Essay by De Villo Sloan: The Post-Vispro Condition: Thoughts on Cheryl Penn’s Vispro Project & The Many Masks of Doc Mortag (McMurtagh/Sloan 2021)

By De Villo Sloan

The Cheryl Penn Boat

When gray New England life left him a misanthrope feeling estranged from others and himself, Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, signed aboard a whale ship and embarked on a quest of self-renewal.

I am a poetic Ishmael. When I feel estranged from my work, when it taunts me like self-parody, when I feel no affinity to any other poet on earth, I know it is time to join a Cheryl Penn project. Thus, I joined Cheryl Penn’s vispro study in February of 2021, which has proven to be an extraordinary and renewing experience. Allusions to the Pequod go only so far; Cheryl Penn is no Ahab, I assure you.

I have had the great good fortune to work with Cheryl Penn on several international, managerially complex, collaborative book projects. A favorite memory is the Asemics 16 project (circa 2012). This brought dozens of artists and writers together from around the world to explore asemic writing. That experience altered my personal evolution very positively. I came to recognize early that in addition to being a spectacular visual artist and writer, Cheryl Penn is a culture leader. She has a rare ability to assemble diverse participants, to provide a supportive environment for creativity and to facilitate communications. Yet she and her collaborators deliver astounding results, usually on time. I also appreciate Cheryl’s ability to identify concepts in all our shared work that, if explored, will yield important results. Her projects have a great relevance to the writing and arts communities to which she belongs.

For instance, when Cheryl and I first discussed what would become the Asemics-16 project, I assumed we would pursue “vispo” content. Cheryl suggested “asemic writing.” My response was something such as, “Asemic writing! Nobody is interested in that stuff!” Since then, I defer to and confer with Cheryl Penn. I joined her “vispro” study whole heartedly. If Cheryl thinks it is important, then I am “on it.”

The Making of Doc Mortag

A great deal of synchronicity occurs in the visual poetry and asemic writing communities, where work is circulated perpetually. In August of 2021 Kristine Snodgrass (USA), John McConnochie (Australia) and I – exploring glitchTXT - began ether sessions to produce, if memory serves, a sustained, glitched (asemic) collaborative composition. Possibly a book. The three of us produced a series of collabs that I hope to share some day, but the project faded. I had never worked with John McConnochie, and the three of us could not get the right wavelength. I think we would now. Kristine Snodgrass had reached a point where I think she was exhausted. She was going to be the main character in a book she was making with John and me. That is a shaky premise.

We did have many discussions, and one point that stayed with me was incorporating narrative into these radical glitched decompositions. I recall discussing visual narrative in film and ideas about developing structures. Throughout the whole project, I believe the narrative focus was an outstanding element of the vispro studies; structure became for me a focus.

Page from The Many Masks of Doc Mortag.

Working with Kristine and John, I realized I wanted to do a glitch narrative. I hoped to produce an asemic comic or a modest graphic novel, a link to popcult. Having once been a guitar player, I see glitchTX as the equivalent of using a foot pedal to distort a live guitar. The glitchTXT is a tool to help me better achieve my vision, a tech tool. The art is in the player. I am ordinarily a very nonlinear, non-narrative writer. What I was seeing in Cheryl Penn’s vispro Facebook group offered me

new models and narrative possibilities. Thus, circa September 2021, I set out to intentionally create a sustained vispro work. The Many Masks of Doc Mortag is, to me, intentional vispro. I appreciate having the vispro group as a lighthouse as I dug into the project.

I met San Diego visual poet Shawn McMurtagh via John M. Bennett. I have been a McMurtagh fan – Eye Rush Press – for several years. In 2018, I published neo-concrete pieces by Shawn at Asemic Front 2, wonderful and rare work. Then we made some collabs. He is great to work with, [insert California mellow stereotype here with smiles]. Recently, Shawn McMurtagh had done these amazing, expressionist faces, brilliant, gradient, totally representational heads that I knew could be glitched into new Chakras of magnificent decomposition. What I appreciate is that Shawn trusted me enough to play riffs on his magnificent faces. Thus, you have the strange tale of The Many Masks of Doc Mortag and its connection to Cheryl Penn’s vispro project.

Comment:

Ok, so De Villo is a little overt in his praise (thank you De Villo!) but I always value his analysis on literaryart issues. He sees things others don’t and often highlights unknown/unrealised features. The Many Masks of ‘Doc Mortag’ * is described as “a collaborative graphic novella (vispro for Cheryl Penn) of corrupted file concrete asemics (AsemiX). This is the first edition of the second publication in the Asemic Front Series” . I know De Villo as a Neo Concrete poet – and writer, so I especially want to draw attention to the following point: We did have many discussions, and one point that stayed with me was incorporating narrative into these radical glitched decompositions. I recall discussing visual narrative in film and ideas about developing structures. Throughout the whole project, I believe the narrative focus was an outstanding element of the vispro studies; structure became for me a focus.

Glitching is way outside my ball park, but that would constitute the ‘how’ of this novella. The why and the intent changed De Villo’s usual frame of reference – and I think it shows. Glitch art is completely foreign to me. Here follows a definition for those equally not techno-savvy:

Glitch art is a fairly recent phenomenon that has developed from the fast-paced evolution of digital technology. Technically, a glitch is the temporary and slight malfunctioning of a system. Due to the limitations of current technology, time, funding, and human error, glitches run the whole gamut of the digital landscape and can be difficult to pinpoint due to their transient nature. From software and games to sound files, automated systems and phones, there is an endless number of glitches that we encounter, often unknowingly, during day to day life. Glitch art is an art form that harnesses the visual effects of data corruption. By applying certain encoding or actions to an image, a photograph can become visually corrupted while retaining a usable file. Glitch art is generally an experimental process, with glitch artists walking the fine line between a usable file and a completely broken one. From: https://digital-photography-school.com/make-abstract-glitch-art-photographs/ In reading that explanation I became very aware of the nature of instructional prose – prose on glitches and quite aside from vispro saw the possibilities of producing ASCII art** - in fact any sort of work using Unicode – an information technology standard for consistent “encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems ( https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode14.0.0/ ) (this would constitute the how of creating vispro – not the why). I realised that again we have come (theoretically) full circle. Even computers and their handlers with all the code they produce have a standard measure which provides consistency and a way to ‘handle text’. The way this novella was produced was with narrative in mind – not poetry, not prose poetry, not narrative poetry – visual prose narrative.

*This book can be found as a free download on https://www.scribd.com/document/538328322/The-Many-Masks-of-Doc-Mortag-by-ShawnMcMurtagh-De-Villo-Sloan-Edition-1-2021

**ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII). The term is also loosely used to refer to text based visual art in general.

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Page 1: The Many Masks of ‘Doc Mortag’. 2021.

De Villo has defined this work as a graphic vispro novella, so the viewer is left in no doubt as to artistic intention and approach used. A novella by definition is an extended piece of prose fiction and in this instance is a form of story relying on distortion, some sort of plot, and a central character - no matter how vague or tenuous the plot appears to be. I had asked De Villo in discussion what he meant by the first lines –but he didn’t bite. Henry James said: “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character”? Thus plot/story line – even if it is tenuous - is likely to develop – with or without the authors acquiescence. Looking at this page, I find it interesting that the text on the page (prose text) is embedded into the overall image – it does not lie on the surface of the page as most printed words do – the prose is the image. Although this occurred as a by-product of the making process, this vispro image is very certain of its visual-prose heritage. The reality is that although a novel may determine general classification (graphic novel in this instance), vispro is the hold all, the means, the artistic literary form which is so pliable and adaptable it is bound to become the seeking artists’ device.

And it’s ironic, isn’t it? On the one hand we have the construction of narrative and on the other hand the deconstruction of image. A dramatic paradox is at play and paradox is a way for writer-artists to create verbal or situational irony. As irony has such an oblique quality, I feel a detached sensibility pervades this vispro work which shows no signs of being vispo – or ‘just’ a graphic novella. This is the first studiously generated vispro novel and I hope, as such, it helps to shape and define other vispro novels.