Sunday, August 12, 2018

A review of Michael Jacobson's Works & Interviews by Federico Federici

"Works and interviews" by Michael Jacobson is a collection of both asemic scripts ("The Giant's Fence", "Action Figures", "A Headhunter's Tale"), interviews and other textual installations ("THAT: A Planet", "The Paranoia Machine", "MK JCBSN").
The first three sections challenge the reader to enter a net of finely entangled patterns and explore the residual signs of plots, which the paranoid characters, once inhabiting there, left deliberately behind.
Page after page, a carousel of abandoned or accidental symbols, of dreams cropped from a broader vision is delivered to the brain, which is supposed to edit and reassemble them into full narrative frameworks. Readers turn into spies collecting evidences of the impenetrable shelter of meaning. They may even find themselves connected to peripheral cameras, recording the relentless brain activities on the verge of dreaming.
Under a different perspective, the storytelling approach of this book convincingly relies on a cornerstone of asemic practice: however paradoxical it may seem, the intrinsic coherence of asemicism generates meaningfulness while stimulating the aptitude of readers to scan symbols in a meaningful way.
Asemic works act as blank tapes, simultaneously activated, recorded and erased again while watched. Each reader is, as such, an accomplice of the writer and possibly its desired alter ego.
A mirror is not an image in itself, but it has the property of imaging, likewise each asemic text does not exhibit a meaning of its own, but it is some sort of filter, capable of simulating and stimulating meaningfulness, engaging the reader into this unprecedented task.


- Federico Federici

Click here for Works & Interviewshttp://postasemicpress.blogspot.com/2017/04/works-interviews-by-michael-jacobson-is.html