Commentary: Jean Baudrillard's Four Phases of the Image & the Asemic De-Coupling of the Sign by De Villo Sloan

"Untitled collab" by Rebecca Resinski (Arkansas, USA) & De Villo Sloan 

(New York, USA) (August 2017) 

(Image courtesy of Asemic Front Archives)

In Jean Baudrillard's classic book Simulacra & Simulations, he identifies four stages of the image as it moves from representation into the realm of the Simulacra and the hyperreal.

 “These would be the successive phases of the image:

 1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.

2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.

3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.

4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.”

                                                                                                - Jean Baudrillard

"Untitled collab" by Rebecca Resinski  & De Villo Sloan (August 2017)

(Image courtesy of Asemic Front Archives)

Asemic writers/artists, concrete and visual poets working in the digital realm will likely observe that Baudrillard's analysis of the image follows the de-signification process of visual images that are absorbed into the textuality of the hyperreal. 

In digital asemic composition, the signified is decoupled from the signifier and new structures to contain these floating indeterminates form organically. Generations of increasingly detached and hyper-referential metasemics emerge. 

- De Villo Sloan

October 4, 2024

(De Villo Sloan is a concrete poet living in Upstate, New York. He writes about postavant lit & art & is Director of the Winifred & De Villo Sloan, Jr. Charitable Fund.)