Special Issues 2016 For winter break, Real Life put together eight special issues for your consideration, each with a top- ic and essays selected by one of our editors. Here is a compilation of all of the packages. Nathan Jurgenson EDITOR IN CHIEF Rob Horning Soraya King Alexandra Molotkow EDITORS WAYS OF SPEAKING 3 STRUCTURE 93 “Definition Not Found,” by Rahel Aima 4 “True-ish Grit,” by David A. Banks 94 “E*MO*JIS,” by Laur M. Jackson 10 “Magnificent Desolation,” by Elisa Gabbert 101 “Free Recall,” by Britt Paris 14 “Perpetual Motion Machines,” by Chenoe Hart 108 “Gif Horse,” by Britney Summit-Gil 18 “Pajama Rich,” by Moira Weigel 113 REPETITION 22 BLOOD TIES 119 “Against the Clock,” by Maya Binyam 23 “Life Support,” by Hannah Barton 120 “Time Capsules,” by Fuck Theory 27 “Survival Guides,” by Rachel Giese 127 “Watch Again,” by Lydia Kiesling 36 “Monster Tuck Rally,” byAlexandra Kimball 131 “Instant Replay,” by Monica Torres 41 “Clash Rules Everything Around Me,” 138 by Tony Tulathimutte STATIC 46 “Auto Format,” by Navneet Alang 47 BOTS 144 “Worlds Apart,” by Sarah Beller 51 “Selfless Devotion,” by Janna Avner 145 “Nervous? We Should Be,” 57 “The Mismanaged Heart,” by William Davies 149 by Jane Frances Dunlop “Verbal Tics,” by Jacqueline Feldman 154 “Quick Fix,” by Naomi Skwarna 61 “Torso Junkie,” by Mayukh Sen 161 FASCISM 66 TRANSCENDENCE 165 “Apocalypse Whatever,” by Tara Isabella Burton 67 “Remote Control,” by Linda Besner 166 “Chaos of Facts,” by Nathan Jurgenson 71 “Advanced Search,” by Franceska Rouzard 176 “What Was the Nerd,” by Willie Osterweil 77 “Seeing Stars,” by Alex Ronan 180 “Broken Windows, Broken Code,” 83 “Every Place at Once,” by Crystal Abidin 185 by R. Joshua Scannell 2 WAYS OF SPEAKING“Definition Not Found,” by Rahel Aima “E*MO*JIS,” by Laur M. Jackson “Free Recall,” by Britt Paris “Gif Horse,” by Britney Summit-Gil What we say is always entangled with how we say it. Form doesn’t dictate content, but they mutually reshape each other in all media, and digital ones are no exception. Digital media have changed how readily ideas circulate, which in turn changes the sorts of questions we ask—of search engines as well as of each other. New ways of asking yield different ways of knowing, redefining what can be thought and who typically gets to be heard. A sense of information abundance brings a sense of omnipotence and hopeless inundation in equal measure. And meanwhile, what counts as speech itself changes with our new tools for talking, as we communicate visually and speak without words. How we listen, too, is altered, as we hear content in tandem with its virality, and momentum (rather than the medium) becomes the message. —Nathan Jurgenson WAYS OF SPEAKING DEFINITIONDEFINITION NOT NOT FOUNDFOUND The last refuge from #content lines. You might do it just because, or to see if you can, as if testing out a pen you’re not going might just be asemic writing to buy. Containing neither content nor value, by RAHEL AIMA these marks might be scanned as data but can never be parsed. It feels singularly seductive at a time when everything is made surveillable and here’s a catharsis in writing without where you don’t need to speak to be heard or something to say. Your pen becomes a nee- write to be read. T dle or a mosquito’s proboscis sucking from a Whether or not you know it, and perhaps well of lactic acid, the kind that settles just under especially if you don’t, what you’re doing is a kind your skin like cellulite. You do it when absently of asemic mark making, where meaning looks doodling in class or on the phone, making cross- possible—are the crosshatches hiding some- hatches, the coiled spirals of a rotary telephone thing; is the doodle a code?—but easy interpre- wire, the onion sections of topographic contour tation is denied. Per its etymology, “asemic writ- BLAKE BY DAYS KATHRYN. 100 FROM 4 ing,” a mode coined as a term by the visual poets chi, and Cy Twombly (a former Army cryptogra- Jim Leftwich and Tim Gaze in 1997, is writing pher). We might consider legibility, a successful without any specific semantic content. Although end-to-end transfer of discrete information, as they looked to describe their own textual exper- the liminal boundary here. Asemic writing is to iments, the term inspired a new generation of ‘legible’ writing what abstract art is to its more artists and writers and, buoyed by its circulation representational analogues. And just like abstrac- on the blogs and listservs of the late ’90s, soon tion in art—consider the evolution from Cubism grew to become a global movement. There is no and Futurism to Suprematism, for example— small irony in assigning a name to a form pred- legibility exists along a continuum. icated upon resisting meaning, like penning a Take the ribbon worm knot on the left be- press release for a protest without demands. Yet it low. Perhaps you understand it as a doughy coil feels very right that asemic writing should emerge or some kind of felt alphabet toy for a non-Lat- from that particular Y2K moment of hurtling inate writing system. Perhaps you don’t read it globalization, techno-pessimistic paranoia and as writing at all. Someone used to Latinate or neon-lit fishtanks; a time of semiotic overstimu- Cyrillic scripts, however, would likely see in lation where signs swarmed like white blood cells the worm on the right a ‘6’ or ‘b’ or ‘б,“ while an or a ط and where, in the immortal words of Horse_eb- Arabic, Farsi or Urdu speaker might see a ooks, everything happens so much. strong ‘T.’ Speakers of other languages may just What we mean by asemic writing, though, see a pair of scribbles; what is legible to some dates back to two Tang Dynasty calligraphers, might be entirely asemic for others. This is key: “crazy” Zhang Xu and “drunk” Huai Su. Revered asemic writing turns on apophenia, or the ter- for their cursive styles, their scripts are at once ribly human tendency to perceive meaningful tender and wildly explosive, with all the expres- patterns in random data and to identify a sig- sive aggression of a ribbon worm shooting out its nal where there is only noise. The intent of the proboscis. The 1,200 years since have produced creator thus becomes vital. For a work to be truly numerous other proto-asemic examples, from asemic, it should be illegible not just to readers the “interior gestures” of Henri Michaux and Ro- and viewers but to its maker too, lest it be some- land Barthes’ “contre-écritures,” to the illegible thing more akin to a cipher. Conversely, some of writing of artists like Mark Tobey, Rachid Koraï- history’s most impenetrable ciphers have later 5 been revealed to be asemic, as in the case of the keyboard. Thickness may indicate dynamics Luigi Serafini’s 1981 illustrated encyclopediaThe or clusters.” To consider the score’s geometric Codex Seraphinianus. rectangles today is to feel a sense of frisson at its The absence of aspecific semantic content prefigurative qualities, at the way they resemble does not mean that asemic writing is not inescap- the horizontal bars of a midi editing software. ably semantic in form. We recognize something Musicologist and historian Richard Ta- as asemic precisely because it bears the hallmarks ruskin, in his weighty title The Oxford History of of what we understand to be script. On the page Western Music, says that electronic technologies or canvas or screen, the marks deploy a variety have resulted in us entering a post-literate sonic of lines, along with curves, strokes, serifs, and era in which standard notation and convention- other fontlike or ideographic accoutrements. There is little to no attempt to depict depth, dimension or color, but there Asemic writing turns might be a sense of movement along vertical or horizontal on apophenia, or the axes. Sometimes, as in the work of artist Mirtha Dermisache, tendency to identify a signal there is a lightly skeuomorphic attention to the modular col- where there is only noise umns and paragraph markers of the printed page. In this way, asemic writing might be better understood not as illegible but as ‘post-literate,’ al musical literacy have lost their primacy as a to use the phrase of one of the contemporary means of musical preservation. It’s a phenom- movement’s most important hubs, the New enon that graphic scores would seem to have pre- Post-Literate. To encounter a piece of asemic writ- saged. Yet what graphic scores best illustrate are ing is to engage in a kind of pattern recognition, qualities beyond musical notation’s communica- a database query that heavily relies on what we tive potential, as with intensifications of emotion visually interpret as writing-or-not. As with the in Marco Fusinato’s 2007–13 series Mass Black replacement Unicode characters that you might Implosion. On archival facsimiles of avant-garde see when there is an error in rendering text or graphic scores, the artist rules a line from each displaying foreign character sets, you cannot read note to a central point “as a proposition for a new it but you agree to understand it as language. composition, in which every note is played at It’s worth emphasizing that asemic writing once, as a moment of consolidation and singular can extend beyond representations of typogra- impact.” The result is a series of arresting sink- phy, and graphic notation presents a particularly holes that suggest obsessive SEO link building beautiful example.