asenitt asemic, following traces

 asenitt asemic, following traces

Flipping through a catalogue of art, this exhibition list of galleries, locations and dates was described by Alex, a Grade Four student of mine, as a “poem”. Alex was a boy who at the time had significant difficulties reading; because of this I assumed that he was responding to the visual structure of the text rather than the meaning of the words. I really enjoyed the inadvertent suggestion that this list could be viewed as a poem…it had flow, rhythm and variety: art, location, date, art, location, date…from east to west, back east then west, five galleries, one centre, 23 months. 

As an experiment, I made a copy and drew over each word in order to blur the poem. I imagined I might see the textual structure as Alex had. 

A Kindergarten child notices a piece of wood with traces of worm trails inscribed upon it; he follows the lines with a finger and notes the resemblance it has to writing. 

He refers to these lines later in the year when he uses a piece of chalk on the hard packed earth to follow the meandering path of an ant. We don’t know what these chalk lines mean to the ant, but the boy remembers the worm-eaten lines on the wood and mentions the connection. This happens as he is learning over the course of the year to print letters, form words, and create messages on a page of paper.

As it moves, slime mould secretes a trail behind it. Like the pheromone markers of ants, this indicates previous behaviour and signals subsequent actions; a reminder for instance  to return to, or refrain from visiting a particular place again. The term ‘stimergy’ comes from the Greek stigma (mark or sign) and ergon (work or action). Stimergy is the process by which we project a message of some sort for others to respond to, a gesture of sorts that may be built upon. Ants leave pheromones and dogs leave urine; unsurprisingly, slime mould lays down a trail of slime. 

Slime Mould processes outside stimuli across the entire structure of its cells…its’ only real knowledge of the world is bodily. As an organism lacking a central nervous system and sophisticated sensory organs, slime mould epitomizes the notion of “embodied knowledge” (Tanaka, 2013). Its’ knowledge of the world occurs entirely through interactions with the world. 

In this recent book about the physical, concrete sides of language, and writing without words, Walter Benjamin states that “language has a body and the body has a language”. The kind of ‘empty’ writing described in this book (asemic writing), is how we all begin when we are children. 

Our marks are outwardly meaningless until we explain them or until others find them and ascribe meaning to them. 

Writing requires some-body any-body to make it meaningful.

(notes taken in part from Kreepingarten. A proposal for knowledge transfer from/to/between Physarum Polycephalum and Kindergarten Children. A.Senitt 2021)