Fragments on Asemic Art and Architecture

TR

01 We are living in the middle of a dilemma –the social media is a hungry monster, we endlessly feed its stomach with meaning, just to be digested in an instant. Instagram, which suggests this destiny by its name, works as a cycle of production and consumption that has to be broken. The meaning production itself is creating the meaninglessness of self. Furthermore, if the self had not starved for to look meaningful within social media, it would not be doomed to meaninglessness. So the over-instrumentalization of meaning-creation is problematic.

02 When I begin to prepare for my upcoming seminar, I find myself in the midst of despair and anxiety. I feel hopeless and almost certain that I will fail. This prevents me from starting to work on my paper. Once I overcome this obstacle of frustration, I begin to realise a fact. The fact that if my failure is so inevitable, then there is nothing to worry about. I will fail, it is obvious, so I can relax and start working. This gives me a false sense of relief, and only then can I begin to write. This happened to me again last Tuesday when I was ready to give up on preparing a presentation for you.

03 But a darker relationship with writing emerges at that moment. To my amazement, I had written five or six pages without interruption, fragment by fragment, as if I had been rehearsing these pages for a long time. A moment similar to the theme of the doppelgänger, or a twin-identity that comes out of me like an alter ego, that emerges like a Brad Pitt from Fight Club. This double identity dictates what I write, and this parallels a story in Oruç Aruoba’s book entitled Benlik [Personality]. Aruoba introduces us to his inner beast, which has taken the form of a crab. The crab lives silently inside the body of the writer, only to appear unexpectedly.

04 The process of generating meaning from nothingness during the act of writing can be a challenging one to articulate. This process of dark relationship with writing occurs frequently.

05 On 9 November, I wrote down on my notebook almost seventy passages on asemic art and architecture. This was three days before the scheduled lecture, and I had begun to entertain the prospect of being unable to prepare a presentation for your Architecture and Design Theory lectures. I had been invited to participate in these lectures several months earlier and had expressed no reservations about taking part. I wrote the pieces in one go, with minor corrections. In the process of book-editing the text, I completely revised the English version. I produced the Turkish text by heavily editing the digital translation, in a sense by rewriting it. I also improved the English original with the help of a digital assistant. No alterations were made to the sequence of the passages. I did not consult any publication or previously taken notes whatsoever.

06 I would like to start with “creating meaning in architecture”: Every architectural element is designed to be part of a given meaning. Imagine a stick. Length, cross section and perforation, as well as materiality and colour, cannot escape our choices.

07 An archenemy of architecture is undoubtedly entropy −where all layers of pre-given meanings are at risk.

08 Syntax and semantics: A dual mechanism for the perpetual creation of meaning. Even design and the creative process rely on this dual mechanism. Syntax and semantics create a web of meaning around a basic element. And when that element tends to escape the given order, it is rewarded with meaning for its courageous act.

09 Indecision in architectural design: The meaning-giver falls into ambiguity, into a web of choices −unable to decide which way to turn. However, this indecision is quite different from what we might call ‘asemic’, since indecision is not a permanent state, but only transitory and part of the designer’s ‘wandering ritual’. In a garden of forking paths, to use a Borgesian metaphor, the so-called wise designer will arrive at the design goal and, sooner or later, overcome the ambiguity without having to feel guilty about finalisation.

10 Asemics is a relatively new, emerging field of creativity in literature, and Michael Jacobson is one of the leading initiatives of the younger generation. The earliest examples go back to Henri Michaux’s asemic gesture drawings of the 1920s, and it only became a movement in the 1990s, not surprisingly, the time when personal computers became widespread and people began to abandon cursive for screen and keyboard, as Peter Schwenger notes. (Image 1)

11 The idea of writing without meaning, freed from the ball and chain of semantics and rescued from the linguistic dungeons, must be as new as the modern condition, which has nothing to do with the modern metropolis, where the alienation of the individual has become a condition of existence.

12 The modern individuals, once uprooted from the ties of a given land, place or locality, found themselves in a dual position of emancipation and nonsense. On the one hand, they could freely explore the promised land of the city in disguise and not as a relative of the locality; on the other hand, they were in danger of falling into the abyss of estrangement and psychological alienation caused by the capitalist economy. As George Simmel had explained in his text on the early metropolis and mental life, a condition of equality of goods, all drifting and floating weightlessly, caused this ever-deepening meaninglessness.

13 The capitalist economy of the equalized, homogenized and standardized universe of commodities has erased all distinctions in an attempt to re-create a flow of goods and, through this erasure, to erase the personal qualities, the differences of the individual: Meaning. This is a dark irony; as the system becomes more bio politically competent, the person is approached, but this is a personalization at the cost of the person’s ‘personhood’ being rolled up and then put under full surveillance, all consumption behaviors being coded and subtly exploited.

14 So it was the modern condition that simultaneously freed the citizen from the burden of place and threw them into the darkness of emancipation, where they had to construct all the meanings to re-exist.

15 We can trace the liberating act of asemic in the history of art: There are examples of calligraphic art from the 14th century Byzantine period, which were then called Monocondyles, meaning in a single move. (Image 2)

16 In September 2021, Enis Batur, the famous poet and writer, sent me a link that detailed those nonsense yet unique, artistic yet asemic, personified specimens that could without hesitation be considered Istanbul’s precursors, the ancestors of asemic art. Interestingly, these Byzantine signatures or monocondyles are paradoxically meaningless and at the same time signs of authentication. Any legal document could be signed with a monocondyle. (Le monocondyle: un délire graphique - Christian Förstel. Accessed: 25 January 2025)

17 Further evidences of asemic writing can be found in Henri Michaux’s Mouvemént series –these cursive gestures were not, for him, singular artistic outcomes, but a series of indeterminations, a strong emphasis arising from the restless, writing body, a body in motion, and by being so, trying to avoid a pre-given meaning: They neither belong to language nor art.

18 Spills of paint, random throws of a scattered photograph, randomly reassembled pieces of a sculpture, the wanderings of Dadaists in the city: All this and much more can be baptized as attempts to evade an ultimate meaning. Collage, bricolage, atonal music, concrete poetry, to name but a few, pushed meaning to its limits, materially and semantically, to open up a new space.

19 What was the position of architecture in this turmoil? Were there attempts to get rid of spatial, syntactic and semantic structures, as courageously as in art? Or were we confronted with the precursors of a tabula rasa, which were in fact struggling for another manifesto to found a universe of ultimate meaning? This was especially the case in architecture. Throughout the twentieth century, most of the myriad attempts, large and small, to nullify and invalidate the art scene, set out to cure a hypothetical disease from which they had pledged to save society, had in common the priceless agenda they had bestowed upon humanity.

20 Negative connotations such as nonsense, emptiness, nothingness, with the black sun of pessimistic humor, were not to appear until the 1990s, when the computer captured the world once and for all, as Peter Schwenger would agree.

21 Leaving behind the universe of pen and ink to reinvent themselves in front of the screen and the keyboard, people were voluntarily reopening a field that had hitherto been occupied and held hostage –the world of writing. Verba volant, scripta manent –the Latin mantra that inscribed the priority of writing over verbal communication– was at stake, as the swiftness of the electronic keyboard was about to conquer the realm of Gutenberg.

22 Emancipated from the slavery of a collective burden, created hand by hand with language and culture, the hand was for the first time in the long history of homo faber able to write freely –with a basic impulse freed from meaning. This emancipation carried with it the risk that handwriting would become unnecessary and junk, but handwriting, with its unique capacity, could now be elevated to the level of art.

23 Artists from all over the world began to write asemic in the 1990s, as Schwenger observes −to be able to communicate without using language, to liberate the cursive script and thus the writing body to create a new art milieu.

24 This crisis of handwriting coincides drastically with the famous crisis in architecture schools −the heads of architectural design studios began to complain about their students’ inability to draw sketches. This digital versus manual debate was part of a bigger picture, and teachers thought that this problem was endemic to architectural education. But it was not.

25 Students in the globalizing digital world spent most of their learning time at the keyboard rather than the notebook, resulting in a dramatic alienation from cursive, so much so that a ‘cursive illiteracy’ began to emerge in schools. Pupils could no longer read anyone else’s handwriting, only their own, if they ever could. A twenty-first century version of the confusion of Babel.

26 It is important to establish the distinction between automatic writing and asemic writing. The concept of automatic writing was pioneered by Surrealists as early as the first quarter of the 20th century. The premise of automatic writing is that it enables the subconscious to be expressed through the uninhibited movement of the hand.

27 This liberation is illusory, because in automatic writing one assumes that one does not control the writing, but one also inevitably limits oneself to this free flow of connotations, which may be nothing more than the author’s state of mind, often dry rather than poetic.

28 What is asemic writing? Like the gibberish of a lunatic or a child, is it the equivalent of meaningless speech? Asemic writing must be more than that: It is an escape from the prisons of semantics and syntax, and thus from meaning, by turning the tool of writing against its father, language; but this time taking revenge on its poisonous words and venomous paragraphs.

29 Schwenger refers to theorists such as Roland Barthes and artists such as Henri Michaux and Cy Twombly. It will come as no surprise that Barthes is mentioned, for Barthes not only proclaimed the death of the author and with it the parallel birth of the reader, he also made it clear that he was against authorship, against seeing someone else’s name on the cover of a book.

30 What Roland Barthes was after was a certain kind of writing, a writing that, he said, would transcend the limits of a book and disseminate itself in a plurality of media, jumping from one book to another; a writing that knows no limits, only a certain kind of existential desire, a desire that would keep itself in a relentless state of being: "Being-writing", in Deleuzian terms.

31 This writing that escapes from the book to take up a nomadic line of flight from one text, one individual to another and is a perfect stranger to power, the power of language, of literature. This flight is in no way useful, so it cannot be used. So it is with asemic writing: It is the ultimate act of writing, a pure form of desire.

32 Asemic writing does not produce a narrative, but obviously a reader. It produces no character, but a unique art. It produces no style or genre and is always on the sharp edge of the linguistic knife. It is neither a cipher nor a code that can be broken one day to leave its mystery to meaning. Can such an architecture be imagined? The architect is after pure form, not pure desire.

33 A non-code system of signs that still calls itself architecture? Can we imagine a writing of architecture that always avoids ending up in a meaningful spatial fiction? Could one imagine a non-architecture that resembles architecture but has no intention of becoming architecture?

34 Playfulness, parody and dark sarcasm would accompany such an asemic architecture. Daniel Libeskind’s Micromega works of the 1970s, Peter Eisenman’s writings on the zero degree of architecture, Tschumi’s idea of disjunction, Lebbeus Woods’ post-apocalyptic illustrations, John Hejduk’s beastly artefacts could all correspond to an asemic architecture, if not to a surrealist one.

35 But is it not profoundly ironic that all these revolutionary attempts to free architecture from its burden have been reduced to paper architectures, as fantasies paving the way for entrepreneurs and developers? The realm of nonsense was left as a playground for voluntary madmen.

36 Is there a place for false architecture in a post-pandemic world? Would an asemic practice of architecture help to escape an ultimately meaningless universe where death is closer than ever?

37 Is there really an architectural mystery behind the tools of design? Are they as powerful as they are said to be −that is, capable of creating meaning even when they do not intend to?

38 Where would a pedagogy of design lead if it did not aim to use design tools, but instead started from an asemic point of view? Would it not be more honest to start from nonsense rather than from omnipotent architectural thinking?

39 Architectural design practice is always a set of constraints aimed at a context of architectural representation –a threshold that, once crossed, would automatically position the designer in the promised land of security, of meaning. Once the heights of architectural meaning are reached, the tool has done its job.

40 All the skills, all the labor and all the creativity are invested in a refined, prestigious, precise architectural representation, which is also obliged to prove that it uses the latest digital technology. This obligation is even greater when the design is deliberately primitivized. They could have used it, but they did not, so they expect applause for not doing so.

41 Asemic art has no prophecy. Asemic art has no cure. Asemic art cannot be taught; it simply appears out of the blue, it is the spirit of the age. Asemic art cannot be reduced to mere decoration or gibberish. Asemic art is an eruption.

42 Asemic art could be useful, and that can only be a critical function for architecture. Asemic art cannot be used, but can be seen as an alien, a stranger that would invalidate all pre-given meanings. Asemic art would be like writing with the left hand for a right-handed person.

43 Asemic art would be like singing a song backwards, anagramming a given text or re-encrypting a code. Asemic architecture has been taking place in the form of pastiche since the beginning of postmodernism.

44 Asemic architectural practice begins when we try to think the impossible in architectural representation. Like the stairs of Escher or a Penrose triangle. Every architectural tool is a trap of meaning, because every tool is a construct, a systemic device made to construct other constructions. So it must be blown away.

45 What would the sabotage of asemic architecture bring? Topological digital architecture, with all its monstrosities, has the potential to create one. Asemic architecture is therefore not an instrument, but a mood.

46 Architectural asemic could be the equivalent of an artificial language that parallels conventional architectural language, but in an inverted, twisted way, so that it can never be imitated or reproduced in cases like global capitalism. An asemic architecture can seduce in a very different way from globalized architecture. This seduction is its only capacity.

47 The seduction of asemic architecture has been misunderstood, even in its most famous figures. Take Luigi Serafini’s world-famous, enigmatic encyclopedia, the Codex Seraphinianus. For forty years after its publication in 1981, occultists, cryptographers, ufologists, mystics and the like tried to decipher it –believing that once the code was broken, meaning would reign.

48 But when Luigi Serafini, the book’s author, finally declared in 2008 that there was no hidden meaning or code embedded in the Codex’s enigmatic script, the curious crowds were dismissed. But they never gave up. What Serafini may have meant by this demystifying declaration is that the Codex was the first volume of a greater book to come. At least that is how I took it.

49 Luigi Serafini, at the age of 27, wrote the only book worth writing: The Codex Seraphinianus. But in my opinion, it was the beginning of a saga to be written for generations. The next volumes are waiting to be written. New authors could extend the enterprise in their own way. In short it is not the style but the spirit that is contagious.

50 Asemic writing is in some ways a perfect Oulipian enterprise: By forbidding any meaningful resemblance to the letters of the alphabet, it takes a lot of practice to write Asemic fluently. A secret language that remains a secret to its creator. In this way, it is perfectly Borgesian.

51 This profound paradox: You are free to write anything, as long as your writing does not coincide with any meaningful letter or word. “Minor literature” in the Deleuzian sense.

52 Architecture students are among the most willing to enlist in the army of architectural meaning. They all know that the game of meaning is played voluntarily, although they never intend to cross the fences of meaning. They are encouraged to pretend that the world ends at the edge of the architecture village.

53 At the end of the day, even the most disbelieving architecture students would do their best not to disappoint the archi-village professors who know no other land than the meadows of Archiland.

54 The royal science of academic architecture, built on the pillars of rational meaning, is fueled by the obedience of the clever architecture student.

55 If the student were even for a moment unwilling to obey the truth regime of architecture, the academics of the Royal Sciences would immediately fall into the black hole of non-meaning, asemic, where rules no longer apply. They would laugh at it. But they laugh at their own stupidity without knowing it. Everything will be reduced to generalized exceptions, so that exception will rule again: The Kingdom of ’Pataphysics.

56 The famous pataphysical laboratory mouse prevents falling into such an abyss. Scientists put this mouse in the labyrinth, it leads directly to the other end where cheese is put, not because the scientists are wise but because the mouse wants to please them and not disappoint them, so acts accordingly. The pataphysical mouse deceives the royal scientist, as Christian Bök states.

57 Imagine such an asemic condition within the academy: Faculties of architecture would face a final collapse and diminish forever. They would have no rules to guide the discipline in a world of exceptions. The Kingdom of ’Pataphysics is inevitable and imminent.

58 I began to talk about creating meaning with a stick. The stick is one of the oldest tools humanoids have used. A stick to hunt, to walk, to explore; to frighten an animal, to climb, to measure the depth of mud or a river; to threaten other people, to fight, to kill. Today, almost a quarter of the 21st century behind us, we live in the Neolithic digital age.

59 Now some theorists are trying to hide America’s guilt by clinging to the word “Anthropocene”, as if it were a philosophical miracle to have destroyed the planet. Like the humanoid with the stick, a single tool characterizes the Neolithic digital post humanoid: The smartphone. One tool for all possible actions, goods, desires, fights, explorations, entertainments, communications, languages, arts, knowledge and everything else. Only to make us believe that we cannot live without it, as if it were a stick.

60 Is the smartphone the ultimate signifier or the reservoir of possible meanings? Everything is concentrated in a single device –the smart phone, which will become a non-existent, ghostly object in the coming years, is on the verge of becoming unbreakable. This could also be another threshold for human beings.

61 Today, in a world of total individualization, everyone finds salvation in a Harry Potter-like phantasmagorical parallel universe where you can become a witch yourself with a magic wand. The wizard’s wand is the summit that today’s digital neolithics want to climb. They are the theologians of the 21st century, the sectarians who dream of everything in one object or in one word.

62 This concentration of meaning in a single techno-device is no accident. Once the universe is contained in an artefact, meaning will be solid for the first time in history.

63 Will non-meaning, asemic, entropy, the black hole, then be overcome? Although asemic art or asemic architecture is not organized or systematic, it is likely to be a contemporary tabula rasa, washing away all the burdens of rational histories and putting the black hole back in the middle of our culture.

64 What was modern architecture in the beginning? The earliest modern writings on architecture are based on Leon Battista Alberti, who in the 15th century wrote about the laws of architecture. Was Alberti the forerunner of the realm of meaning in architecture? We are taught in architecture schools that he was. But his little-known text on ciphers has not yet been translated into Turkish. For me, it is the very first text on architecture, where Alberti shows that translation, disguise, ciphering and coding, language games, are the real foundations of our culture. And this text leads me directly to the idea of a potential architecture.

65 Gilles Deleuze, in one of his lectures in which he asked what it means to have an idea in philosophy, said that philosophy is not a tool made to think, to speculate on any subject that comes along. Philosophy, as Deleuze puts it, is not a mechanical device, ready to be applied to any concept. I think the same is true of architecture: Architecture is not a discipline ready to design every necessary building. The over-instrumentalization of architectural design has made the meaningful universe of architecture obsolete.

66 Asemic architecture could be the answer. Perry Kulper, Brian Cantley and many others are already exploring the new horizons of non-meaning in their work. Asemic architecture does not offer salvation, but it is well aware that without a personified universe of synthetic meanings, all creative fields are bankrupt. Architecture is no exception.