I started keeping notebooks some time around age sixteen. It was 2003 and for an English assessment I’d submitted a short story inspired by the Book of Genesis; something about Adam running around the Garden of Eden with a missing rib and bleeding all over the place. As we all sat down in class one afternoon, the teacher announced: ‘there’s one story that I think is exceptional. Marcus, would you care to read yours in front of the class?’ With a burgeoning tenth grade ego and a penchant for public speaking already spurned by several years of after-school drama club, he did not have to ask twice. But when I stood up, double-sided lined A4 paper in hand, I struggled to read the messy cursive scrawl of my own handwriting. After a minute or so of my floundering, the teacher interrupted my broken delivery. ‘And that, Marcus, demonstrates my real point. Your handwriting is illegible. If you don’t sort it out over the Easter break, you won't be able to sit your exams.’
Was this spectacle of public humiliation my first experience at the sticky intersection of form and content?
In any case this was an odd proposition, because of course I already knew how to write. Something had just gone wrong along the way, leaving both reader and writer adrift in a gnarled forest of signs. Nonetheless, as a people-pleaser through-and-through, I did what he commanded, went away, and re-taught myself to write. It was actually quite a fun process. Learning to write on your own terms, outside the formal constraints of education, is surprisingly liberating. As an adult with a strong foundation to work from, one can consciously attend to style in a way that a five year old can’t. As such, my new hand took heavy inspiration from the graphologies of tagging and graffiti-writing, not because I was much of a street artist, but because I was enamoured by the hip hop and nu metal typefaces that proliferated the zeitgeist of my teens (think Limp Bizkit album cover). And so, I crafted a new handwriting that was both readable, and, dare I say, pretty friggen sick.
But the payoff for clarity was speed. In this new script, the turbo-paced cursive I’d abandoned was replaced with a more methodical, delicate approach to writing — artful, yet laboriously slow. This caused its own problems when exam time rolled around. While my new handwriting still proved academically problematic, it had awakened a new pleasure in writing, not writing as a vehicle for content but writing as a formal exercise in and of itself.
By this age I had also developed a keen interest in tabletop wargames and RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer 40,000. While at first I relished in the microscopic detail of painting model orcs, what I loved more was creating elaborate maps, NPCs and lore (all handwritten in a big ring-binder folder). One might say I was a natural born dungeon master, except for the fact that I could never find anyone to play these painstakingly crafted campaigns other than my neighbour Jamie, who would feign interest out of pity for an hour or so before returning to his Razor scooter.
So, with nowhere interesting to place my interests, these disparate preoccupations with expanded forms of writing mutated into keeping journals (as I called them at the time). My early journals read like a Brett Easton Ellis novel crossed with a Cosmopolitan magazine: long, arduous paragraphs of inane namedropping, unrequited lusts, and forty-eight other shades of angst. This journalling practice has evolved dramatically over the years, eventually mingling with my concurrent performance practice in complex, generative ways. The most notable evolution of this is an extreme compression of size: each of the artist pages included in this issue are 1:1 scale, and all written or drawn completely freehand in molecular detail that privileges the economy of space. There’s an ironic full-circle moment when people inevitably ask a recurring question upon seeing the notebooks: ‘can you actually read that??’
But the answer to that question, unlike in that English classroom twenty-three years ago, isn’t really the point. These pieces are not designed to be ‘read’ per se; they are better understood as residual markings; palimpsests, artefacts of transformation. An important reference along the way has been encountering lineages of asemic writing (writing devoid of semiotic content): the mysterious lingua ignota of the Voynich Manuscript (1404–1438); the alien newspaper anthologies of Mirtha Dermisache (1940–2012); encyclopedic expanses like Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus (1981). While my work often dabbles in pure asemic writing, it’s perpetually plunging in and out of the mucky process of meaning-production. This continual interplay between sense and nonsense, text and texture, can be called, respectively, ‘parasemics’ and ‘intertexturality’. Parasemics is a field of quasi-semantics drawing on pseudoscience, psychobabble, glossolalia and other linguistic artefacts. It incorporates gesture, non-verbal voice, transcription errors, sublimonyms, and fictional codifications. Parasemics is not a fixed system but a terrain where language operates as a material of instability, incorporating breakdown, illegibility, and misrecognition as compositional tools. Adjacent to this process is ‘wor(l)dbuilding’: a methodology of reverse-engineering conceptual landscapes, emotional codices and psychoschematics out of and around neologisms.
The included pages are scans of notebooks from the past twelve months or so (I don’t date them and they tend to develop nonlinearly), and can be taken as a series of mind-maps that operate closely in tandem with my experimental theatremaking practice. Much has been said about the temporal precarity of performance as an artform but in my experience the material residues of the event itself are equally as important as its ghosts. These notebooks are not merely an externalisation of the physical, mental and relational labour of making performance; they are the process itself, the engine room of embodied thought.
This mode of thinking about performance as both an ephemeral and materially lingering process is the beginning of what I call ‘perforganisation’. Perforganisation treats performance not as a discrete event but as a porous system of entangled relations: between bodies, spaces, durations, media, and everyday life. A ‘perforganism’ might emerge in the space between a rumour, a protocol, a misremembered voice memo. This framework enables the construction of speculative institutions, phantom dramaturgies, and esoteric rituals that shape how a work behaves and is perceived. Like parasemics, it functions as both a method and a lens; a slippery way of thinking through performance not as representation, but as transformation.
There’s another whole substrate to perforganisation: the notebooks operate not just temporally and materially, but relationally. This practice interfaces with the world beyond just me, their author. You’ll find the journal used in writing experiments at a jazz gig or out on the dancefloor at the club (yes I am that guy). In these contexts, a curious person inevitably sees me writing, peers over my shoulder, and asks to have a closer look… maybe they find themselves participating in perforganisation without even realising. But none of this is really new. Just ask my highschool friend Claire, whom I insisted read every page of my first completed journal so she’d know how obsessed I was with her; or my first girlfriend Jessamy, who, jealous of Claire, insisted I let her read the same journals, only to discover endless paragraphs about Claire, prompting her to conceal a secret two-page letter (her handwriting was always immaculate) beneath one of the many pasted-in layers of fold-out inserts in those early journals that I would not find until two decades later when some friends egged me into reading aloud from them at a kickons at 3am.
----