I had fun playing with a new scanner I bought to help me upload the physical Moon Letters to my computer. The quality is great, and I immediately thought—this would be perfect for digitising my Asemic writing.
I decided to experiment: I uploaded a piece of Asemic writing, then tried a translation tool to read the text from the image. I wasn’t expecting much, Asemic writing is by definition without a fixed meaning, existing in a space between language and pure form. But to my surprise, I got three translated lines.
This unexpected outcome was a moment of algorithmic improvisation, a piece of text I never wrote was suddenly part of the work. The machine involved itself in the process, introducing an element beyond my control, much like the way audiences reinterpret asemic writing in unpredictable ways.
Two questions immediately came to mind:
• What does it mean for an asemic text to be “translated”?
• Does this process create a new kind of auto-generated asemic language, where machine logic meets human mark-making?
This might just be the beginning of a new asemic project. And, I’m excited to experiment more, to invite the machine into the asemic process, and to see where this unexpected collaboration between human intention and machine misinterpretation leads me.
Karema 