopolitan-yet-personal quality, I think, lends asemic writing a hyper-contemporary sense of being and makes it much more than art. I read it, in fact, as an archetypal language, as a (recon)figuration of the words spoken by the Babel-builders. Asemic texts, as it were, serve as a projection of humanity’s desire to reconnect with the mythological root of all languages and, by extension, one another. (…)
via SCRIPT
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