by Kristine Snodgrass (Florida, USA)
Faithful AF2 readers have doubtless detected I am posting a series (non-linear as it will surely be) about visual poets engaged in experimental asemics & pansemics using glitch software and/or otherwise corrupted/disrupted programs & methods. They are in my estimation producing exciting new forms of vispo & asemics.
I am also proposing that glitchtxt (aka Femmeglitch, gliTchXT & related others) is a process practice apart from the better-known & older Glitch Art & Glitch Music, although intersections surely abound. Glitched spoken-word asemics, for instance, might yield some fresh classics.
While these poets are neither the first nor the only practitioners of glitching image-text, they do, I believe, represent a current, primarily digital (& international) community sharing & advancing glitchtxt in a collaborative spirit. Their shared perception of text as image is of socio-cultural interest in the context of Michael Jacobson's postliterate theories.
I would be remiss not to include AF2 frequent contributor Kristine Snodgrass in the series. As AF2 documented, her asemic glitch work has helped define current practice & has inspired her contemporaries.
In our exchanges regarding this remarkable black & white series, Kristine provided some thoughts & commentary, "I am thinking about how it seems like color is EXPECTED in this current phase of glitchtxt," she wrote. "Are these explosions of color a distraction from the distortion, destruction & symbol creation? I wanted to focus on light & line, black & white in this series; I am still processing to an extent. Cannot we be stark?"
"Stark" is a fine descriptor for a tendency toward black, white, grey minimalism I have seen in some asemic/pansemic work lately. Now Kristine Snodgrass writes about it & uses it in her own work, suggesting my own similar thoughts are more than idle, subjective speculations.
Otherwise, yes, there is another counter-tendency (the greater I think) toward powerful color in glitched asemics. I find the vibrancy positive as we seem to be emerging from the peculiar lifelessness of conceptual-influenced vispo & uncreative writing. These are choices ultimately resting with artist & audience, of course.
I associate the current stark & dark strain in asemics (both glitched & straight) with the gradual circulation of writing about asemics by Jim Leftwich & work in response that is emerging from a number of sources. Again, some of that work has appeared at AF2. Perhaps the Leftwich material has had a stronger impact here at AF2.
For me at least, Leftwich's vision of asemics is deeply rooted in Existentialism (as in philosophy) & even rooted in the nihilist views of language in late & remote corners of postmodernism. I do not mean to imply this is a disappointment or failure of asemics: I am very intrigued by this counter-vision of asemics. Kristine Snodgrass has arrived at a realization as well.
The sunny even utopian rhetoric of the "asemic art movement" - even in certain quarters promising an international poetic language - is tempered by another view. I hope you find these glitchtxts & noir vispo by Kristine Snodgrass intriguing, expanding & transforming, as I do.
-De Villo Sloan
by Kristine Snodgrass
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