Jonathon Keats’ 1,000 Year Old Opium Cover

Years ago in those halcyon days before the soul-crushing weight of adultness was upon us, we were filled with youth and this writer used to put together absurd pieces of weird for a little online literary website called Opium Magazine. Flash ahead almost a full decade and Opium has turned into a powerhouse, with a print edition and the very fun touring show, the Literary Death Match. And what’s more, they’re even getting into experimental, far more artsy publishing than back in this writer’s day; the kind of stuff that makes it onto Wired‘s radar. Such is the case a this moment, which finds San Francisco-based artist Jonathon Keats creating a story for the magazine’s latest issue, themed “Time.” Published on the cover, the story uses a special kind of ink that will finally melt away after exposure to the sun and reveal itself after some 1,000 years. It’s a pretty nifty idea and something far superior to the goofy bits of nonsense we used to put together for them. Here’s a bit:

“…something essential is lost when ingesting words is all about speed. My thousand-year story is an antidote. Given the printing process I’ve used, you can’t take in more than one word per century. That’s even slower than reading Proust.”

The printing process in question is a simple but, as usual with Keats, pretty clever idea. The cover is printed in a double layer of standard black ink, with an incrementally screened overlay masking the nine words. Exposed over time to ultraviolet light, the words will be appear at different rates, supposedly one per century.

Might we suggest the perfect soundtrack for your reading of Keats’ story? Why it’s John Cage‘s Organ2/ASLSP, of course.

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