Asemic type

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crazy

&

drunk


With the non specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret.



history As long ago as 25,000-30,000 years BP, humans were painting pictures on cave walls. The advent of a writing system seems to coincide with the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to more permanent farming encampments when it became necessary to count your property, whether it be parcels of land or animals. First evidence for this appears to be with incised “counting tokens� from about 9,000 years ago. Around 4100-3800 BCE, the tokens began to be symbols that could be impressed or inscribed in clay to represent such things as a record of land, grain or cattle so it seems a written language was beginning to develop. One of the earliest examples was found in the excavations of Uruk in Mesopotamia from a time around the Sumerian culture.


Counting tokens about 9,000 years ago in the neolithic period.

The Egyptians used the acrophones as a consonantal system along with their syllabic and idiographic system, therefore the alphabet was not yet born. The acrophonic principal of Egyptian clearly influenced Proto-Canaanite/ Proto-Sinaitic around 1700 BC. Inscriptions found at the site of the ancient torquoise mines at Serabit-al-Khadim in the Sinai use less than 30 signs, definite evidence of a consonantal alphabet rather than a syllabic system.

Tokens began to be symbols that could be impressed or inscribed in clay around 4100-3800 BCE.

Images: http://www.historian.net/hxwrite.htm


VinÄ?a / Old European A collection of symbols found on many artefacts dating from between 6,000 to 4,500 BC excavated from sites in south-east Europe, in particular from VinÄ?a near Belgrade. There is still no agreement on whether these symbols are a writing system.

Indus/Harappa script This collection of symbols was used in the Indus valley of India between about 3,500 and 2,000 BC. Some believe that these symbols are non-linguistic, while others argue that they represent a Dravidian language mainly spoken in southern India.

Phaistos Disk The Phaistos Disk was found in the Minoan Palace of Phaistos on Crete in 1908 and is thought to date from the 17th century BC. On it is inscribed an unknown script and there are many theories about the language it represeents and what it means. No other examples of this script has ever been found.

Voynich Manuscript The Voynich Manuscript is named after Wilfrid M. Voynich, a book dealer who acquired it in 1912. It is lavishly illustrated manuscript of 234 pages, written in an unknown script. One theory is that is was written sometime during the 13th century by a Franciscan friar, Roger Bacon (1214-1294). Many attempts have been made to decipher the text but no one has succeeded. Some think the manuscript is gibberish (asemic), and was probably a practical joke played on Rudolph II.


Rohonc Codex The Rohonc Codex is named after the city of Rohonc, in Western Hungary (now Rechnitz, Austria), where it was kept until 1907, when it was moved to Budapest. The origin of the codex is uncertain. In 1838 it was donated to the Hungarian Science Academy by Gusztav Batthyรกny, a Hungarian count, together with his entire library. It is written in an unknown language and script and has defied all attempts to decipher it.

Rongo Rongo A script once used on Easter Island until the 1860s, after which, somehow, knowledge of the script was lost. The language it represents is Rapa Nui, the Polynesian language spoken on Easter Island.

Images: http://www.citrinitas.com/history_of_viscom


crazy and drunk It seems, due to the constant references to them, that the history of today’s asemic movement comes from two Chinese calligraphers: “crazy” Zhang Xu, a Tang Dynasty (circa 800 CE) calligrapher who was famous for creating wild illegible calligraphy, and a younger monk Huaisu, “drunk”,who also excelled at illegible calligraphy.

Zhang Xu, was a Chinese calligrapher and poet. A native of Suzhou, he became an official during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang. He was known as one of the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup. Legend has it that whenever he was drunk, he would use his hair as brush to perform his art, and when he woke, he would be amazed by the quality of his works but always failed to produce them again in his sober state. Though more well known for his explosive cursive script, he excelled in the regular script. Under the excitement of art and of course wine, he became oblivious of social expectations, and would often fling off his cap in the presence of princes and nobles, something not to be done. Hence he came to be known as Zhang the Madman.

He is often associated with the younger Huaisu and the two are said to be the greatest cursive calligraphers of the Tang Dynasty. The duo is affectionately referred to as “the crazy Zhang and the drunk Su”.

Huai su was a Buddhist monk and calligrapher of the Tang Dynasty. He was born in modern Changsha, Hunan. Not much is known of his early life. He became a monk in his childhood, apparently out of poverty. Legend says that he planted banana trees in the courtyard of the temple where he lived, and used the leaves as paper to practice his art. He made his national fame in his early thirties when he came to Chang’an, which was then capital of China. Famous poets of his time spoke highly of his works, including Li Bai. Like Li Bai, he was also very fond of alcohol. Fewer than 10 pieces of his works have survived.



In the 1920s Henri Michaux, who had been influenced by both Asian calligraphy and Surrealism, began to create wordless works such as Alphabet (1925) and Narration (1927). He was a highly individual Belgian-born poet, writer, and painter. Surrealism was, and to sum degree still is, a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. The aim was to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality”. Artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes with photographic precision, they created strange creatures from everyday objects and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself.

Henri Michaux:

Images and copy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Michaux#/media/File:Henri_Michaux.jpg

1921 Celebes, Max Ernst

Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and of no logical consequence. André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement. It developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important centre of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and music of many countries and languages.

Witnessing Visions


Red Abstract Composition

Sans Titre

Composition

Mescaline Drawing, 1960


A few of my pieces inspired by “Witnessing Visions”, Henri Michaux



Asemic writing is a hybrid art form that fuses text and sometimes image into a unity, and then leaves it open to subjective interpretations. It may be compared to free writing, or writing for its own sake, instead of writing to produce verbal context.

In the 1950s, practitioners such as Brion Gysin, Isidore Isou, Cy Twombly, and Morita Shiryu all expanded writing into illegible and wordless visual mark-making; they would help lay the foundation for asemic writers of the future.

The open nature of asemic work allows for meaning to occur across linguistic understanding so therefore an asemic text may be “read” in a similar fashion regardless of the reader’s natural language. Multiple meanings for the same symbolism are another possibility for an asemic piece of work.

Brion Gysin

Brion Gysin

Cy Twombly Isidore Isou


Mirtha Dermisache (1940-2012) is another writer who had created asemic writing since the 1960s. She was an Argentinian artist whose works of asemic writing have been published and exhibited internationally at venues including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and MACBA in Barcelona, and collected by leading international arts institutions

Texto, 1974

Images: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asemic_writing


inspired by Nirtha Dirmisache


Reading between the lines




In the 1980s Chinese artist Xu Bing created “A Book from the Sky” which is a work of books and hanging scrolls on which were printed 4000 hand carved meaningless characters. The characters were carved into individual pieces of movable type made from pear wood. Initially, Xu himself typeset sample pages, and took them for printing to a factory in the village of Hányíng. This was one of the last remaining traditional printing factories in China, which after the Cultural Revolution mainly produced state-sponsored reprints of classical texts using pre-Revolution woodblocks. Later, workers at the factory typeset the pages by referring to a “model book” prepared by Xu, which contained symbols that had been placed in a one-to-one correspondence with his 4,000 pseudo-Chinese characters.

Calligraphy-ism

The 1980s also saw artist Gu Wenda start the first of a series of projects centred on the invention of meaningless, false Chinese ideograms, depicted as if they were truly old and traditional. One exhibition of this work/type was held in Xi’an in 1986, featuring paintings of fake ideograms on a massive scale. Moving forward, also in China, during the 1990s, an abstract calligraphy movement known as “Calligraphy-ism” came into existence, a leading proponent of this movement being Luo Qi. Calligraphy-ism is an aesthetic movement that aims to develop calligraphy into an abstract art. The characters do not need to retain their traditional forms or be legible as words. In Vietnam during the 2000s a calligraphy group called the Zenei Gang of Five appeared. To this group of young artists, “Wordless” means that which cannot be said, that which is both before and beyond the specificity of naming. To be without words is saying nothing and saying everything.

Title page: “A Book from the Sky”

Xu Bing created “A Book from the Sky”

Wordless


s


Least spoken languages During my research I also looked into language, both lost languages and those that are little spoken now. I was interested to look into the possible reasons for the decline in these languages, was it the globalisation of language/alphabets? Ter Sami (2 people) Te Sami language is almost a dead language, there are only two people who can speak it fluently and after them this language will disappear as a native language. It was mainly spoken in the north-eastern part of the Kola Peninsula, Russia. The old USSR is accused of wiping it out due its focus on Russian language.

Rotokas is a language spoken by few people and constructed of fewer letters. It is estimated to be spoken by less than 4,000 people on the island of Bougainville, Papa New Guinea. It has a Latin-based alphabet of only 12 letters which represent 11 phonemes. The letters are A E G I K O P R S T U V.

Zoya Gerasimova (left), one of the last speakers of Ter Sami. Photo taken in 2006. Photo; wikipedia.org/wiki/Ter_Sami_language


Latin alphabet for Ter Sami

Cyrillic alphabet for Ter Sami

Images: http://omniglot.com/writing/tersami.htm


Mental Imagery date: 2035 CE location: a design office The designer looked at the screen and watched the child’s memory of being sick. “I’m sorry to ask you this, but think of diarrhoea again please,” she said. The toilet shimmered into view briefly followed by transparent wavy lines. The designer noted the lines, then replayed the other children’s memory and noted that 67% of them included shimmering, wavy lines to represent smell. “Thank you, that’s all I needed. You’ve really helped me design this icon,” she said. From this quote I began to think about, as crazy as it may seem, the future of written language and if due to advances in technology, our language would come from images from thought rather than an alphabet. Maybe we can transfer our thoughts onto a sub-straight in whatever way we see fit and they could be translated later into a readable form later. Is this what was done in the caves of Europe all that time ago? Kosslyn, Stephen M., Thompson, William L., & Ganis, Giorgio. (2006). The Case for Mental Imagery. New York, NY: Oxford.

think of diarrhea again please


Paul Rand once said that communication design is about “saying the commonplace in an uncommonplace way.� (Rand, 1970, p. 36) This suggests that effective communication is essentially enhancing the familiar. For visual communication design, this means creating unique images that will connect in predictable ways with the images people already hold in their minds. From this perspective, the whole user-centred design movement is a cultivation of means for designers knowing, not just assuming, the mental images people have. Stephen Kosslyn, William L. Thompson, and Giorgio Ganis’ book The Case for Mental Imagery (Kosslyn, Thompson, & Ganis, 2006, p. 4) gives designers an accurate glimpse into how mental images work. Saying/seeing the commonplace in an uncommon place way, can this mean that uncommon can become common? Rand, Paul. (1970). Thoughts on Design (Third ed.). New York: Wittenborn Schultz.


Pre writing When it comes to writing, it is important to distinguish between the process of writing and that of handwriting: Writing is about the ability to think of words with a view to putting them onto paper or screen. Handwriting is one of the tools that you can use to make the words appear on paper. At present, schools start children off with handwriting as their main tool, but, as they become older, it is important that they also learn how to touch-type as this is very much needed in today’s workplaces and in everyday life. Let’s begin with writing. Writing Early writing is about children talking and then making marks. This means that most of children’s early writing is often ‘scribble’. They may tell us that they are ‘writing’ a shopping list, but what we might actually see are lines of circles. This doesn’t matter as the key thing is that children are learning about the process of writing. In terms of seeing legible words, the chances are that the first word will be your child’s name at around four years. Children “write” by using certain strategies for writing. Often, these strategies don’t look much like adult writing. But when a child “writes,” at any given time he/ she is trying out certain unspoken rules or patterns

that they believe will produce written language. They may draw a picture or embellish it with letters; they may spell words almost by abbreviating them; they may match names of alphabet letters with sounds they hear in words; they may write a story by naming a character and then saying something about them. All of these acts reveal a strategy, an underlying idea—for now, at least— about how writing works. Are we not again looking at early writing in humans again, what would writing look like if we were not taught the rules of the alphabet? The child sees what they have written as correct, it is for you to be able to interpret the outcome. On the following pages I have examples of children’s writing pre school. I was given permission to visit a nursery and work with the children on various writing exercises including name writing and shopping lists. The outcomes were fascinating, some being simply “scribbles” that represented what the child was trying to get across and others were a combination of word/scribble and image/scribble. No matter what the outcome, writing seemed to be fun, and not as is often seen in adulthood, a chore. Thanks to Queens Road Methodist Pre School staff and pupils for their help with the writing task shown.





Talking to each other with symbols In the caves of Pech Merle, Font-de-Gaume and Rouffignac in southern France there is some of the most breathtaking art our planet has to offer. Images of bison, lions and other creatures are painted on the cave walls. Herds of horses and the odd mammoth and giant bull, wander across the rock face. Many of the animals are painted in vivid colours, and in such detail that suggest the artists had acquired considerable skill. These underground art galleries, also turn out to be remarkably old. The works at Rouffignac are said to be around 13,000 years old, while those at nearby Chauvet and Lascaux are thought to be more than 30,000 years old. This testimony on rock walls – in daubs of ochre and charcoal mixed with spittle and fat – shows that our hunter-gatherer ancestors could depict the world around them in a startlingly sophisticated way.

the caves’ images of animals. There are triangles, squares, full circles, semicircles, open angles, crosses and groups of dots. Others are more complex: drawings of hands with distorted fingers (known as negative hands); rows of parallel lines (called finger flutings); diagrams of branch-like symbols known as penniforms, or little sketches of hut-like entities called tectiforms. In total, 26 specific signs are used repeatedly in these caves, created in the millennia when Europe descended into – and emerged from – the last great Ice Age.

Picasso was awestruck. “We have invented nothing,” he remarked gloomily, after a visit to Lascaux in 1940 to inspect the handiwork of his Stone Age predecessors. Not surprisingly, these paintings attract tens of thousands of visitors every year. However, there is another aspect to this art that often escapes attention, but which is now providing scientists with fresh insights into our evolution. Rather than studying those magnificent galloping horses and bison, researchers are investigating the so often overlooked symbols painted beside them. These signs are rarely mentioned in most studies of ancient cave art. Some are gathered in groups, some appear in ones or twos, while others are mixed in with

www.theguardian.com/science/2012/mar/11/cave-painting-symbols-language-evolution


Source - http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=2146414109


Image: Midnight Science (2014-2015),Volume 13, Paper 1 Author: Derek Cunningham


Ogam is the oldest form of writing in Ireland and Scotland. It can still be seen inscribed on hundreds of large and small stones, on the walls of some caves, but also on bone, ivory, bronze and silver objects. The Ogam script was especially well adapted for use on sticks. Sticks are part of the Basque word for “alphabet�. Scholars such as Carney and MacNeill have suggested that ogham was first created as a cryptic alphabet, designed by the Irish so as not to be understood by those with a knowledge of the Latin alphabet. The name Ogam likely comes from oga-ama, ogasun (property, wealth) ama (Priestess, mother) property of the Priestess, which indicates that the script may originally have been designed for use by the clergy of the preChristian religion.

Bill McGlone Image: http://www.crystalinks.com/ogham.html

Language researcher Bill McGlone has written that Celtics had a way of communicating with hand signs and that they often would write these signs to spell messages in rock or wood. A horizontal line was first drawn. Then vertical lines were arranged in groups, either above or below the line, or both. These vertical lines represented the position of the fingers, either raised or bent, or missing. By examining the group of lines in this cave, Bill had deciphered many messages, using old Celtic phonetics. http://www.thebirdman.org/ the image gary vey


Recent Asemic


Reclaimed Text from Youdhisthir Maharjan http://thenewpostliterate.blogspot.co.uk



Some examples of reclaimed text inspired by Youdhisthir Maharjan


Type Hallucinations (DRUNK and CRAZY) Dreams have always been an intriguing part of the human experience. Cultures around the world have tried to explain what they are, projecting their thoughts and interpretations to make sense out of the unknown. As humans, we have a hard time dealing with ambiguity, It bothers us tremendously, and that is because we have a natural tendency to identify and categorize information in order to navigate the world to survive. With type, I looked at the idea of the conscious mind dealing with the unconscious, how does it look like to dream typography? How does giving form to the formless looks like? These are my interpretations. The images were produced when a little drunk using my own previously written/drawn asemic work and loading the images into photoshop and just playing with filters as I thought good at the time. I am both surprised and pleased with the outcomes.



questionnaire I had been interested in the reaction of those that had seen my work up to now, how, dispite most not understanding what I was doing, they had reacted to it as art rather than writing, especially with the more intricate and colourful pieces. I therefore wanted to go back to a more formal look to the work, take it back to writing. For this I laid out a form, a form that had no meaning and only barely looked like a form. Having put some nonsense/asemic writing on it, I gave it to many people to fill in , asking them not to think too much, simply fill in by instinct. I cannot say the outcome was difinitive in any was as far as boxes ticked, but it was interesting how different people, even those from creative backgrounds, interpreted the form in different ways. Some would just randomly fill in, others would try and read/interperate the form by placing their given alphabet/grammatical rules on it. Predominantly though, because it looked like writing it was assumed it was, what else could it be?



The Map


I remember seeing a program in 2009 that featured a drum and bass musician call Goldie who ended up producing a piece of classical music despite not knowing how to read music. Goldie was a competitor on the BBC television conducting series Maestro. At the beginning Goldie does not know how to read or play classical music. During the show Goldie spent from January to the summer of 2009 studying classical music and developing his piece. In the end, the BBC Concert Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Choir conducted by Charles Hazlewood perform Goldie’s piece “Sine Tempore” at the Royal Albert Hall in the 2009 Proms season. On the performance, Elisa Bray said in The Independent that “Goldie has proven himself again. The outcome I was interested in was Goldies marks on paper the he saw representing what he could hear in his head, it was a series of multi coloured marks on a sheet of paper that varied in size and intensity depending on how he saw it, even wished it to be viewed. Now looking at it I see similarities in those marks to that of asemic writing, to each viewer they will mean something slightly different and yet somehow I believe a similar feeling would be achieved. At this point I started to consider the combining of the written with sound and what the writing may look like if produced as sound waves. In an interview published in the Daily Telegraph, Goldie explained to Peter Stanford, among other things, how he got into classical music ... ‘’’The producer who suggested me for the series did so because she had heard I liked Górecki.’ It was, he recalls, his erstwhile girlfriend Björk (they split in 1996) who first introduced Goldie to classical music through the work of Henryk Górecki, whose Symphony of Sorrowful Songs met with great critical and commercial success in the early Nineties. ‘We were in Iceland together one Christmas Eve, looking out of a window at boats in the harbour, with three or four feet of snow. And she put on Górecki and it was just brilliant, beautiful, touching. When I got to know more about him - that he was Polish, that his family were in Auschwitz - I knew what it was that had touched me. This was music that summed up real life. And so it changed the way I thought about classical music.’

Images are screen shots from https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=jauuw6BPCBk


Calligraphy research - Roland Buckingham-Hsiao During my research I came across a piece by Roland BuckinghamHsiaso Research student at the University of Wolverhampton. The 2016 PhD Conference was held at 11am – 3.30pm in Room MC301 at the City Campus on Friday 9th September. It was excellently organised by my friend Isi Agdoaye. It was a paper on a Collaborative Calligraphy performance piece and its relation to his wider research questions (see abstract below). Abstract: The paper was presented and discussed together with a performance work by Roland Buckingham-Hsiao (in collaboration with Taiwanese artist Chou, Cheng-Yu,). The work performed in Taiwan in April last year, dealt with the possibility of collaboratively written script, the similarities and differences of east and western visual composition and performance writing theory as applied to Chinese calligraphy. The performance involved the western perception of Chinese script, notions of unreadability in written script, theories of “asemic” writing, the possibilities of non-symbolic communication in Chinese calligraphy. This work again sparked my interest in the aspect of a type/audio/ image based piece of work. At this stage though I was still unsure of why I was doing this. I was producing some good pieces of work, but unsure why. Images: https://buckinghamhsiao.wordpress.com/

Fragment of a Poem, pencil on paper,


Tree Calligraphy V111


Abstract Calligraphy No. 6, ink on paper, 2016, Roland Buckingham-Hsiao



My versions of the visual outcomes of Buckingham-Hsiao.



‘It looks like writing, but we can’t quite read it’ This comes from www.asemic.net a website about this practise that has potential as an intriguing way of adding focus and drama to paintings, drawings and mixed media pieces. The following pieces of work have inspired me to look harder into possible outcomes for my final MA work.

Kitty Sabatier

Kerri Pollo


Andrew Van Der Merwe.

Sally Harrison


Helen Malone

Miriam LondoĂąo.


StĂŠphanie Devaux

Jennifer Cantwell


Shinichi Maruyama

Elisabeth Couloigner


Troy Innocent

mrcakie


A little more of my own work looking at colours and layers.



So now starting to look at a possible outcome for my research. During various tutorials it had been mentioned that if I was looking into emotions that may be found in my asemic type, that maybe I should try and do some pieces when feeling a certain emotion. It was not until the Christmas/New Year break that I really felt emotive enough to produce that piece of work. I had a particularly bad time with my eldest son the outcome of which was not great. I felt many emotions during the writing of this piece/letter. I will not put those emotions down here as I think it more interesting for you the viewer to read what you can into my mark making. Strangely enough, despite my feelings during the time of writing, I am really pleased with the final piece and found it almost therapeutic making it. The page opposite shows a still from the final film of me writing the letter and the following pages show my set up of a suspended Ipad filming it all.


https://youtu.be/z5IK-ZCeUxg




Glitch Variations On A 2008 Sibyl by Marco Giovenale http://thenewpostliterate.blogspot.co.uk On the blog the new post-literate I found these pieces of work by an artist called Marco Giovenale and I found myself getting closer to an idea for an outcome. This may be were my asemic type meets its digital visual outcome “Glitch� Would this give me the emotional outcome I was looking for?



serendipity Ok, so the wow moment. I put the film I had made of myself writing the letter into Premier Pro mainly to edit out much of the extraneous imagery. I am still learning this piece of software and so sometimes hit a button that maybe I should not have, and I did. Suddenly on the left of my screen was a strange soundwave/glitchy looking image, and yes when the film was played it played as an independant piece. Looking at it closely I saw it was following the movement of my hand as it moved across the page and yet looked like sound waves, it felt relaxing, strangely not one of the emotions I was feeling whilst writing it. If that was not fortuitous enough, on the radio was playing a piece of music by Brian Eno, it worked perfectly with the visual. This does seem a little far fetched, but this is how it happened, genuinely. I unfortunately did not get a screen shot at the moment I noticed this strange visual, but following are some of my process of making the final film output.




Final outcome: https://youtu.be/LynvkOMJgJQ


Creativity ‘closely entwined with mental illness’ By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online 17 October 2012 On looking and listening to my final piece I wandered if this could be put to some use rather than just a “nice bit of work”. I have a friend that works at a school for children with mental illness of various stages of severity and I knew they had rooms in which projections were made and music played. Upon more research I found that creativity is often part of a mental illness, with writers being particularly susceptible. Writers had a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and substance abuse, the Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute had found. They were almost twice as likely as the general population to kill themselves. The dancers and photographers were also more likely to have bipolar disorder. “It is important that we do not romanticise people with mental health problems, who are too often portrayed as struggling creative geniuses” Beth Murphy, The mental health charity Mind

As a group, those in the creative professions were no more likely to suffer from psychiatric disorders than other people. But they were more likely to have a close relative with a disorder, including anorexia and, to some extent, autism, the Journal of Psychiatric Research reports. Lead researcher Dr Simon Kyaga said the findings suggested disorders should be viewed in a new light and that certain traits might be beneficial or desirable. For example, the restrictive and intense interests of someone with autism and the manic drive of a person with bipolar disorder might provide the necessary focus and determination for genius and creativity. Similarly, the disordered thoughts associated with schizophrenia might spark the all-important originality element of a masterpiece. Some troubled minds Novelist Virginia Woolf, who wrote A Room of One’s Own and To the Lighthouse, had depression and drowned herself Fairytale author Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote The Ugly Duckling and The Little Mermaid, had depression US author and journalist Ernest Hemingway, who wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, had depression and killed himself with a shotgun Could it be that this could be worked on?


Novelist Virginia Woolf killed herself


medical uses Asemic or asemantic writing I have found is a style of written self-expression that apparently can be advantageous when working with individuals who have no words for feelings. A study looked to comparatively explore the therapeutic value of expressive writing and asemic writing using a sample of alexithymicschizophrenic adults. Participants were assigned either to the expressive writing or the asemic writing treatment condition, journalled for 15 minutes for seven days. Analysis of the report suggests that “asemic writing facilitates self-expression and temporarily improves mood�. Participants from the expressive writing condition, however, reported difficulties in verbal expression of emotions and mild distress following the exercise, but had improved awareness and understanding of their emotional experiences. The Therapeutic Value of Asemic Writing: A Qualitative Exploration Christine N. Winston, Nazneen Mogrelia & Hemali Maher Pages 142-156 | Published online: 13 Jun 2016

Images: http://artsandminds.org.uk/


Working with students at Cambourne Village College Sheila Ceccarelli (artist) and Yael Pilowsky Bankirer (Psychotherapist) as part of the ‘Young People’s Pilot’, coordinated and managed Arts and Minds, a leading arts and mental health charity in Cambridgeshire found the following outcomes. “Students were given the opportunity to further explore expressive mark making as a tool for self-expression and a vehicle for communication. Whereas in the previous session students had made marks in response to each other’s work in the form of a ‘visual conversation’, in this session students worked alone. They were given the previous week’s work as a canvas on which to work and encouraged to cut shapes out of it. Students worked on a smaller scale and were also given their own sketchbook. Students were asked if they could remember being little, before they could write, but pretending to write real words mimicking the adults behaviour around them. Many of the students had this memory and were keen to give it ago. They might want to write a letter to themselves, a shopping list, a diary about the day, a poem – but were encouraged not to use real letters but imagined ones and be expressive and experimental in the forms, shapes and rhythms of their ‘text’. They were encouraged to go with the flow and see what emerged without worrying too much about what might come out. Overall the session was successful and students all embraced the process with an open, creative and experimental approach”. I now new the area I would like to look at for my final piece of work for my MA. As my accidental discovery of the visual/audio asemic work came late in this project, I obviously need to be looking into the benefits further, but I do hope I can take this further.


Possible outcomes

Room with steps for movement, possibly sound variations on different levels. Type/imagery projected.



An exciting innovation as far as my future work is concerned is this conductive ink, could I combine all my thoughts into one workable useful outcome?


Bare Conductive’s electrically conductive paint and sensor hardware are changing the way that individuals and businesses incorporate electronics and intelligence into the built environment.

Don’t touch the monsters by Studio Macchinette https://www.bareconductive.com/news/dont-touch-the-monsters-by-studio-macchinette/


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Chris Venables Visual Summary VIC703


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