Demon Portraits is a Frankenstein's monster of a book — a letter-by-letter, cut-and-paste masterwork written on top of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
Working from four identical trade paperback copies, Copeland cut out individual letters and groups of letters from Huxley’s text and pasted them over the existing narrative, incorporating select letters into every word and using correction fproseluid to obscure others — a feat of strength that required more than 11,000 hours of labor over three and a half years of production.
Describing his process, Copeland said, “Every word required many minutes (at least) of work: to analyze what letters Huxley had provided, decide the word(s) that worked within my confines, find each letter, then cut and paste it into form.”
Huxley’s writing ultimately informed, guided, and restricted word choice, forcing an improvised, woven interaction between the texts. Copeland continued, “I feel this textual tension and its resolution is the vague ‘narrative’ of Demon Portraits. I could never rely on being able to write what I wanted. I had to go with it. And it got weird. But it all went somewhere.”
The result lands somewhere between poetry and prose, rhyming with Copeland’s equally monastic work as a visual artist and his more public-facing output as a member of, among other bands, Black Dice.
- Dem Passwords, 2025
- Softcover, 228 pages
- 6 x 9 inches
- First edition
- Printed in Canada
