Cecil Touchon

Listening with the Eye - An Asemic Notebook Cecil Touchon

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.