Sasha Wizansky’s magazine embraces graphite, paper and constraint – a reminder of what thinking by hand still unlocks.
AI floods the feed with instant output. Pencil Magazine stays analogue and slow. Created by artist and designer Sasha Wizansky with poet and visual artist Matthea Harvey, the publication is made entirely from graphite pencil and paper – and asks its contributors to work the same way.
That means no colour, slick digital effects or infinite tabs open in the background. The result is intimate, strange and deeply human: handwritten essays, sketches, drawings and visual experiments that feel almost oppositional to the frictionless pace of online culture. But Pencil Magazine isn’t simply nostalgic for pre-digital life. It taps into something increasingly visible across culture right now — a craving for analogue experiences, slower attention spans and creative practices rooted in the physical world.
As conversations around AI, originality and digital exhaustion intensify – including in our upcoming The Stupid Report, as well as in a recent SEED – the magazine asks a deceptively simple question: what kind of thinking becomes possible when we step away from screens and make things by hand again?
Selected by Stack and shipping to all Protein MEMBERS this month, Pencil Magazine arrives less as a rejection of technology than as a reminder that creativity can still be tactile, communal and perfectly imperfect.
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You designed a magazine around one of the most basic creative tools possible: the pencil. Why the pencil specifically – what does it unlock that digital tools don’t?
Sasha Wizansky: We love pencils because everyone already has a relationship to them – we all used them in school. They are cheap, almost universally available and unintimidating. Yet each pencil comes with infinite possibilities. Digital tools are based on grids. Even if the pixels are minuscule, they are built on a gridded scaffolding that directs your work. It is freeing to shed this scaffolding.
Using an analogue tool, with all the accompanying friction, facilitates a relationship with your body. With each mark of the pencil, you feel specific feedback – is it scratchy? Smooth? Is the line getting thicker as the point loses its sharpness? The pencil becomes an extension of your hand. There is solid research showing that people learn better when they take notes by hand, and I believe many forms of creative work benefit in the same way.
