Meador, Clifton: readed A conversation between notions of rep-
resentation, correct form, and tradition led
me to ponder the contemporary evolution
of reading and writing. I taught for many
years, and watching my students hope-
lessly 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, how-
ever, 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 typograph-
ically experimental essay about this new
mode in reading and writing. [This is for
my fellow dinosaur literati.]
In Readed, typographic forms are per-
formed 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. en., offset litograph, thread sewing, 36p, 7.6 x 10.2 inch, Ed. of 36, num., sign., New York, 2024, Studio of Exhaustion Request of availability backnext