William S. Burroughs - Ferran Destemple: Deconstructive Asemics from "The Soft Machine" (Barcelona, Spain)

[De Villo Sloan]

Pages from The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs altered by Ferran Destemple (Barecelona)

 

September 21, 2018 - Ferran Destemple – an artist and writer in Spain whom I admire very much – sent me these pages from The Soft Machine as a submission to Asemic Front (mail art call). He uses erasure on pages from a classic William S. Burroughs text to create asemics.

Ferran Destemple wrote, “In relation to the pages I sent you, I need to tell you that it is one of my works about Burroughs’ texts. In this case I erased parts of the Burroughs text to convert or transform it into an asemic one.”

These links will take you to related work by Ferran Destemple:

www.autismosautomaticos.net

http://www.autismosautomaticos.net/category/cinefan/

I love the concept and the visual appearance of these pages, and I appreciate that Ferran Destemple has shared them. Extending the William S. Burroughs cut-up experiment into the realm of asemics is, I believe, a project of great interest.

The Soft Machine is a text where conventional, linear narrative and linguistic conventions are already disrupted in order to reveal the machinations, codes and deep structures ordinarily hidden from the reader’s consciousness. By moving the text further into the realm of the unintelligible, even greater depths are illuminated.

Some asemicists aligned with specific theories might question if this work is truly asemic. Erasure can raise a process question when there is an original, underlying text that can be reconstructed. I acknowledge this would be a fair question worth discussion, although I have not yet seen a reasonable resolution between the two views. But I also believe this work by Ferran Destemple is of importance regardless of its relationship to asemics or visual poetry. I am thrilled to present it on Asemic Front. Close-ups are included.