Lineage of Asemantic (Asemic) Writing: From Dada to the Post-Digital Era

Asemantic writing (commonly called asemic writing in English) is an expressive mode that, while appearing to be linguistic inscription, consists of strings of characters or signs that are unreadable in any existing language. Literally “writing without meaning” (a-semic), the term asemic derives from the sense of “lacking specific semantic content.” Linguistically speaking, whereas ordinary prose is a system of signs that conveys meaning (semantics), in asemic writing the connection between sign (grapheme) and meaning (semantic content) is deliberately severed. In a 1998 letter, Jim Leftwich remarked: “If the seme is the smallest unit of meaning, then an asemic text uses units of language for reasons other than producing meaning.” In other words, asemic writing foregrounds non-semantic aspects—such as the form, tactility, and arrangement of signs themselves.

The concept of asemic writing also resonates with the context of poststructuralism and deconstruction that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century. For instance, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, in discussing the role of blank space within linguistic texts, referred to it as “asemic spacing.” The intervals inserted between letters and words signify nothing in themselves; yet, precisely by being there, they enable meaning to occur. From the perspective of semiotics and semantics, Saussurean linguistics has long emphasized the separation of signifier and signified. Roland Barthes offers the example of a typo: if one intends to write officer but mistypes offiver, the result belongs to no known lexicon and is given no context; the “code is interrupted,” leaving behind a pure signifier. Barthes called such a “word without meaning” an asemic word, highlighting the presence of the pure signifier in textual theory. As poststructuralist thinkers suggest, texts always harbor slippage and différance of meaning; asemic writing is theoretically compelling in that it pushes toward the limit-case of a complete absence of meaning. Indeed, the Derridean condition of the infinite deferral of meaning is arguably instantiated in asemic works. From this vantage, discussions of asemic writing often draw upon advanced theories of semiotics and deconstruction.

That said, “without meaning” does not entail sheer, absolute meaninglessness. While asemic writing lacks determinate linguistic content, it emphasizes visual and affective information and the expressive force of the gesture of inscription itself. Tim Gaze notes that verbal texts carry not only semantic information but also aesthetic information of shape and emotional information legible from handwriting. Asemic writing, by excluding semantic information, foregrounds precisely these aesthetic and affective contents. In practice, viewers freely associate from the arrangement of non-semantic signs—eliciting mental responses and interpretations as if beholding pure visual art. Meaning is then either generated “from nothing” by the reader or remains indefinitely withheld. Critics describe this as a vacuum of meaning that, paradoxically, opens space for new insights. De Villo Sloan, for example, argues that by interrupting and breaking conventional meaning-effects, new meanings and recognitions become possible, and that in asemic texts the visual and material aspects of lettering come to the fore.

Historical Development: Poetic Practices in the West

Early to mid-20th century: dawn and forerunners. Although asemic writing as such only came to be recognized as a distinct movement in the late twentieth century, its prehistory is scattered across the avant-gardes. Dadaist poets boldly practiced the de-semanticization of language; Hugo Ball’s poem Karawane, for instance, is famous as a sequence of sounds devoid of logical meaning. Surrealism advocated automatic writing (automatisme), experiments in inscription that bypass conscious control, often generating texts and character strings that defy comprehension. In the United States, Emily Dickinson left behind in the 1850s rapid, near-illegible jottings of poems; and the Surrealists’ contemporary Man Ray produced in 1924 a visual poem, Paris, mai 1924, that contains no words at all. In retrospect, these may be regarded as prototypical asemic practices.

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Man Ray — “Paris, mai 1924”

1950s–1970s: Concrete/Visual Poetry and “Unreadable Hand”

The currents of Concrete Poetry and visual poetry, which treat letters and typography as plastic elements, formed crucial soil for asemic writing. In the 1950s, American painter Cy Twombly began producing canvases with scrawled, alphabet-like marks, and throughout his career unveiled numerous scriptural paintings that seem legible yet remain unreadable. Critic Carrie Noland observes of Twombly and Robert Morris that they focus on the bodily gesture of inscription—returning to the origins of proto-writing—and that their incessant strokes ultimately render letters illegible. As Peter Schwenger has shown, Twombly’s works communicate “the essence of writing itself,” which is usually obscured by the message (meaning) that written words convey.

Meanwhile, in Europe the postwar movement of Lettrism in France proclaimed the dismantling of existing language, producing numerous works with alphabetic fragments and meaningless character strings. Lettrist poets such as Isidore Isou emphasized the power of signs without meaning, creating intentionally meaningless texts as a form of visual poetry. In the 1960s, Brion Gysin (UK-born painter/poet), influenced by Arabic calligraphy and Japanese sho, produced an energetic body of illegible calligraphic paintings. For example, his Calligraphie (1960) looks like Arabic scripts or Chinese characters but consists of nonexistent letters. Brazilian artist Mira Schendel likewise created in the 1960s works such as Ancient Writing (1964), employing her own character-like forms—now positioned as early instances of asemic art. Argentine artist Mirtha Dermisache produced multiple “illegible books” across the 1960s–70s—handwritten “letters” and “newspapers” that are entirely unreadable. Her originality drew the attention of Roland Barthes, who praised in a letter that her writing is neither figurative nor abstract yet achieves astonishing expression solely through the morphology of letters. Even before the term asemic writing became established, Dermisache’s works were highly regarded as art made with unreadable letters, and she consistently referred to them as writings.

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Twombly, Cy — Calligraphic Paintings

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Isou, Isidore — Lettrist Poems

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Brion Gysin — Calligraphie

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Schendel, Mira — Monotypes

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Dermisache, Mirtha — Illegible Letters and Newspapers

1980s: The Invention of Imaginary Languages

In 1981, the Italian artist Luigi Serafini published the celebrated oddity Codex Seraphinianus, a work modeled on an imaginary encyclopedia and written entirely in an unknown language (a self-invented, undecipherable script). Coupled with its fantastical plates, the book drew wide attention. Although its script is methodically organized, its meaning remains wholly opaque, earning it the epithet “the most beautiful meaningless book in the world.” Serafini himself did not explicitly position the work within the avant-garde, but from the vantage of the later asemic-writing movement it stands as a crucial milestone. Around the same time, “unreadable text” works appeared sporadically across Europe and North America. In Italy, Bianca Menna (stage name Tomaso Binga) presented in the 1970s a set of performances and works under the rubric scritture desemantizzate (“de-semanticized writings”). Reaching further back, the Italian designer-artist Bruno Munari had already produced in 1947 the series Scritture illeggibili di popoli sconosciuti (“Illegible writings of unknown peoples”)—typographic works composed of meaningless signs—which, in a broad sense, can also be read as proto-asemic experiments.

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Serafini, Luigi — Codex Seraphinianus

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Binga, Tomaso (Bianca Menna) — Scritture desemantizzate

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Munari, Bruno — Scritture illeggibili di popoli sconosciuti

Since the 1990s: Formation and Expansion of the Asemic Movement

On this groundwork, asemic writing emerged in the late 1990s as a self-aware international movement. Around 1997, the Australian poet-artist Tim Gaze and the American experimental poet Jim Leftwich exchanged works and adopted the word “asemic” to designate their “unreadable letter” pieces. Both were active in the world of experimental poetry journals; according to their account, Leftwich happened to receive a postcard from editor John Byrum that used the word “asemic,” which catalyzed their adoption. They promoted the term energetically, first publishing the folded pamphlet asemic volume ~1 (1998), which gathered works by themselves and associates. This small spark soon grew: Gaze launched the zine Asemic Magazine, calling for contributions worldwide. Initially drawing on the international mail-art network, and reaching out to calligraphers and visual artists of varied schools, Gaze amassed submissions from Europe and North America as well as Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Across Vol.1–Vol.6, the magazine showcased striking diversity. With such publishing activity—and with the opening of online galleries (in 2008, Michael Jacobson, together with Gaze and Derek Beaulieu, launched The New Post-Literate)—asemic writing consolidated as a recognized genre in the 2000s.

Contemporary figures include the founders Tim Gaze (Australia) and Jim Leftwich (USA); Michael Jacobson (USA); Derek Beaulieu (Canada); Marco Giovenale (Italy); Satu Kaukonen (Finland), among others. Gaze is known for collections that fuse visual poetry and glitch (electronic perturbation), such as noology, and for drawing suites that occupy a midpoint between pictogram and language, e.g., Glyphs of Uncertain Meaning. Jacobson has actively documented global asemic work on his blog The New Post-Literate, while publishing his own novel The Giant’s Fence (2007), written entirely in unreadable script. Beaulieu has created distinctive asemic pieces extending from typographic experimentation; Giovenale has produced numerous mixed-media works of highly abstracted letter fragments. In recent years, artists from East Asia—where calligraphic traditions run deep—have also entered the field. Chinese-American artist Cui Fei earned high acclaim for the 2000s series Manuscript of Nature, arranging vines and twigs on paper to evoke ancient Chinese manuscripts. Thus, in the twenty-first century, asemic writing has gained genuine internationalism and proliferates across diverse media.

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Gaze, Tim — Glyphs of Uncertain Meaning

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Jacobson, Michael — The Giant’s Fence

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Cui Fei — Manuscript of Nature

Relations to Kindred Avant-Garde Movements

Dadaism. Born amid World War I as an anti-art uprising, Dada fostered numerous experiments that mocked linguistic convention. As noted, sound poetry dispensed with logical meaning and relied on sound and rhythm alone. In an auditory sense, such pieces can be considered asemic poetry without letters. Dadaists also made frequent use of nonsensical spellings and meaningless prose. Tristan Tzara’s method of cutting words from newspapers and drawing them from a hat severed ordinary semantic linkage, compelling readers to confront the materiality of words rather than context. In liberating language from its semantic function—letting words be “word-things”—Dada established a clear continuity with the ethos of asemic writing.

Surrealism. Surrealists sought to entrust the unconscious to writing through automatic techniques. Breton and others often produced texts that read as incoherent; crucially, they relinquished authorial control over meaning. In the 1930s, Antonin Artaud recorded in his Mexican notebooks a visionary experience in which the surrounding landscape appeared as inscriptions in an ancient script—unreadable to him yet suggesting a vast linguistic system. Critics have lauded this as an early, striking description of encountering—and creating—asemic works. Some Surrealists even devised personal scripts (e.g., Yves Tanguy’s “magical” characters). The Surrealist drive beyond meaning provided theoretical inspiration to later asemic practice.

Concrete/Visual Poetry. Asemic writing is often treated as a branch or development of Concrete (visual) poetry. Since the 1950s, Concrete poets have emphasized layout and the plasticity of letters. In many works, the page’s configuration outweighs lexical sense. Some deployed words as geometric pattern; others decomposed and recomposed alphabetic units, rendering reading itself difficult. While Concrete Poetry pushed the boundary between letters and image, later asemic poets sometimes cast themselves as moving beyond what they perceived as a post-1960s lull in Concrete practice. Before Gaze and Leftwich, unreadable texts already appeared within Lettrism and Concrete currents—proto-asemic forms. In the 1960s–70s, for example, Germany’s Franz Mon collaged disassembled letters; Italians Ugo Carrozzi and Vincenzo Accame published fragmenting, ornamental letter-poems. Across the 1970s, the abstraction of letters spread in many locales, cultivating interest in non-semantic expression as part of visual poetry.

Conceptual Writing. In the 2000s, a cohort of Anglo-American poets advanced Conceptual Writing, represented by Kenneth Goldsmith and Christian Bök (among others), which prioritizes concept and process over creativity in the traditional expressive sense. Their works may appear banal (telephone directories, transcribed newspapers), yet they dismantle the notion of the author’s hand as original inscription and aestheticize the act of textual generation itself. While Conceptual Writing typically uses existing words and thus differs from strict asemic practice, they share the recognition that text need not be limited to information transfer or lyrical expression—and can at times bracket semantic content altogether. Goldsmith’s radical thesis of “uncreative writing” invites the question: might even a meaningless text function as poetry? Some conceptual works are indeed difficult to read and semantically indeterminate. Such experiments engage head-on the absence of meaning and exchange stimuli with asemic writing. Both currents share a radical, late-modern stance: to interrogate the institution and assumptions of language-art itself.

The Problem of “Meaning” in Non-Meaning Texts

Asemic writing is “script without meaning”—so what remains for the reader? Here lies a philosophical paradox. As Barthes and Derrida already intimated, precisely because asemic works lack determinate meaning, they can give rise to other forms of signification. Peter Schwenger notes that while semantic meaning is absent, other meanings do not vanish; strictly speaking, what is negated is the capacity of the sign as seme. Asemic writing abandons the ordinary referential function of signs: words no longer denote; they simply exist as forms. Consequently, readers must confront the often-invisible act of reading itself. The process of attempting (and failing) to decipher, or of freely conjuring images from chains of marks, becomes the locus of aesthetic experience. In short, the absence of meaning paradoxically invites active meaning-making.

Finnish poet Satu Kaukonen offers a suggestive view: she considers herself both an author of asemic works and an explorer, a global storyteller. Asemic art, she argues, is a kind of language rooted deeply in everyone’s unconscious. Wherever people first attempt to write, they often produce scribbles akin to asemic strings. In this sense, asemic art can serve as a shared language—abstract and post-literacy as it may be—allowing mutual understanding across backgrounds and nationalities. She further observes that conventional meaning-language frequently divides and stratifies people, whereas asemic texts—because they are unreadable to all—place individuals of every literacy level and identity on a more equal footing. That is, precisely because they are unreadable to everyone, they may generate universally shareable sensations and experiences. This claim points to the universal potential of asemic writing.

On the other hand, reading non-meaning texts entails perpetual uncertainty and delay. Does the sequence of marks before us signify something—or is it mere ornament? Readers hesitate, even feel disoriented. In a 2015 exhibition catalog, Italian critics Inna Kirilova and Gleb Kolomiets wrote that the content of asemic writing is meaningless: as signifiers that never reach a signified, they hang in the void. Yet they add that as act and gesture they are not meaningless. A “language before words” extends its hand from within an impersonal text, drawing our silence into another kind of speech. Asemic works are the traces of the author’s embodied handwriting; that gesture itself can produce communication with the reader. Even absent determinate content, the rhythm, pressure, and affect embodied in inscription can be intuitively and physically perceived. Schwenger likewise argues that asemic writing communicates something essential about writing that is usually occluded by message: even the very sequence of strokes harbors meaning—an autographic equivalent of the writer’s psychic state. Paradoxical as it seems, asemic writing thus reveals alternative modalities of meaning—affective, corporeal, universal—and reopens the fundamental question of what it is to read and write.

Contemporary Developments: AI Poetry, Code Poetry, and Noise Texts

The ideas and methods of asemic writing have influenced new poetic practices in the digital age. Noteworthy areas include AI-generated poetry, code poetry, and electronic noise texts. At first glance distinct, they converge on liberating language from semantics and disturbing the border between text and non-text.

AI-generated poetry. Large language models (LLMs) now generate poems and prose without direct human intervention. Trained on vast corpora, systems like GPT produce human-like sentences; nevertheless, the output may be contextually incoherent or amount to strings that, while grammatical on the surface, are semantically vacuous. In this sense, one might speak of “AI-driven non-meaning texts.” Paradoxically, because LLMs aim to imitate meaningful language via statistics, they are not naturally inclined to produce deliberately unreadable (asemic) strings without specific prompting. Yet their strange passages, decoupled from human intention, confront readers with a novel unreadability—a post-literacy textuality of the AI era. Metafictional experiments where AI “reflects” on its own writing further reframe the question what meaning is, inserting it anew into the problematic of asemic writing.

Code poetry. The field of code poetry treats programming languages as poetic text. It leverages the semantic gap between human and machine languages. A snippet of Perl or Python may be arranged like prose; executed, it acquires machine-level meaning (function), but to non-programmers it can appear as incantatory gibberish. Here, the same text is meaningful to machines and meaningless to many humans—a duality that yields poetic effect. Some works deliberately break syntax, yielding unrunnable yet poetic fragments. In the 2010s, Italy’s Francesco Aprile published numerous code-poetry pieces (via the imprint Post-Asemic Press), effectively situating code poetry along the asemic continuum. In an information society, code poetry becomes a new face of the unreadable text, aestheticizing the semantic rift between two linguistic systems and embodying asemic philosophy in another guise.

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Noise texts. Practices that exploit electronic noise and glitch also expand asemic possibilities. Garbled characters, random or hash-like alphanumeric arrays, and encrypted strings perched on the cusp of readability present themselves as textual noise—yet artists discover fresh aesthetics within. Poet Federico Federici likens reading his “unreadable texts” to listening to noise music. Encountering an asemic text resembles hearing the extreme minimalism of Jakob Ullmann: once the melodic line of ordinary language is stripped away, what remains may seem like noise, but that noise harbors patterns to be aesthetically enjoyed. In everyday digital life, one might open binary data in a text editor and gaze at its chaotic characters: sequences that are neither simply linguistic nor purely non-linguistic. To draw beauty or lyricism from such arrays requires precisely the sensibility trained by asemic practice.

These contemporary experiments do not merely imitate the past; they extend the concept of asemic writing into new domains, attempting to redefine writing/reading in the post-digital era. As technology advances, we are ever more surrounded by textual data—some of it humanly uninterpretable. Asemic writing and its derivatives persist in posing foundational questions: What is meaning? What is a letter?

Conclusion: Prospects Grounded in Western Theory and Poetic Practice

Asemic writing, though seemingly paradoxical in “removing meaning from language,” has developed steadily within the currents of twentieth-century art and linguistic theory. Poststructuralist critiques of meaning and insights from semiotics undergird it, while Dada, Surrealism, Concrete Poetry, and Conceptual Writing have exerted peripheral yet potent influence. Contemporary figures—Tim Gaze, Michael Jacobson, and others—have carried the genre to international breadth through creations that straddle visual art and literature.

Its significance lies in forcing us to rethink what it is to read and write. In the absence of a determinate message, readers confront the blank—the marks and their own imagination. Thus readers cannot remain passive consumers; they become active creators. As Schwenger suggests, asemic work can function as a kind of resistance to the “machinery of language” in a globalized technological society: against standardized transmission and entrenched coding, it proposes new sensibilities and thought-patterns through meaning-less signs. One also detects a critique of post-Enlightenment alphabetic centrism: faced with an order long dominated by the alphabet, asemic artists proffer communication via signs without meaning, unsettling our cognitive templates.

Looking ahead, asemic writing will likely continue to diversify. With the growth of digital technology and AI, unintended unreadable texts multiply. In such times, the asemic aesthetic offers not merely an avant-garde genre but a critical lens on our lived information environment. In a globalized world that demands communication beyond linguistic walls, it is ironically possible that texts written in no one’s language may afford a shared experience and a starting point for creative dialogue. They appeal to primordial impulses—the urge to scribble, the ancestral sensitivity to aesthetic marks—that predate writing itself.

Finally, asemic writing does not end in “meaninglessness.” The array of non-meaning signs may render readers silent; yet within that silence, the letters continue to sing. To borrow Tim Gaze’s phrase, there is always the possibility of improvised voicing in asemic works—every piece carries a song. To listen for that song after words fall away is to touch, once more, the depths of language-art.

References

Michael Jacobson & Tim Gaze (eds.), Asemic Writing: Definitions & Contexts 1998–2016, etc.

Sam Woolfe, “Derrida, Barthes, and the Origins of Asemic Writing” (2022)

Sam Woolfe, “An Interview With Tim Gaze, a Pioneer of Asemic Writing” (2023)

Federici & Fiala, “Asemic Texts” — The Journal (2018)

De Villo Sloan, Asemics 16 (Mail-Art Project, 2011)