Asemic Writing: Letters & Maps

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Asemic writing is the art of expressing yourself through art forms that are abstract and individualistic.
Understanding asemic writing as a form of artistic expression, and to implement this to create our own personal, expressive works of art.

Project Description
Over the course of this studio, we were given the freedom to be as creative with our process of understanding Asemic Writing. The projects we did turned out to be unique and personal as they expressed different aspects and experiences of an individual.

From mapping out places based on our emotional connection with them to writing letters that could only be deciphered through their colours and strokes, the art works created as a part of this course enabled me to develop a sense of individuality in whatever I produced.

Roles

Sketching | Typography | Journaling | Illustration | Research

Psychogeography

One of our tasks was to create a map using emotional and sensorial connections to the spaces, rather than simply a map based on geography and routes.

Initial sketches for the psychogeography assignment — mapping out spaces with emotions and colours

The final psychogeographic map – places were depicted using colours which represented certain emotions and connections.

I further developed the psychogeographic map and digitised it. The map was designed in two parts – one was a bare outline of the area, and the other was using colours and shapes for the different spaces.

The bare outline of the map was printed on an OHP sheet while the coloured part of the map was printed on regular art paper. The idea is that the colours and shapes add a vibrancy to the place and basically show how my emotional connection to these spaces is what makes the place more valuable and important to me.

As a part of this class, we had to maintain a journal which could be our space to express our thoughts and ideas spontaneously. Our journal was our drawing board where we could be as expressive and as free as possible to explore the concept of asemic writing.

I also started to explore the definition of asemic writing as a "wordless, open semantic form of writing". To do this, I created letters that were written to be read but not to be understood (if that makes sense!). The whole idea behind this was to show how this asemic writing was defined so, because of how it activates our brains to read. This is due to the resemblance to letterforms and language however, the actual work is not necessarily legible because they're meant to be expressive works of art rather than written pieces.

Another psychogeographic map drawn – of my house, labelling spaces based on the conversational flow through the house and the colours depicting various emotions.