“If a motherboard were immersed in a vat of biological fluids long enough it might result in AsemiQuads. In this transformative soup are visio / verbal hybrids that both dance upon the eye as well as offer performative sound scores. A delightful twist that delves further into Blonk’s substantical abilities.” (Nico Vassilakis, visual poet)

Sound poet and performance artist Jaap Blonk turns out to be an amazing graphic artist as well. From his sound poetry scores he developed an independent body of visual work. From about 2010 this has become ever more important for him. The title alludes to a combination of ‘quadratic drawings and short asemic statements, asemic meaning “having no specific semantic content”, or “without the smallest unit of meaning”.

My asemic writing — writing with no semantic meaning — gradually developed from my notations for sound poetry. These are functional scores with a script consisting of the International Phonetic Alphabet with a lot of added symbols of my own invention. Sometime around the turn of the millennium the signs started ’emancipating’ themselves from the task of representing sounds to an independent life as pure image. Since then I have been developing the writing in various directions: sometimes it takes the form of tiny beings, sometimes just short phrases or small clouds of signs.

The backgrounds for the drawings were basically made in two different ways. On the one hand, geometric structures, either based on number sequences or generated with non-linear equations. On the other hand, photos I took or scans of collages I made, that I then processed with small programs I wrote.  — Jaap Blonk, October 2022

Softcover, 60 pages, full colour high quality digital print, perfect bound book, size 190×190 mm. Edition of 125 copies.