[Launch] OEI #112-113: Cosmology of Bliss

Join us for a presentation of A Cosmology of Bliss, the latest issue of OEI. The issue concerns Bliss (aka Blissymbols or Semantography) — an unspoken language made of countless little geometric symbols, many resembling the things they point to, others remaining more mysterious. The publication explores Bliss through archival material, biographical and speculative texts, and commissions by some thirty artists and poets who put the symbols to new and unruly use. A Cosmology of Bliss will be introduced by its editor, Rowan McNaught.

Find the book here: https://rile.space/books/a-cosmology-of-bliss-oei-112-113

Find the books by OEI here on our website: https://rile.space/publishers/oei-editor

Schedule

18:30 Presentation by Rowan McNaught

About

A Cosmology of Bliss reconsiders the histories, forms, and dreams of Bliss and its many contributors. It includes a new picaresque biography of Charles, the chemical engineer, wounded refugee, and amateur semanticist; essays that draw out affinities and resistances, such as with the history of 20c Australian poetry and experimental pedagogy; unpublished material from Bliss’s manuscripts and correspondences, including an extensive selection of the barely-published Blissymbols Picture Book—Charles’s final work; and commissions by some thirty artists and poets who put the symbols to new and unruly use. Together they seek to lodge Bliss into the history of Australian visual art and poetry as a remarkable exception. Against received accounts of a failed auxiliary language or an outmoded therapeutic aid, A Cosmology of Bliss is the first study to insist that Bliss is a poetic project. Taken as such, the symbols begin to speak—silently—of a world of lucky faults, chemical grammars, speechless inscriptions, and untenable, incandescent loves.

OEI #112–113: A Cosmology of Bliss concerns Bliss (aka Blissymbols or Semantography) — an unspoken language made of countless little geometric symbols, many resembling the things they point to, others remaining more mysterious. Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985) began the project in 1942 while a stateless refugee in the Shanghai International Settlement, and who, after emigrating to the Australian beach town of Coogee, worked on it for the rest of his life.

Rowan McNaught is an artist-researcher based in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia), and the secretary of Darpa (https://darpa.press).

About OEI

OEI is a Stockholm based magazine for extra-disciplinary spaces and de-disciplinizing moments – experimental forms of thinking, montages between poetry, art, philosophy, film, and documents; critical investigations, editorial enunciations, aesthetic technologies, non-affirmative writing, speculative archaeologies, new ecologies and counter-historiographies.

OEI magazine was founded in 1999 and has published 111 issues. The publishing structure OEI editör was started in 2002 and has published some 100 books of investigative poetry, aesthetic documents, bookworks, theoretical and poetological texts etc.

OEI is an artistic and literary project run by Jonas (J) Magnusson & Cecilia Grönberg.