Asemic Writing Exercise: Participant's Glyph

Overview

This experiment invites participants to create asemic glyphs based on emotional associations with Chinese radicals and a meditative soundtrack. It explores how meaning is constructed through gesture rather than legibility.It aligns with the project’s aim to transcend over-intellectualized reading, reconnecting with the spiritual and emotional origins of mark-making as a form of sacred expression.

Asemic Writing Exercise: Participant's Glyph

Experiment 3.1

This asemic writing workshop explores how emotion, instinct, and sound can give birth to personal visual language. Unlike typography as we know it—designed for clarity and communication—this task embraces an alternative typography rooted in gesture, atmosphere, and feeling. Here, each glyph is not a character to be read, but a mark to be felt.

Participants listen to a chant-inspired soundtrack and respond with hand gestures, guided by assigned Chinese radicals linked to specific emotions. These gestures are tracked in real time using Mediapipe, which captures hand movement data and visualizes them in TouchDesigner as fluid digital brushstrokes. These gesture-based paintings are then passed into Stable Diffusion, which interprets the movements as asemic glyphs—symbols that resemble writing but defy literal meaning.

This process mirrors how scribbles on a digital keypad are auto-translated into legible words—except here, Stable Diffusion doesn’t correct, it translates the emotional rhythm into impressionistic visuals. The inclusion of Stable Diffusion introduces a third force that reshapes and distorts, echoing how sacred texts evolve through time, translation, and technology.

This is not typography in the conventional sense—it is a system of emotionally-driven glyphs, where form follows feeling. Like variable fonts shift by weight or width, these forms shift by emotion, turning gesture into language beyond words.

Process

Step 1: Radicals

Participants begin by choosing one of four traditional Chinese radicals:

心 [xīn: heart], 火 [huǒ: fire], 水 [shuǐ: water], 彳 [chì: step]

These radicals are deeply symbolic, evoking inner states—like serenity, anger, fluidity, or vitality—and reflect how language originally carried emotional and elemental associations before it was formalized into fixed systems.

Step 2: Emotional Writing through Sound

While listening to a custom-designed soundtrack mimicking rhythmic Buddhist chanting, participants paint freely in response to their chosen radical and the emotional tone of the sound infront of the web-camera as their movements get detected by Mediapipe in Touchdesigner. The soundtrack includes temple-inspired sounds like bells, gongs, and ripples that guide the tempo and mood of their gestures.

Participants are not instructed to replicate actual Chinese characters. Instead, they are encouraged to create intuitive marks—their own glyphs—that embody how the radical feels, rather than how it should look. The aim is to return to the roots of calligraphy and spiritual text, where writing was once a meditative, emotional, and sacred act, not just a tool for information.

Step 3: AI as Mirror – Stable Diffusion

The paintings are then processed through Stable Diffusion, a generative AI model. But rather than using AI to define or “perfect” the glyphs, it translates the emotional rhythm into impressionistic visuals.

This step highlights how today’s systems try to extract meaning from illegible or emotional data—similar to how touchpads guess what we write from vague scribbles. In this context, AI becomes a mirror of abstraction, a collaborator in the defamiliarisation of language. It also echoes how sacred texts evolve through time, translation, and technology.

Outcome

Click the images below to see the glyphs created by participants for different moods:

Overview