Metagraphy

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"Metagraphics or post-writing, encompassing all the means of ideographic, lexical and phonetic notation, supplements the means of expression based on sound by adding a specifically plastic dimension, a visual facet which is irreducible and escapes oral labelling. . . . " Isidore Isou [1]

Metagraphy, Metagraphics, post- or meta-writing was developed by the Lettrist movement in 1950s.[2]

Contents

[edit] Hypergraphy

"If one places an abstract composition - which is simply a fragmentary purification of the former object - in (or alongside) a figurative structure, this second composition digests the first one - transformed into a decorative motif - and then the whole work becomes figurative. However if one places a letterist notation on (or beside) a realist "form," it is the first one which assimilates the second to change the whole thing into a work of hypergraphics or super-writing. " Isidore Isou, "The Force Fields of Letterist Painting" , from Les Champs de Force de la Peinture Lettriste (Paris: Avant- Garde, 1964).

After the split in the Lettrist movement, the Lettrist movement developed metagraphy into super-writing or hypergraphy. The Lettrist International in opposition to what they called lettrist metagraphics (hypergraphics) mostly abandoned metawriting and metagraphics and started to concentrate on unitary urbanism and Situationism.[3]

[edit] Psychogeography

After the formation of the Situationist International and the adoption of unitary urbanism, a hypergraphical critique of architecture and urbanism was developed in the form of psychogeography.

After the formation of the SI, the group and Asger Jorn in particular, developed forms of "plastic" non-Euclidean and unitary geometry which gave rise to the applied study of situations or topology in the form of situlogy, situgraphy.

[edit] Situlogy

Asger Jorn developer of Situlogy and Situgraphy - "the field of situlogical experience is divided into two opposing tendencies, the ludic tendency and the analytic tendency. The tendency of art, spinn and the game, and that of science and its techniques," IS No.5, open creation and its enemies.

After the advent of hypertext, hypergraphics were developed by the Lpa Historification Committee (LHC) at the 1st Conference on the Foundations of Psycho-Physics with Oxford University's Philosophy of Physics department, Clarendon Laboratory and CERN.

[edit] Further reading

Curtay, Jean-Paul: Letterism and Hypergraphics: The Unknown Avant-Garde 1945 -1985, Franklin Furnace, New York, 1985

Bohn , From Hieroglyphics to Hypergraphics in "Experimental - Visual - Concrete Avant-Garde Poetry Since the 1960s", 1996

[edit] See also