Listening With The Eye An Asemic Notebook Volume 4

This work is intended to be purely visual with no reference to literary content or convey any sort of symbols. There is an interest however in musicality, of moving the focal point of the eye along during the reading through repetition, cadence, movement, etc. It is a form of listening with the eye as the title of the book suggests. The idea behind asemic writing is to create artworks that are based on the act of mark making similar to handwriting but without reference to semantic content or literary meaning. Hence each 'writer' has a unique way of writing or making marks. When we look at handwriting, even if we are unable to decipher it, we are getting some sort of visual content out of it from looking at the marks and rhythms or distributions of the markings on the page. You might say this is the body language of the writing beyond the message conveyed. This body language is the part that is of interest in this work.

The writings presented here were composed specifically for existing in a book environment as unified text. These works might be called automatic writing or visual writing or asemic writing. There is no intention to tell a story or to use any recognizable language or symbols. Rather the works function in free flow with intuition rather than thought, allowing the hand to just do what the hand does; make marks. Touchon uses improvisational approach to mark making as if playing an instrument that records in marks what might otherwise be heard as notes of music and this might be a way to approach the work - to look as if listening; spending time studying the nature of the work; its flow, its progression, its repetitions, etc. just as we might have an aesthetic experience from looking at pages of text in a foreign language that we are not conversant in. In such a case we get to enjoy the work on a purely visual level without the conversion of the characters into linguistic meanings.

Dog Ear explores dog-eared pages of mass-market paperbacks which are photographed to isolate the small diagonally bisected squares or rectangles of text.

The first English translation and publication of a Polish poet whose struggles with spiritual issues spark comparison to Czestaw Mitosz.

In October 2013 Rosalia and Cecil Touchon spent a month in Paris, France. While there, Touchon collected paper and made 80+ collages in 30 days. Also include are related photographs taken in Paris and asemic writing as well as examples of several paintings made based on this set of collages.

Artists' book on the work of Carlos Amorales focusing on his persona based series Los Amorales.

In late summer 1953, as he returned to Mexico City after an expedition through Latin America, William Burroughs began a notebook of reflections. This notebook, the sole survivor from that period, reveals Burroughs as a man staring down personal catastrophe and visions of looming cultural disaster.