I got really into asemic writing over the past period. Truthfully, this interest in illegable writing began in 2021 but that seems disturbingly long ago.

What is asemic writing? One definition is that it is ‘writing with no semantic content.’ However, since developing this as a practice (written, visual, artistic, all) I think I might have unearthed a sub-genre that is writing with an inherent semantic content, though it is only known or visible to the writer and not to the reader/audience. I’m going to go into this deeper in a seperate, upcoming post on Asemic Writing as a Practice. This post is about when I wanted to learn how to make digital typefaces and decided my first one should be asemic.

LET LETTERS SPEAK

In the summer of 2021, I applied to the Parler les Lettres (Let Letters Speak) summer school at le Signe in Chaumont, France, held by type designer Naïma Ben Ayed as part of the Biennale Internationale de Design Graphique ’21 (International Graphic Design Biennial ‘21). Ben Ayed, who is specialised in Arabic type design, created the programme to deliberately give precedent to non-Latin based writing systems, specifically calling for participants who wanted to learn how to make digital typefaces and were interested in experimenting with the notions and intersections of language and letterforms.

At the time I had a research lab called Band of Burnouts as part of a fellowship with the School of Commons that was about imagining burnout as a collective, rather than individual, experience. Part of this lab was around recognising, or at least considering, the body as a producer of knowledge (side project/intervention on this here.) When hearing people share their stories and experiences of having a burnout, words and accounts of a sense of their body ‘speaking to them’ or ‘telling them something’ would come up regularly. There was a notion that the body had a language that was not the same as what comes out of our mouths, when the body speaks often those sensations and goings-on evade words. Verbal explanation escapes us. And yet, there is something universal in that body speaking thing that we can connect with eachother over, even if we don’t speak the same verbal language. She speaks French/Japanese/Brazilian Portuguese and I don’t – but we can understand a commonality between bad period pain or indigestion. I felt there was a potential and an intersection between this body-talking thing and asemic writing. And of course I loved the idea of making a digital typeface that was asemic. When something seems nonsensical or absurdist, I’ll be the first to say there is point to what appears pointless. Whatever is subversive in character holds promise and potential. Plus, these things we do best contain an element of joy, playfulness, fun, and surprise.

In my application I explained my desire to create a digital typeface that was asemic, one that took inspiration from the non-verbal language of the body—the ‘language’ that doesn’t seem to compute with our usual words, can be international and universal (we may not speak the same verbal language, but it is possible you can relate to how my body feels after exertion or what it’s like when a headache is reverberating from between the eyebrows)—and simultaneously could create a vacuum of meaning that lies open for the reader to fill in and interpret. Thankfully they liked my idea to develop an asemic typeface which could represent the body speaking.

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SOMASOMA

And so, SomaSoma was born. From handsketches into digital forms, I learnt how to make a digital typeface using Glyphs3. The trial is long expired and that programme too expensive to buy into for more time to play around. I got my asemic typeface into a happy-enough state to share, for anybody who cares to, to play around with it too. Below you’ll see images of its manifestation and a statement about SomaSoma‘s intent, plus the link to download it and see what happens for yourself too.

DOWNLOAD

Feel free to download SOMASOMA and try it out for yourself.
I hope you can have some asemic fun with it. –  ♡ Jess

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