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Hypergraphy, also called hypergraphics, is a writing method created by the Lettrist movement of the 1950s.[1] Hypergraphy merges poetry with more visual ways of communicating such as painting, illustrations and signs. The technique was first known as 'metagraphics', but later became known as 'hypergraphics'.
Isidore Isou, the founder of Lettrism, described hypergraphy as "the means of expression based on sound by adding a specifically plastic dimension, a visual facet which is irreducible and escapes oral labeling."[2] Maurice Lemaître, a Lettrist theorist, defined it as communicating through the union of various forms of communication, as an "ensemble of signs capable of transmitting the reality served by the consciousness more exactly than all the former fragmentary and partial practices (phonetic alphabets, algebra, geometry, painting, music, and so forth)."[3] The technique was used in the Lettrist painting and cinema, where the letters were drawn directly onto the film. As Lettrists became more experimental in their use of media, the technique was applied more to daily life, such as critiquing urbanism and architecture in the Lettrist field of Psychogeography.
See also
- Asemic writing
- Asger Jorn
- Maurice Lemaître
- Psychogeography
- Rammellzee
References
- ^ Isou, Isidore (1964). "The Force Fields of Letterist Painting". 'Les Champs de Force de la Peinture Lettriste. Paris: Avant-Garde.
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 letter notation on (or beside) a realist "form," it is the first one that assimilates the second to change the whole thing into a work of hypergraphics or super-writing.
- ^ Isou, Isidore (1964). Les Champs de Force de la Peinture Lettriste. Paris: Avant-Garde. Excerpt found at Selections from the Manifestosof Isidore Isou, ed. and trans.by David W. Seaman
- ^ Foster, Stephen C. (2005). "Lettrism: A Point of Views". In Ford, Simon (ed.). The Situationist International. London: Black Dog Publishing. p. 20.
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
- Acquaviva, Frédéric & Buzatu, Simona (eds): Isidore Isou: Hypergraphic Novels – 1950-1984, Romanian Cultural Institute, Stockholm, 2012.