Readed Project Statement
I started working on Readed during the spring of 2024, while Donald Trump was on trial for falsifying business records in New York City. Courts in New York do not allow photography in the courtroom, but they do allow artists to draw during trials. The only images of the trial I saw—in the media at least—were courtroom sketches of the accused. I started thinking about how odd it is that drawings of trials are allowed while photographs are not.
Even in the age of digitally editable images, where everyone theoretically knows that a “photograph” has no more veracity than a drawing, we still ascribe some power to a photographic image. We read drawings differently than the way we read photographs, and that difference is largely dependent on context and the codes of representation evoked by a particular image. Courtroom sketches create an interesting conversation between art history and codes of representation. The function of a courtroom sketch is to convey an appearance—the test being “are we able to recognize the people depicted”—while simultaneously conveying the emotional tenor of a trial. Good courtroom sketches draw heavily on art historical and photographic codes of representation.
This conversation between notions of representation, correct form, and tradition led me to ponder the contemporary evolution of reading and writing. I taught for many years, and watching my students hopelessly addicted to their phones—to the point where they got shaky without them—left me wondering if literacy was dying. Longer exposure to their practice, however, led me to understand that they were reading and writing all the time, but the reading and writing they were doing was vastly different from academic literacy. Use of emojis, invented spellings, short-form texts, novel slang, and the struggle with auto-correct are the hallmarks of their literacy, so I decided to make a typographically experimental essay about this new mode in reading and writing. [This is for my fellow dinosaur literati.]
In Readed, typographic forms are performed as images, screened using odd patterns, and intended as a score for the reader. The work concludes with the phrase “this is the new reading a warm bath but oily and not quite clean,” my assessment of reading and writing on tiny screens.