User:LightBlueTTT/sandbox

Kelli Anderson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, where she grew up. Half of her family is from Brooklyn and half is from New Orleans, which she says has resulted in a rather confused accent. Her dad is a river pilot and her mom is a stay-at-home mom.

Anderson spent four months at a digital agency, driven by her interest in the internet and a desire to enhance their website-building skills. However, she states she soon discovered that a traditional, full-time job wasn’t the right fit for her.

Anderson’s biggest influences were Marjorie Welish, a art history professor and Linda Francis, a painting teacher at the Pratt Institute of New York.

In 2024, she wrote her new book Alphabet in Motion, a pop-up book of the alphabet, from A to Z. Anderson alone researched, wrote designed and paper engineered the novel, which explains how typography works.  The book, built on years of research drawn from global design archives, visually and tangibly explores the technologies and perspectives that have influenced letterforms throughout history. Anderson describes her upcoming project as more than just an alphabet book: “It illustrates how shifts in technology and culture influence the appearance of type.” With this project, she aims to contribute her own chapter to the narrative of letterforms.

She also spent five years working as a collections photographer at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. There, she spent time digitizing their glass plate negatives and rare natural science books. She worked there until her project paper record player wedding, started picking up fame on the internet. She quit working at the museum in 2007 or 2008.

She has developed curricula and taught in graduate programs at NYU, ITP, and Parsons as well as taught at the School for Poetic Computation, The New School in New York City, art history at the Pratt Institute as well as paper engineering, typography and risograph animation at Cooper Union.

Notable works

This book is also a camera

The book illustrates—and actively demonstrates—how something as simple as a folded piece of paper can harness the fundamental properties of light to create a photograph. Anderson has a deep appreciation for paper, and she manipulates it as other designers would manipulate digital pixels to achieve remarkable results. Through a combination of folds, cuts, and tucks, she creates a working pinhole camera. This simple device captures images using just a fine beam of light, Ilford photo paper, and developing fluid. To take a photo, you place a sheet of photo paper inside the camera, frame your shot, and manually control the shutter.

This book is also a planetarium

This book offers an in-depth exploration of the scientific principles behind everyday items. It features six interactive pop-up devices. Among these creations are a planetarium that projects stars, a strummable instrument, a geometric drawing tool, a perpetual calendar, a message encryption and decryption device, and a sound-amplifying speaker. By transforming these familiar devices into paper forms, the book demonstrates the endless achievements possible with minimal resources.

The Yes Men

In 2008, Anderson teamed up with the Yes Men and other activist groups to carry out a collaborative hoax, inundating New York City with a fake edition of the New York Times that presented “news” from a utopian future. The activists made 500,000 copies, picked them up in U-Haul vans, and stationed the vans in eight different locations around Manhattan. Then, Anderson along with countless volunteers, showed up at 5am to grab the papers and pass them out. She explains that their aim was to demonstrate the incredible potential of the world if the public actively pressured their elected officials to genuinely represent their interests and needs. This project ultimately won the Arts Electronica Prix and was featured at the Brooklyn Museum.

In collaboration with the activist group The Yes Men, Anderson developed a fake version of The New York Times creating a futuristic utopian simulation.