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Contents
editorial
DJO BANKUNA
Pissing On The Rainbow Nation
NATHAN TRANTRAAL
Ôs haatie wit mense nie. Hoekô haat julle vi ôs?
GLENN HOLTZMAN
The Music Department in South Africa as a Mirror of Racial Tension and Transformative Struggle: A Critical Ethnographic Perspective
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Black artists and the paradox of the gift
Theme Johnny Mbizo Dyani
ZWELEDINGA PALLO JORDAN
JOHNNY DYANI: A Portrait
JOHNNY MBIZO DYANI
A Letter From Mbizo
ARYAN KAGANOF
Johnny Dyani Interview 22-23 December 1985
SALIM WASHINGTON
“Don’t Sell Out”
LOUIS MOHOLO-MOHOLO & HERBIE TSOAELI WITH JOHNNY DYANI
In Conversation with Mbizo
ZOLISWA FIKELEPI-TWANI & NDUDUZO MAKHATHINI
When Today Becomes The Past: The Archive as a Healing Process
ASHER GAMEDZE
Tradition as improvisation | Continuity and abstraction
GILBERT MATTHEWS & LEFIFI TLADI
An Interview with Lars Rasmussen
EUGENE SKEEF
The Musical Confluence of Johnny Dyani and Bheki Mseleku in Exile
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script i: The Figure
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script ii: Ontology Of The Bass
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script iii: Musical Offering
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script iv: Home And Exile
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script v: Experimental Philosophic Incantations
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script vi: The Posthumous Life
ED EPSTEIN
Spiritual
CAROL MULLER
Diasporic musical landscapes: Abdullah Ibrahim, Johnny Dyani, and Sathima Bea Benjamin in an African Space Program (1969-1980)
BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH
Riot in Progress (Legalize Freedom)
S’MAKUHLE BOKWE MAFUNA
Notes on the Exile Years
KEI MURRAY MONGEZI PROSPER MCGREGOR
Who the Son was?
ARYAN KAGANOF
Somebody Blew Up South Africa
JONATHAN EATO
Interludes with Bra’ Tete Mbambisa
MAX ANNAS
Morduntersuchungskommission. Der Fall Daniela Nitschke
SHANE COOPER
Lonely Flower
THANDI ALLIN DYANI
"I love you. You don’t have to love me but I love you."
galleri
SLOVO MAMPHAGA
Shades of Johnny Dyani
HUGH MDLALOSE
Jazz is my Life
TJOBOLO KHAHLISO
Shebeening
FEDERICO FEDERICI
Notes (not only) on asemic phenomenology
ANDRÉ CLEMENTS
Vita-Socio-Anarcho
DEREK DAVEY
Verge
borborygmus
MUSTAPHA JINADU
Trapped
VUSUMZI MOYO
From Cape-to-Cairo – AZANIA
MALAIKA WA AZANIA
In a foreign tongue...
SHARLENE KHAN
Imagining an African Feminist Press
DILIP MENON
Isithunguthu (A conversation in Joburg)
CATHERINE RUDENT
Against the “Grain of the Voice” - Studying the voice in songs
GEORGE LEWIS
Amo (2021), for five voices and electronics
STEVEN SHAVIRO
Exceeding Syncopation?
BRUCE LABRUCE
Notes on camp/anti-camp
PATRICIA PISTERS
Set and Setting of the Brain on Hallucinogen: Psychedelic Revival in the Acid Western
frictions
KHADIJA TRACEY HEEGER
Doctor Patient
KNEO MOKGOPA
Vuleka Mhlaba (What Would Happen if Madiba Returned?)
CHURCHIL NAUDE
Die mooi mooi gedig en anner massekinners ….
OSWALD KUCHERERA
Travelling on the Khayelitsha Train
SISCA JULIUS
Islands in the stream
FAEEZ VAN DOORSEN
Nobody’s Mullet
GADDAFI MAKHOSANDILE
The Face of Hope
VONANI BILA
Extracts from Phosakufa (the epic)
NIQ MHLONGO
Mistaken Identity
OMOSEYE BOLAJI
People of the Townships part 2
SIMBARASHE NYATSANZA
How to Become an African President
JEAN RHYS
The Doll
OSCAR HEMER
Coyote
MICHALIS PICHLER
Bibliophagia
claque
LINDELWA DALAMBA
From Kippie to Kippies and Beyond: the village welcomes this child
GWEN ANSELL
Zim Ngqawana: A child of the rain
MKHULULI
Black Noise: Notes on a Semanalysis of Mogorosi’s DeAesthetic
LIZE VAN ROBBROECK
DECOLONIZING ART BOOK FAIRS: Publishing Practices from the South(s).
DYLAN VALLEY
The Future lies with folk art: Max Schleser’s smartphone filmmaking THEORY AND PRACTICE
PAUL KHAHLISO
Riding Ruins
DIANA FERRUS
Ronelda Kamfer’s Kompoun: unapologetic and honest writing.
UNATHI SLASHA
Piecing Together the Barely Exquisite Corpse: On Tinashe Mushakavanhu’s Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on the Speculative Archive
WANELISA XABA
One from the heart: Dimakatso Sedite's Yellow Shade
BLAQ PEARL (JANINE VAN ROOY-OVERMEYER)
Uit die Kroes: gedigte deur Lynthia Julius
FRANK MEINTJIES
Wild Has Roots: thinking about what it means to be human
MPHUTHUMI NTABENI
The Land Wars: The Dispossession of the Khoisan and AmaXhosa in the Cape Colony - a discourse on the unrelenting and ruthless process of colonial conquest
ekaya
MKHULU MNGOMEZULU
Call Me By My Name: Ubizo and Ancestral Names for Abangoma
HILDE ROOS
In Conversation with Zakes Mda: "The full story must be told."
INGE ENGELBRECHT
Tribute to Sacks Williams: A composer from Genadendal
ESTHER MARIE PAUW
A tribute to Hilton Biscombe
WILLEMIEN FRONEMAN
Resisting the Siren Song of Race
off the record
SANDILE MEMELA
Things My Father Taught Me
HEIDI GRUNEBAUM
On returning to my grandmother’s land (notes for a film)
HILTON BISCOMBE
A boytjie from Stellenbosch
KHOLEKA SHANGE
Art, Archives, Anthropology
RITHULI ORLEYN
On Archives, Metadata and Aesthetics
KEYAN G. TOMASELLI
The Nomadic Mind of Teshome Gabriel: Hybridity, Identity and Diaspora
FINN DANIELS-YEOMAN & DARA WALDRON
Song For Hector - the utopian promise of the archive
TREVOR STEELE TAYLOR
Censorship, Film Festivals and the Temperature at which Artworks and their Creators Burn - episode 2
GEORGE KING
Sustaining an Imagined Culture: Some Reflections on South African Music Research in Thirty-Five Years of Ars Nova
RAFI ALIYA CROCKETT
Loxion Fabulous: Temporality and Spaciality in South African Kwaito Performance
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© 2023
Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
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    #07
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FEDERICO FEDERICI

Notes (not only) on asemic phenomenology

Asemic writing points to a gradual weakening of the correlation between sign and meaning or, in the language of architecture and biology, to the confutation of the form follows function principle.

Any approach based on the restoration of a minimum alphabet from fragmented subsets, or on the recovery of some original syntax from noisy communication channels programmatically fails. The flux of symbols does not intercept and duplicate encrypted information. It works around the uniqueness of the code by blending familiar patterns out of context, introducing modifications in them, or devising new ones. This is one of the extremely subversive traits validating the paradox of asemic communication.

No recognisable genome exists, nor does any implicit one accepted by the community. Each text, regardless of its extent, embodies the full expression of a unique and obscure language which constitutes its stimulus and its essence. The powerful iconic synthesis thus accomplished absorbs all the traditional phonic elements, turning the act of reading into a pure visual experience, contemplative, even where a sequence of signs, apparently more persuasive, may hint at the presence of multiple narratives.

Each asemic form is not a statement in itself. It is rather an unaussprechbare Aussage (unpronounceable message) triggering the interpretive schemes of the subconscious, making the idea of an a priori of meaning redundant. Reading no longer consists of two contiguous yet distinct phases, namely decoding and interpreting. It becomes a unified creative activity performed upon the free surface of the text, drawing from unknown resources.

The psychological effects of brief asemic practices, stimulated in individuals with schizophrenia and alexithymia, have recently been investigated.[1] Winston, Christiane/ Mogrelia, Nazneen/ Maher, Hemali: The therapeutic value of asemic writing: a qualitative exploration, in “Journal of Creativity in Mental Health”, 11(2), London 2016, pp. 142–156. The comparative analysis of the writings, supported by the observation reports, has documented temporary improvements in mood and an increased awareness of emotional dimension, notwithstanding the onset of mild stress symptoms, following the assignment given on a daily basis.

The semiotic triangle (signified — signifier → sign) narrows to the vertex of the signifier, abandoning the sign and the signified to a formal solitude of their own. The elements immediately above the level of the word (periods, paragraphs etc.) are in essence preserved as counterweights of an alleged textual frame. The handwriting tangles in a net of vanishing points and nodes. It shifts as a system of cross-cutting but unstable fault planes. Is that a way to react to information, infected with acronyms and codes, and spare the meaning the agony of language?

Each writer experiences the extreme condition of linguistic minorities, being the first and last heir of a newspeak or of some dialect dying out.

The substratum of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake rests on text segments and notes from the most disparate studies. Although aimed at strongly oneiric mechanics, the new approach marks a radical turning point compared with Ulysses, bypassing the strictly psychoanalytic significance of the stream of consciousness, as documented in a letter addressed to Harriet Weaver: “[…] these are not fragments but active elements and when they are more and a little older they will begin to fuse of themselves.”[2]Joyce, James: Letters, ed. Stuart Gilbert, Vol. I, New York 1966, p. 204.

Pages become real laboratories wherein to let linguistic phenomena occur, recording them in the process of “writing from writing”. The plot, relentlessly rippled by distortions of places and dilations or ellipses of time, reveals itself as a living expression of Minkowski’s chronotope. The old meanings annihilate themselves and the linguistic particles transmute into pure sounds or mysterious crases. After all, the reality surfacing everywhere in the Universe is driven by the principle according to which light turns into matter and matter into light.

Some of the most outstanding narrative expedients stem from adopting the same methodological approach as the new physics, rather than from the fascination of its paradoxes. If quantum mechanics no longer relegates the physicist to the role of detached witness of phenomena, the reader must likewise play an active part in defining, not barely recovering, the meaning of the text.

Asemic writing, in turn, requires a special entanglement to be established between hand and subconscious for the uncertainty of the text to be the pure diffraction of “meaning through a grid of signs”. Reality always lights up the thin slit between sleep and awakening, but no factual data exist to approximately refer to. The written page does not coincide with the message. It is a filter, an analyser to investigate a space which is symbolic and “real” at once. The primitive intuitions of symmetry, similarity or self-similarity acquire double significance: a psychological and a metrical one.

Several lines of research are suitable for dealing with the intrinsic nonlinearity that follows.

Topology-based methods could support or replace traditional hermeneutics to properly study such manifold structures. Each page, a snapshot of an unknown linguistic phenomenon, would hence be addressed as a set of fuzzy data.

To define and extract pseudo-linguistic features such as dimension, fractal analysis might be implemented. Provided that the most suitable algorithm has been chosen, this tool has proved to be powerful and flexible for clustering data, for detecting and extracting main features from noisy signals[3]Wornell, Gregory W. / Oppenheim, Alan V.: Estimation of fractal signals from noisy measurements using wavelets, “IEEE Transactions On Signal Processing”, Vol. 40, n.3, 1992, pp. 611–623. and for dealing with complex scaling laws or with chaotic dynamical systems. This rather unexplored blend of mathematics with writing might define unprecedented and more convenient interpretive techniques to probe works whose textual traits have permanently been subverted.

Alongside this investigation, dedicated routines can be developed to plunge conventional documents into pure asemic spaces, rearranging clusters of pixels according to precise shapes (straight line, square, etc.) and parameters (centre, diameter, etc.). Undergoing morphological manipulations, each scanned image evolves through different stages towards a new formal equilibrium. Such procedure has been fully tested with sheet music in Stuttgarter Strukturfonien (Federico Federici, LN 2019).[4]Higuchi, Tomoyuki: Approach to an irregular time series on the basis of the fractal theory, “Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena”, Vol. 19, n.3, 2005, pp. 659–674.

Another approach, quite distinct from pure code poetry, paves the way to books whose content is never definitive, but continuously modified by means of sensors. The Way I Discovered The Berlin Wall Has Fallen (Federico Federici, LN 2017) is a project in which data from a TMP36 temperature sensor, driven by Arduino, are fed straight into the LaTex code designed to output the textual elements to be printed.[5]Artist talk during the exhibition Intuición Estética curated by Michael Jacobson in Cordoba (2016).

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Notes
1. ↑ Winston, Christiane/ Mogrelia, Nazneen/ Maher, Hemali: The therapeutic value of asemic writing: a qualitative exploration, in “Journal of Creativity in Mental Health”, 11(2), London 2016, pp. 142–156.
2. ↑ Joyce, James: Letters, ed. Stuart Gilbert, Vol. I, New York 1966, p. 204.
3. ↑ Wornell, Gregory W. / Oppenheim, Alan V.: Estimation of fractal signals from noisy measurements using wavelets, “IEEE Transactions On Signal Processing”, Vol. 40, n.3, 1992, pp. 611–623.
4. ↑ Higuchi, Tomoyuki: Approach to an irregular time series on the basis of the fractal theory, “Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena”, Vol. 19, n.3, 2005, pp. 659–674.
5. ↑ Artist talk during the exhibition Intuición Estética curated by Michael Jacobson in Cordoba (2016).
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