Living Open Diary: Embodied Writing Experiments

Living Open Diary explores asemic writing and reading, the materiality of language, extended writing techniques, and intermedial bodily presence in writing, focusing on its corporeal dimension.

Originated with roots in multimedia performances dating back to the 1998s—2011s, Living Open Diary, an art/dance research project, explores diaries and diary-like performance installation through embodied writing scores.

Bodily explorations of new languages and modes of communication created by entities muted and unrecognized by society are the core of the art dance research-as-practice.

Methods:

Asemic writing and reading
Diary-like embodied writing experiments

Asemic:

This research practice explores the concept of asemic as a quality of the intersection of movement, art, and text in writing performances. The asemic refers to cultural ways of knowing that do not have clear semiotic meaning within empowered systems. By definition, the asemic makes space for all those whose voices have not been heard.

Note about recent diary-like writing session:

During the Convocation II sharing practice of Language-based Artistic Research (Zentrum Fokus Forschung University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria, 2023) “Living Open Diary” (a writing experiment), all participants constructed elongating writing tools by connecting twigs with markers and attaching them to their bodies. They created the space of creatures with long writing/drawing limbs who moved and left marks of asemic writing in all directions and surfaces, saturating the felt sense of being in totality of extended and embodied writing. I am curious about this provocation and consider questioning the distance between streaming thoughts and matters.

Interdisciplinary and embodied writing that interacts with material, surfaces, and participants (being affected in this engagement with materials)

A sensuous way of multimedia body presence in the writing process where writing is understood as listening and becoming ‘other’ through this engagement with materials of the world.

This meditation mediates meaning-making, asemic materiality, and othering in the embodied writing process.

The ambiguous nature of meaning-making in art and artistic research suggests seeking alternatives that might come with the ‘asemic’ and ‘eco-asemic’ materiality of language and awaken art/dance’s potential to meaningfully collaborate with surroundings.

These explorations of language other than linguistic and grammatical aspects help to reimagine and redeﬁne major concepts of living and ways of knowing. This artistic research enables art/dance potential to challenge existing conventions and institutional structures and create space for “unspoken texts” and “unheard voices.