Having reached the end of punctuation, I determined that the alphabet was next—only to be diverted by Peter Schwenger’s eye-opening book, Asemic: The Art of Writing.
There has been a trend of invented glyphs in sci-fi graphics over the past couple of decades. Eg FUI's (fiction user interfaces) or lettering on the sides of spaceships or other vehicles. Asemic to us but presumably legible to the alien cultures represented in the stories. Lots of them look vaguely Korean, perhaps because the blocky shapes resemble heavy sanserif fonts beloved by early sci fi futurists.
Nice! There’s a brief discussion in Schwenger’s book of some interstitial cases of asemic writing, including scripts that are meaningful in fiction but uninterpretable by us.
Xu Bing is an interesting case, because after his Book from the Sky, which is smack in the center of the asemic canon (as you've described it, not a category I had conceptualized before reading this) he went on to write The Book from the Ground, which is the opposite: no language but utterly legible, written in symbols which aren't words nor standardized but which are perfectly comprehensible (which would be interesting to consider alongside emoji, although I think his book predates emoji, but maybe it just predates my own knowledge of them; at any rate he's not writing in emoji, it's cooler and weirder). (I go on about it here: stephenfrug.blogspot.com/2011/07/xu-bings-book-from-ground.html) Opposite in another way is a third project (done after the sky and before the ground) called Square Word Calligraphy, which at first glance looks (to non-Chinese readers) illegible—it looks like Chinese—but which, once examined closely, turns out to be strangely shaped English letters which can be read. Having made these transitions (text that looks like Chinese but is actually asemic, text that looks Chinese but is actually English, and then text that looks like nothing but is actually a narrative) throws an interesting light on the asemic project, I think.
There has been a trend of invented glyphs in sci-fi graphics over the past couple of decades. Eg FUI's (fiction user interfaces) or lettering on the sides of spaceships or other vehicles. Asemic to us but presumably legible to the alien cultures represented in the stories. Lots of them look vaguely Korean, perhaps because the blocky shapes resemble heavy sanserif fonts beloved by early sci fi futurists.
Nice! There’s a brief discussion in Schwenger’s book of some interstitial cases of asemic writing, including scripts that are meaningful in fiction but uninterpretable by us.
Xu Bing is an interesting case, because after his Book from the Sky, which is smack in the center of the asemic canon (as you've described it, not a category I had conceptualized before reading this) he went on to write The Book from the Ground, which is the opposite: no language but utterly legible, written in symbols which aren't words nor standardized but which are perfectly comprehensible (which would be interesting to consider alongside emoji, although I think his book predates emoji, but maybe it just predates my own knowledge of them; at any rate he's not writing in emoji, it's cooler and weirder). (I go on about it here: stephenfrug.blogspot.com/2011/07/xu-bings-book-from-ground.html) Opposite in another way is a third project (done after the sky and before the ground) called Square Word Calligraphy, which at first glance looks (to non-Chinese readers) illegible—it looks like Chinese—but which, once examined closely, turns out to be strangely shaped English letters which can be read. Having made these transitions (text that looks like Chinese but is actually asemic, text that looks Chinese but is actually English, and then text that looks like nothing but is actually a narrative) throws an interesting light on the asemic project, I think.
I didn’t know about The Book from the Ground—thanks for that and for your writing about it!
The Man Ray looks like a redacted Epstein file.