INTRODUCTION POUR ASEMIC COLLABORATIVE BOOK 16#3

Asemics 16

Collaborative Mail-Art Book Project

INTRODUCTION TO EDITION 3

This third edition of the Asemics 16 collaborative book project is a collection of highly innovative work by artists who are members of the thriving, global mail-art community. On the pages ahead, you will find work by painters, collage artists, photographers, conceptual artists, and visual poets. They applied their talents to create new work in the esoteric and endlessly fascinating realm of asemic writing.

Asemic writing includes the invention of imaginary languages with corresponding symbols and systems for their arrangement. An asemic text suggests a language, might at times reveal traces of known language, but ultimately cannot be read as any existing language or extinct language that has been recorded.

Much asemic writing today mimics symbols transcribed on an otherwise blank page: written correspondence (cursive asemics), the printed page of a book. Perhaps because visual artists have delved into asemics as well as writers, color, images, textiles, found text and objects – among other material – are sometimes employed to provide context and suggest narratives. Mail-artists, in particular, seem to favor liberally incorporating the visual arts. This accounts for much of the visual richness of Asemics 16.

This approach is a common thread connecting the work of members of the Asemics 16 project; the result is the creation of hybrid forms that meld traditional distinctions between the visual image and linguistic symbol (visual poetry) – pushing us ahead into the era of post-literature and, paradoxically, pushing us back to the illuminated book and ultimately back to the archaic, to the origins of language and symbols. A fascinating aspect of this edition is the artists who find asemic symbols in nature; it is almost as if they wished to erase the heavy accumulation of culture over centuries and millennia to begin anew. Others prefer to sift among the ruins of older worlds for inspiration.

Cheryl Penn, a South African artist whose work frequently visits the border between image and text, deserves great praise for establishing the concept of Asemics 16. I am thrilled to have been her partner on this adventure. She is founder of the South African Mail-Art School and developed her process for creating collaborative books from her study of New York City artist Ray Johnson; he was instrumental in establishing the mail-art movement in the 1960s.

The project was launched in May 2011. The International Union of Mail-Artists (IUOMA), founded by Ruud Janssen of the Netherlands, served as an ideal headquarters in cyberspace for an effort that required extensive coordination and communication. One fascinating aspect of the project made possible through IUOMA was group discussions that preceded individual work on chapters (and later sharing drafts). These included forming a consensus definition of asemic writing, providing consciously flexible parameters.

The mail-art community, inherently connected to Fluxus, has been a conduit and supporter of concrete poetry, visual poetry, haptic poetry as well as asemic writing for decades. It is gratifying that Asemics 16 can serve as a chronicle for the work of the wonderfully gifted artists who continue to advance these forms.

De Villo Sloan

August 15, 2011

Auburn, New York, USA