Sunday, September 28, 2025

AI-semics & Human Creativity: Selections from PANSEMIC TEXTSTORM by Miekal And (Wisconsin, USA)


From "The Not So Literal Chronology of Pansemic Textstorm" 
by Miekal And (West Lima, Wisconsin, USA) 
(August 2025) (Image courtesy of the artist)




Since August 2025, visual poet Miekal And has been creating and publishing digitally PANSEMIC TEXTSTORM, an image-text series that represents, for me, the most state-of-the-art work being done today at the intersections of asemics, concrete poetry, and vispo.

Thus far, PANSEMIC TEXTSTORM has been published only online. His audience has been able to follow the genesis of Miekal And’s piece from drafts to a “finished” work.

In fact, I am posting some favorite pieces from drafts of PANSEMIC TEXTSTORM first shared in the Facebook asemic writing group in August when Miekal And published online "The Not So Literal Chronology of Pansemic Textstorm," a series of 76 image-text pieces. 

While the series could easily be adapted to the physical book form, the affordability and ease of publishing the work solely online has obvious advantages made evident by And's digital acumen. The shift from The Age of Print to digital poetics still presents many challenges to artists and publishers. 

 





From "The Not So Literal Chronology of Pansemic Textstorm" 
by Miekal And (August 2025) (Image courtesy of the artist)



PANSEMIC TEXTSTORM is a meta-textual and metasemic lyric cycle. Miekal And explores the deep roots of language and his own poetic origins. He masterfully incorporates many current vispo subgenres that are evolving in contemporary vispo. I believe PANSEMIC TEXTSTORM is a composition of great significance revealing the potential of AI to revolutionize asemic composition.

PANSEMIC TEXTSTORM presents an awe-inspiring tour of calligraphic styles, exotic and mundane fonts, organic forms, and glyphs all composed digitally. Miekal And's asemics are widely admired for seemingly expressive strokes of the stylus, but in reality his success is the result of collaborations with Artificial Intelligence, photoshop, and fontographer. A close examination of botanical images and references in the series alone could fill a hefty thesis.

A complete (83 plates thus far) version of PANSEMIC TEXTSTORM can be viewed (free) at the Internet Archive. Miekal And wrote:

"Recovered from the memory-skin of a vanished species, PANSEMIC TEXTSTORM is a corpus of 83 visual utterances rendered in what may be a language, ritual, or recursive hallucination. Glyphs emerge not to be read, but to breathe—spiraling, mutating, decomposing across each frame.

"The forms resemble botanical alphabets, fungal grammars, and the calligraphy of oxygen-deprived minds. Some plates tremble with footwritten tremor-lines; others dissolve in brush-pool smudging or flicker with quantum simultaneity—saying all things, always, and never.

Fragments of Martian humidity script, Venusian biosignal, and neural circuitry calligraphy suggest transmission across multiple atmospheres. Meaning is neither fixed nor central—it decomposes mid-glyph into cephaloglyphic debris, insectoid syntax, and sacred obelisk scrawl.

These works are ambient, recursive, post-syntactic. Together they form a multilingual pansemic palimpsest: not a language lost, but one that refuses to be found.

Format: 83 images, mixed digital/analog media

Origin: Unverified | Context: Pre-collapse dialects | Function: Unknown

https://archive.org/details/pansemic-textstorm"





From "The Not So Literal Chronology of Pansemic Textstorm" 
by Miekal And (August 2025) (Image courtesy of the artist)




While numerous visual poets today in The Asemic School of Quietude practice meditative simplicity with stylus, ink and handmade paper, technology is opening new doors for creativity as well. The task will likely fall upon writers and artist to define what it means to be human.


- De Villo Sloan
September 28, 2025
Elbridge, New York USA






From "The Not So Literal Chronology of Pansemic Textstorm" 
by Miekal And (August 2025) (Image courtesy of the artist)






From "The Not So Literal Chronology of Pansemic Textstorm" 
by Miekal And (August 2025) (Image courtesy of the artist)





From "The Not So Literal Chronology of Pansemic Textstorm" 
by Miekal And (August 2025) (Image courtesy of the artist)






From "The Not So Literal Chronology of Pansemic Textstorm" 
by Miekal And (August 2025) (Image courtesy of the artist)