#sam dee

[woodendevil]

doing limited palette portraiture with the palettes on procreate xoxo

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

I’m fascinated with how little books or magazines are understood as resulting from systems of material production. Tiny letters in ink or light somehow obscure all of that. I conducted this worker’s inquiry to show that, despite the glamor of the written word, copy is not abstract. It is a material subject to conditions of labor exploitation like other commodities. Workers produce copy. Copy is woven and tailored. It is cut into shape, flowed into a layout, kicked down or run up in paragraphs. Quotes are pulled and caps are dropped, with neat lines of copy hugging their contours. This vocabulary remains from lead or paste-up composition, which made these metaphors much more literal. But the symbols writers manipulate are still material, even if they are stored digitally.

Sam Dee, At the periphery of journalism