Book #043 - Exercises in Asemic Writing

Asemic writing. It looks like writing, but you can't quite read it.

Today's book is more about the content than the construction, for a change. Asemic writing is writing that...isn't. It looks as if you should be able to read it but...you can't. It appears to make sense, but...no, it doesn't. Or does it? Here are some examples that I came up with for today's book with explanations of how they were done. If you want to read up on asemic writing you could start here.

The text above was made by slicing a printed page from a book and then reassembling the slices. In this case the cuts were made horizontally, through the center of the lines of type, so that the letters were split in two. Then the strips were mixed up and offset a bit - however it looked good - and glued back together. The whole thing was then scanned and tidied up in Photoshop; all the little leftover bits being removed.

The two on the left were made the same as the above example, except that the strips were cut vertically so that the the individual letters were preserved and recognizable; the combinations of strips resulted in random mixing of parts of words, creating something that looks like our alphabet but not a familiar language. To the right, circles and rectangles cut (punched, actually) from some pages were glued onto a whole page, breaking up the print in a completely random way.


And finally, the above example was done in Photoshop, using the same principles as described above. I created a line of test and then cut and copied and reassembled it. Lastly I used some shape-distorting tools on it.

You know you can enlarge the images by clicking on them, right?