kottke.org posts about Kelli Anderson
In the last installment of a video series called The Universe in Verse, Maria Popova, Yo-Yo Ma, and Kelli Anderson have collaborated on a video that features words spoken by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman in a 1955 speech, a poem of sorts on the wonder of life.
Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves… and a new dance starts.
Growing in size and complexity… living things, masses of atoms, DNA, protein… dancing a pattern ever more intricate.
Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity.
Lovely. And of course I love the visuals by Kelli Anderson.
The artist Jason Polan passed away in January from colon cancer. A group of his friends are trying to memorialize Polan and his art with a commemorative postage stamp from the USPS. Kelli Anderson created mockups for the stamps.
Polan loved mail and the USPS. A few years ago at his own expense, he took out a small ad in the New Yorker for the post office:
FWIW, here’s how the USPS’s stamp selection process works.
For the Universe in Verse 2018 poetry event, Kelli Anderson created this wonderful papercraft stop motion animation to accompany Jane Hirshfield’s reading of her short poem, Optimism.
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.
The music is by Zoë Keating…a song called Optimist. Here’s more on the project from Maria Popova.
A couple of years ago, I told you about designer Kelli Anderson’s upcoming book, This Book is a Planetarium. It took awhile to get everything just right, but I’m happy to report the book will finally be out in early October.
Defying every expectation of what a book can be, this pop-up extravaganza transforms into six fully functional tools: a real working planetarium projecting the constellations, a musical instrument complete with strings for strumming, a geometric drawing generator, an infinite calendar, a message decoder, and even a speaker that amplifies sound. Artist Kelli Anderson contributes enlightening text alongside each pop-up, explaining the scientific principles at play in her constructions and creating an interactive experience that’s as educational as it is extraordinary.
Here’s a video of Anderson playing with two of the six contraptions. She sent me a preview of the book in the form of the planetarium pop-up page (accompanied by one of these cool cards) and when I cracked it open, I actually squealed. Seriously, this thing is super awesome. We took it and my iPhone flashlight into the darkest room in the house and sure enough, there was the Big Dipper projected onto the ceiling…my kids could barely stop saying “this is so cool”. Really looking forward to seeing the real thing in October.
Kelli Anderson is at it again. Her pop-up book, This Book is a Planetarium, is due out this spring, but in the meantime, she’s made a book that turns into an actual camera. And you can buy it or make your own. Here’s how the camera works:
My copy arrived in the mail the other day and I can’t wait to try it out.
Using images found on the internet through Google’s visually similar images feature, NASA, U.S. Geological Survey, and various mapping services, Kelli Anderson recreated part of the Eames’ iconic Powers of Ten as a flipbook. Watch a video here:
Or play around with a virtual flipbook at Anderson’s site. This could not possibly be anymore in my wheelhouse. Here’s the nitty gritty on how she made it happen.
The inspiration for making discontinuous-bits-of-culture into something continuous goes back to 2011. Some of my friends camped out on a sidewalk to see Christian Marclay’s The Clock. Like a loser with a deadline, I missed out-only catching it years later at MoMA. In the day-long film, Marclay recreates each minute of the 24-hour day using clips from films featuring the current time-on a clock or watch. It runs in perfect synchronization with the audience’s day (so: while a museum crowd slumps sleepily in their chairs at 6am, starlets hit snooze on the clocks onscreen.)
One of my design heroes, Kelli Anderson, is coming out with a pop-up book called This Book Is a Planetarium. What’s unique about this book is that the pop-up elements are functional contraptions, in the vein of her record player wedding invitation. There’s a tiny planetarium:
and a speaker for your smartphone:
The news comes via a video profile of Anderson’s work by Adobe. So cool.
My friends at Tinybop have unleased their second app for kids: Plants.
Unearth the secrets of the green kingdom! Explore the world’s biomes in this interactive diorama: conduct the seasons, rule the weather, ignite a wildfire, and burrow down with critters and roots. Temperate forest and desert biomes are featured in the first release of Plants. Buy now and get the next two biomes-tundra and temperate grasslands — for free when they’re released.
Can’t wait to explore this with the kids…Tinybop’s Human Body was a hit in our household. Oh, and don’t miss the making of video for the trailer above…Kelli Anderson knocks it out of the park again.
My friends at Tinybop have released their first app, The Human Body, in which “curious kids ages 4+ can see what we’re made of and how we work, from the beating heart to gurgling guts”. Kelli Anderson did the illustrations for the app and they look amazing. Can’t wait to try this out with Ollie and Minna.
This wedding invite designed by Kelli Anderson has a 45 RPM record player built right into it.
Here’s more info on how the musical invite was constructed.
The resulting booklet is comprised of a cover, two inner pages, a letterpressed band (with instructions and a tear-off RSVP postcard), and a flexdisc on a screwpost. The recipient bends the second page of the booklet back to create a tented “arm.” With the needle placed, they then carefully spin the flexidisc at 45 RPM (ish) to hear the song. The sewing needle travels the length of the song and produces the sound. Its vibrations are amplified by the thin, snappy paper to which it is adhered. To keep the needle down on the record, we reinforced the back of the “tent” with a spray-mounted half page of heavier cardstock. To reduce friction between the acetate flexidisc and the backing cover, we had the inside of the booklet laminated to be slick and conducive to hand-spinning.
(via stellar)
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