The signs before our eyes don’t belong to any familiar system. At the same time, they put themselves forward in the form of a sign system, recognizable as marks disposed on a page according to certain conventions. This is what Asemic Writing is about.
Asemic writing is an example of such surface models: it implicitly asks us to conceptualize what we are seeing—not reading. It frees us from the structura- tion of lines of thought, even as we see before us those very lines of thought. The markings we see represent thought processes but are without content. Severed from “instrumentality,” as Barthes would call it, they owe allegiance to nothing other than their own contours and the abstract idea of writing that they evoke. (Schwenger, 2019)
