Kelli Anderson

Last updated
Kelli Anderson
Kelli Anderson 1.jpg
Born
New Orleans, LA
NationalityAmerican
EducationBFA, MFA, MS
Alma materPratt Institute
Notable workThis Book is a Camera, This Book is a Planetarium
StyleConceptual Art, Graphic Design
Website https://kellianderson.com

Kelli Anderson is a graphic artist and paper engineer who works with a wide range of mediums including infographics, branding design, pop up books and risograph animations. She is known for her TED talk on disruptive art, [1] and has published 3 books. [2] Her work has been published by NPR, [3] MoMA, Chronicle Books, and The New Yorker. [4] Anderson has developed curricula and taught in graduate programs at NYU, ITP, Parsons, [5] the School for Poetic Computation, The New Schoo l in New York City, [6] as well as art history at the Pratt Institute and paper engineering, typography and risograph animation at Cooper Union.

Contents

Education

Anderson received a BFA at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, followed by an MFA and MS at the Pratt Institute of New York. She wrote her master's thesis on nuclear waste markers. [7] [8]

Career

Early in her career, Anderson spent four months at a digital agency. However, she states that this experience helped her discover that a traditional, full-time job wasn’t the right fit for her. [9]

Anderson collaborated as a graphic designer with The Yes Men on a counterfeit New York Times newspaper. The hoax involved blanketing New York City with fake editions of the paper completely rewritten with articles describing a utopian present reality. [10] Anderson also designed for publications related to Occupy Wall Street. [11]

Anderson began gaining wider recognition for her interactive paper work, beginning with “Paper Record Player”, a wedding invitation that plays music. In 2013 Anderson illustrated, paper engineered and animated The Human Body, [12] a children's app by Tinybop Inc. [13] In the same year, she created the installation Book Covers, Re-imagined in Paper, a 100% paper installation done for the New York City Public Library with Maria Popova. [14] In 2015, Anderson was granted the Adobe Creative Residency [15] which included being a keynote speaker at Adobe Max, [16] and in 2019, she was an Osher Fellow at Exploratorium.

Anderson's work spans a broad range of digital and tangible mediums, and from the playful to the political or a mix of both. [8] Her infographics include Buying a Gun in America for Mayors Against Illegal Guns, [17] which addressed the ease with which a gun can be obtained. She is also known for her books "This Book Is a Planetarium" and "This Book is a Camera" which was published by the MoMA. [18] [19] Anderson has taught paper engineering at Cooper Union [20] as well as typography and risograph animation.

There is a strong theme of bringing the 2 dimensional to life in Anderson's work, exemplified in her sculptural paper pieces and pop-ups. This theme is also evident in her animation work where a handcrafted quality is often present such as in her work for NPR's video "Talking While Female" [3] or her music video for They Might be Giants which used a combination of stop motion and compositing techniques. [21] Even when working with the purely digital, such as creating interactive anatomy for the Tinybop Human Body app, Anderson's work retains a quality of texture and tangibility. [22] [23] She has also designed for Russ n' Daughters and Momofuku, and Munchery. [24]

Recently, she has been a featured speaker at MIT Media Lab [25] and animated in collaboration with Yo Yo Ma on a series of Richard Feynman poems. [26]

In 2024, Anderson announced 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. [6]  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. [27]

Works

Notable Works

This Book is 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. [18] 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. [18]

This Book is a Planetarium

This book offers an in-depth exploration of the scientific principles behind everyday items. [32] 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. [32]

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. [33] The activists made 500,000 copies, picked them up in U-Haul vans, and stationed the vans in eight different locations around Manhattan. Anderson, alongside volunteers showed up at 5am to grab the papers and pass them out. [9] 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. [10]

Awards

Related Research Articles

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References

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  3. 1 2 Talking While Female | Shots | NPR, 24 October 2014, retrieved 2024-03-12
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  6. 1 2 "Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape". Letterform Archive. Retrieved 2024-10-30.
  7. Anderson, Kelli "DESIGNING FOR DEEP TIME: How art history is used to mark nuclear waste". Pratt Institute, 2005. Retrieved from: https://www.kellianderson.com/MSthesis.pdf
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  13. Vanhemert, Kyle. "Gorgeous Anatomy App Gives Kids What They Want: Farts". Wired. ISSN   1059-1028 . Retrieved 2024-06-26.
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