Jeff Crouch's excellent words for my photo.... and would like to point out its similarity to Helix Nebula (photo NASA) for your end of year solar holiday....
Indeed, the semantics of these statements may or may not produce much of any kind of truth.
They could also bring about a bit of confusion, but confusion requires something ... .
And did you notice?
Just confusion?
An attempt to intervene for the sake of clarity.
And there may even be statement denial.
There may not.
But history is another kind of collection, true or not.
As we live in these conditions now, we make our conditions norms, and norms serve as our rules whether our rules call for compliance or call for change or call for definition ... or call for something or other ... but then, what happens next?
Else-wise, the asemic condition often escapes such activity. For meaning in this way, the asemic condition usually lacks.
Soon enough, philosophy engages the asemic condition and blurts out "paradox."
But no paradox is likely here as silence too belongs to music.
Yet the intervention begins, sort of.
And will the intervention allow for the asemic condition? or move to meaning?
Out now from Post-Asemic Press, Gradients by Kristine Snodgrass!
She best explains the book here:
"Gradients is a book of digital transmographications of asemics tattooed and drawn on the poet’s body. The work plays with mutations, embellishment, ritual, and collaboration with artists and tattoo artists. This book offers a moment to look at the process and images that resulted."
“Snodgrass’s Gradients is a haunting series of visual poems, examining the relationships between images and ideologies, particularly the misogynistic currents in American commercial discourse and its depictions of femininity. Asemic poems, written or tattooed directly onto the poet’s body, are photographed and then transformed by the poet through glitching. The resulting “Gradients” allow perversely fascinating visions of societal structures that emerge from obliterations of the female form. The reader is at once reminded of the ideological implications of any image, so often and so easily overlooked and accepted, as well as the role of the viewer in creating the real world effects of these implications. It is an astonishing book!”
–Andrew Brenza
“In the twisted cosmic dance of cannibalistic energies, Kristine Snodgrass’ Gradients emerges as a frenzied feast for the senses. It devours the boundaries of perception, consuming the flesh of conventional art forms and regurgitating a psychedelic organ traffic of raw expression. Through glitched visions and asemic transgressions, it devours the oppressive structures that confine us, devouring them with insatiable hunger. Within Gradients, the body becomes an altar of consumption, where tattoos and asemic writings are etched upon the skin, merging with the very essence of existence. It is a ritual of devouring, a carnal communion with the chaotic forces that reside within. The colors bleed and merge, swirling in a cosmic maelstrom of ecstasy and despair, as the boundaries between self and other dissolve into an abyss of cosmic cannibalism. The images and collages pulsate with an unearthly vitality, drawing us into a vortex of fragmented realities. It is a visual chaos, where the grotesque and the beautiful intertwine in an intricate dance of creation and destruction. Gradients devours the limitations of perception, transcending the confines of the known universe and plunging us into the depths of cosmic cannibalism. In this swirling chaos, pain and pleasure intertwine, merging into a sublime ecstasy that defies comprehension. It is a journey into the darkest recesses of the psyche, where the primal urges of consumption and creation merge into a singular cosmic act. Gradients is a testament to the insatiable hunger of the creative spirit, a feast for those willing to abandon the safety of the known and embrace the devouring embrace of cosmic cannibalism.”
—Kenji Siratori, author of Blood Electric and Paracelsus
Bio: Snodgrass is an artist, poet, professor, editor, cultural advocate, and publisher living in Tallahassee, Florida. Her written and visual works have appeared world-wide. She has collaborated with dozens of artists, writers, and musicians. She is the author of over 20 books and chapbooks most recently, GRADIENTS, forthcoming from Post Asemic Press. She founded the group, Women Asemic Artists and Visual Poets, a global network that connects women in the visual poetry field. Kristine is Associate Professor of English in the field of creative writing at Florida A&M University. You can find more about her at kristinesnodgrass.com.
The Asemic Condition: Escaping Intelligence for Other Intelligence
Switching from Asemics to AI as a Means of Introduction
The AI Condition is, in part, the concern that AI may be something smarter than we are. Indeed, within a well-defined system, AI is often smarter than anything else operating within the limits of that system: Chess and GO are particularly good examples of systems dominated by AI.
The first problem we face in the AI Condition is that our sense of intelligence is, at best, only defined within a closed system. We have the ability to define intelligence in terms of some condition or set of conditions in a system, but we do not have anything like a total system whereby intelligence is well defined.
Note that the problem of the incomplete system is somewhat an encapsulation of the Halting Problem whereby we cannot always determine whether a system, once initialized, will complete of its own accord or never stop.
So, we are mostly working within the museum of our own intelligence when we define intelligence: intelligence is self-referential to human being at inception.
With such referentiality, the second problem is a kind of Turing Test: how do we distinguish the human from AI?
The usual means to distinguish the human from AI is to posit meaning as the endpoint of human intelligence, but doing so may give away AI as, for now, it only serves to enhance workflows.
Asemics, free from the larger term asemic writing, which is writing without recourse to semantic meaning, is a practice that produces something whose end is not meaning per se. All the while, asemics is not merely parodic, nor is it non-sense, nor is it noise. These elements are often present in asemic practice, but then too, asemics has an aesthetic, which is not without meaning as such.
What then does asemic practice do? It often reveals the NULL of the system where meaning has yet to become. It escapes meaningful workflows.