(exciting music) - [Announcer] Welcome, everyone, to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(exciting music continues) (audience applauding) - Welcome to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

My name's Chrisstina Hamilton, the series director.

Today, we present, we finally present, I should say, as the first time we tried to do this, good old COVID came and got us again.

But today we get to finally present artist, designer, and paper engineer Kelli Anderson.

Yeah, it's exciting.

A big thank you to our partners for their support in this endeavor: the University of Michigan Library, the Ann Arbor District Library, and AIGA Detroit, and series partners Detroit Public Television, PBS Books, and Michigan Public 91.7.

Tomorrow, for those of you who have time and are so inspired, at the Ann Arbor District Library downtown branch, they will host a paper engineering workshop in their Secret Lab from 11:00 AM to noon with Kelli so you can learn to fold a flat sheet of paper into a tessellated 3D object.

Not to be missed.

For students in the house today, I wanna share with you from AIGA Detroit.

They are planning their annual Student Portfolio Review, which will happen next month on March 16th.

You can snap a picture of this QR code to get more information and prepare your work.

It's a great opportunity for you to go and talk to some professionals.

Reminder to silence your cell phones.

In lieu of a Q and A today, you'll notice we do not have microphones up here because we are not having a regular Q and A, Kelli has brought some of her amazing books with her.

And so we can convene in the lobby.

She'll have some for sale and she can sign some and she's happy to just meet people and have a conversation.

So that'll happen at the book table out in the lobby directly following her talk here.

Now, for a little background on Kelli.

Kelli Anderson is an artist, designer, and paper engineer who pushes the boundaries of ordinary materials and formats by seeking out the hidden possibilities in the physical and digital world.

Her work has garnered major attention from new numerous media outlets, including "Mashable," "Kottke," "Slashdot," "Make," "PCWorld," "Swissmiss," "Wired," and the "Toronto Star," and NPR.

And her work itself has been published in "Wired Magazine," Gestalten, Rockport Publishing, IdN, "HOW" design magazine, and "Hemispheres" magazine.

And, of course, she has created and published many of her own books.

Kelli finds that design and paper engineering, in particular, enable one defined possibility hiding in plain view and provides the ability to reveal the amazing facets of our reality through the physical and social forces which structure our world.

Yes, humble paper can act as a direct interface on sound, light, and time, showing us what it means to be human.

Please welcome Kelli Anderson.

(audience applauding) - Well, thank you so much for that great introduction, Chrisstina.

And it's such an honor to be here.

Some of my heroes have spoken as part of this lecture series, so I'm really excited to be here.

So I am calling my talk "The Hidden Talents of Everyday Things."

but my real goal with this talk was to cram in as much work, as many videos, as many, like, pleasing design pictures as I could.

So this is gonna be a ride.

(laughs) Thank you.

Yay.

So I'm coming to you today from Brooklyn, New York.

This is an accurate representation of my apartment, because I have two cats and they're, of course, the boss.

So this is where I work.

And I'm a graphic designer, pop-up book author, tinkerer, animator.

I started out doing a lot of very traditional graphic design work and then wanted to make these experiences that were more tactile.

These are two attempts at expressing variable type through paper engineering.

And I'm really obsessed with things that seem like magic but have no hidden parts.

This is actually what we're folding tomorrow at the library, so a little bit of an advertisement for that.

I ended up making a lot of mechanical things like this protest sign from the 2020 Black Lives Matter march.

You know, you could do the middle finger or the solidarity depending on who you were facing.

And this is evergreen.

Like, we can bring this out right now for our current dilemmas.

But, yeah, whenever I'm working on a traditional design project or something more experimental and mechanical, it's always this speculative process of, like, navigating mysteries, of, like, asking questions, of: "Will this work?

Will this work?"

and then seeing if it does.

So I feel really grateful that in my practice I'm able to operate that way.

And as a designer, there's historically been these two different tracks in my work which have converged, which is where, that convergence is the place where a lot of the books come from.

So the first is that I really like to explain invisible things.

At the beginning of my career I designed a ton of infographics for years and years, and still do sometimes.

And the activity of a designer when you're doing data visualization work is all about bringing facts from the abstract or numerical realm into the sphere of perception so that you can see and feel and experience those facts.

So the other part of my work's duality is that, you know, I'm obsessed with building these little things that seem like magic but have no hidden parts, things that are simple and that you can see them in their totality, the opposite of black box, but are complex in that they seem to behave in a way that's more sophisticated than the sum of, like, their humble parts.

And I like to call these things lo-fi magic.

There's a lot of this in the world that feels like a trick.

For example, like my cat, you might see it once be fooled and never be fooled again.

I was very lucky to capture this on camera.

Not a real wolf, it turns out.

(laughs) But there's this, like, really, like, interesting opportunity that you can capitalize on as a designer when things behave in ways that surprise us.

So, you know, quote, unquote, "magic" occurs when the world just very rapidly demonstrates that there's something that we don't understand about reality, right, that there's a blind spot in our understanding of how the world works.

So this is a book I made based on research by a Swiss scientist named Emin Gabrielyan.

And Emin Gabrielyan is interested in using moire interference patterns to give the illusion of magnification.

His aims are more practical than mine.

He's trying to, like, enlarge small numbers on different dials.

But, you know, when you watch this, when you turn that grid, all the dots underneath it appear to get bigger and bigger and bigger.

But there's nothing special about this material.

What it's doing is revealing to us, like, how our own perception works.

So it works by the same mechanism...

If you're driving down the road and you see a billboard and it's, like, partially obstructed by a tree branch, you can usually, like, fill in the blanks with your mind and still read the words.

And that's exactly what's happening here, but in, like, a very orderly way, 'cause there's a one-to-one relationship between the dots on the page and, like, the gridded holes on this thing.

And so your eye is like, "Oh, well the dot must be getting bigger.

It must be getting bigger."

But, really, you're just seeing, like, all these different parts of different dots.

But, yeah, you know, I realized that if I started making those invisible forces, those things tangible, that I could bring these things that are deep questions and deep mysteries and sort of ponder them alongside my audience, you know, that we'd stand there together and play with this thing and say, "Oh, isn't that interesting?"

and just sort of discover the world, you know, through making.

And although I'm like, I'm really fascinated by tech, I resist the impulse to be black box.

I instead approach technical concepts from more of a craft mentality.

So, you know, I'm always misusing materials that I find in, like, science labs and stuff.

(laughs) This is an animation, for example, that I made out of a puddle of water.

So this is Muybridge's running horse.

And I made it by cutting out a vinyl sticker stencil for each one of, like, the 24 frames in the second of, like, horse galloping.

And then I covered the plate in Rain-X.

And let me see if this will... Yeah.

And it's this hydrophobic coating that is frequently used to keep, you know, snow and sleet and all matter of weather off of your windshield, but it also functioned to corral these puddles into different shapes.

And so, yeah, it's an animated puddle.

(laughs) But, yeah, I feel like I've really, like, succeeded with my work when I can stand there and say, "Look what I did.

I made it and I have no clue why this works."

(laughs) Then I feel like I'm really, like, interacting with something that's like vital and interesting and kind of like really pushing myself to, like, the edge of my understanding.

And I feel that way because I believe strongly that there are these two different inroads to every problem.

For example, if you say, you know, "What is a circle?"

you can answer that question with formalized mathematics and say, "A circle is nothing but a bunch of points that are equidistant from the central point."

So this is what happens when you boil a circle down to an abstraction that you can then, you know, pass around and build upon socially.

But you can also make a circle the way that the first circles were made.

So this is an artifact that looks like a Krispy Kreme donut, but it's not.

It's made outta stone.

You would hurt your teeth (laughs) if you tried to buy it into this.

And it's supposedly, like, one of the first perfect circles that was ever made by man.

And this was made long before the equation exists, before the perfection of industrialized manufacturing existed, before, like, compasses existed.

And it was made by... You know, if you take a large soft rock and then take a small hard stone and start rotating it into it, it digs in and establishes like a fixed axis point and then scrapes away the rock at that fixed distance from that central point.

And so the only shape that can result from that gesture, from that performance is a perfect circle with all of these equidistant points.

So, you know, I like to give that example because a lot of times, like, when you approach the world and approach invention from, like, a tinkering sort of craft mentality, it feels a little bit like, "Oh gosh, you know, I have imposter syndrome.

I don't know what I am doing."

But, you know, it's easy to forget that a lot of the time when things are first invented, you know, things get invented before we have a formalized way of describing them.

And because we've evolved as humans to think about the worlds through our bodies, the most natural way to explore complexity and to, you know, get into, you know, these mysteries we don't quite understand is oftentimes by, like, touching and manipulating and tinkering with things rather than through this, like, formalized inroad of mathematics and formal science.

Has anyone ever made one of these before?

Yeah?

Oh, cool!

I see a couple hands.

Does anyone know what it's called?

- [Audience] Mobius strip.

- Mobius strip.

Awesome!

Yeah, so I know you all have watched this video a couple times now.

So what this is, is you take a strip of paper and you...

If you haven't done this yet...

I only saw one person raise their hand.

So this is your official homework assignment.

Go home, take a strip of paper, twist it once, but not twice, and then tape it end to end.

And if you start drawing a line down the center of it, you'll find that that line ends in the same place where it began.

So it's a very, very simple mechanism to take, turn a two-dimensional surface into a one-dimensional surface.

And this is something that, you know, like, a kindergartner can make, you know, in just a couple of minutes.

But it's definitely one of those things that's, like, much easier to understand in paper than on paper.

So this, for example, is the Wikipedia article that explains, like, what a Mobius strip is and why it works.

And you basically need an advanced degree in math to be able to read this.

(laughs) So yeah.

And usually, like, the Wikipedia article for any topic is like the most pedestrian entry point.

And so I'd hate to to pick up an actual book on the topic of Mobius strips.

But I've tried, so... (laughs) If this interests you, I recommend checking out the work of Erik Demaine.

He's kind of like the patron saint of making mathematics and abstractions, like, tangible through the unlikely craft of origami.

So part of his work deals with showing how all of these, like, unsolvable high-tech engineering problems are being solved by, like, working back and forth between the computer and between using that human tinkering sort of, like, sensory problem solving in the form of origami.

So as a designer, I really believe strongly that our best work happens when we get our hands and our brains working in tandem.

You know, even the best sensors on computers can't compare to the things that we humans can, like, intuit and pick up on in our materials.

So, you know, I have this question in my work that I've been exploring, is, you know, like: Can we use the superpower of the whole intuitive sensing human as a detective for the world, this, like, unlikely and radical potential?

And to do that, you know, we oftentimes... Like, especially in design and tech, we oftentimes ask this question of like, "What is it a thing does?"

It's like a very object-focused question.

But I'm more interested in this question of like: What do the things we design do to us?

I feel like this is a much more humanist way to approach approach design.

So I wanna show you my journey with this particular question.

So, this object was born out of an innocent sheet of paper.

This was actually an experiment that was influenced by...

I first saw this on a children's science show, where...

It was Mr. Wizard.

Any Mr. Wizard fans out there?

(laughs) Yes!

If you all don't know Mr. Wizard, I think he was on TV from, like, the 1960s to the 1980s.

And then at that point it was deemed that he was too mean to children and he was turned off.

The format of the show was always like, you know, he would ask a child like, "Timmy, what do you think this does?"

And, you know, when the answer was wrong, he would say, "No, that is incorrect."

So I think he kind of like went out of fashion in the early '90s.

But there's this great experiment where he rolled up this cone of paper, taped a needle to the end of it, and that was enough to recreate this, like, you know, what I assume is a highly technologized function of a record player, to take that information, that sound information that's encoded into the grooves of record and amplify it into the realm of audibility.

So I saw this and I, it just stuck with me into my adult life when, as a graphic designer, I was approached by two of my best friends to make their wedding invitation.

And I said, "You know what you all need?

(laughs) You don't need a wedding invitation.

You need a paper record player wedding invitation."

And bless their hearts.

Very good friends.

They said, "Yes, Kelli, that sounds like a great idea.

We think our friends would be delighted by this."

So, yeah, then I went down this, like, rabbit hole of, you know, just, like, testing every single needle to find the one that, you know, would fit in the record groove properly, and, you know, calling paper suppliers, asking them for the paper with the best sound quality, which is definitely not a thing and they will not talk to you about it.

(audience laughing) But we figured it out.

And Karen and Mike wrote this really cute song inviting guests to the wedding, which we had put onto this clear flexi disk.

I know you're probably used to seeing records being these like, you know, thick, black, opaque things.

But the reason we wanted to use this clear flexi disk format, even though the sound is terrible, is because we wanted to print, you know, this impartial portrait of Karen and Mike so that people would put their finger on it and start, you know, turning the record, completing their friends in all of these different scenarios.

You know, Mike bakes pies, let's bake pies, let's DJ, you know, et cetera.

Let's grow old together in funny old person close, so... And part of the reason why I did this is because, you know, from a UX standpoint, I wanted people to start putting their finger on the record and start turning it because then the next instruction is a little bit advanced.

You have to turn the record at exactly 45 RPM.

So there's a little needle at the end of this red dot, and you put it on the record, and then exactly 45 RPM.

♪ Here's the invitation ♪ ♪ To a celebration ♪ ♪ Make it a vacation ♪ ♪ Make it a vacation ♪ - [Kelli] And that's what the real song sounds like.

♪ You needed one anyway ♪ ♪ A happy Brooklyn getaway ♪ ♪ To meet up on our special day ♪ ♪ And say ♪ - Yeah.

Thanks.

(audience applauding) Yeah, I was so surprised.

I don't know if anyone else has ever done this with a project, but I'm like, "Yeah, this will definitely work.

I saw it on Mr.

Wizard."

And then I wasn't really sure if we'd be able to get it to work.

So it was a really, really nice surprise.

And I was so excited.

Karen and Mike were so excited.

I think at least 10 of their friends were very excited.

(audience laughing) But it was the funniest thing 'cause I uploaded that video to the internet and it went, like, legitimately viral.

Like, I got invited on morning television, like, talk shows.

Like, yeah, I don't know, I don't know.

Like, yeah, I got invited to give a TEDx talk.

(laughs) It's very strange.

And part of the reason, you know, when people wanna compliment you, it's like, "Okay, cool, I'll take this."

But I was also, in the back of my mind I was thinking like, "Didn't we all agree that the arc of technological progress bends towards, like, increasing sophistication?

Like, why is everyone freaking out about this technological object that sounds bad, only Kelli can play well, if it's humid it won't work, and it's barely audible?

So, you know, don't we want our things that are functional to perform function?"

So I kind of, in making that project, which was, you know, a little over a decade ago, I stumbled into this, like, really interesting generative question for myself that's kind of, like, structured like the rest of my career, which is, you know: Why are lo-fi things still appealing in this world of advanced tech?

You know, why are these objects that kind of go in the opposite direction that human civilization has chosen for technology, why are they still appealing?

And I proceeded to prod at this question in higher and higher stakes venues.

So with Chronicle Books, they asked me for a book proposal.

And I suggested that we make a book that breaks down, you know, sort of black box technology for a generation of digital natives accustomed to immediate wish fulfillment and endless choice on their iPad.

(laughs) So this is a book called "This Book is a Planetarium," and it calls out all of these different objects that we associate with, like, either computers or electronics and shows of the structural phenomenon that undergirds those experiences and technologies.

And the purpose of it is really to get people to stop asking, "How does it work?"

and instead ask like, "How does time work?

How does light work?

How does encryption really work?"

and, you know, hopefully get connected to those, like, vast unanswerable questions of the universe a lot faster.

And so I was really afraid, and Chronicle Books was afraid too, that kids would look at me like how I looked at my grandparents when they described playing Kick the Can.

But yeah, it seems like kids really actually like this and are kind of like craving more tactile experiences and that connection that those experiences can bring.

So, yeah, it was a success.

(laughs) And it's called "This Book is a Planetarium" because I think objectively it's the best pop-up in the book.

And, yeah, so...

But, yeah, even though it is this, like, almost... You know, it's almost out of sync with the time and it's sort of like going against, like, the entire narrative of technological progress.

It's sold over 100,000 copies and it's, like, translated into two languages.

So, yeah, there's definitely... Oh, thanks.

(audience applauding) Yeah, there's definitely something there.

So if anyone has a hunch about anything, I'm just gonna try to, like, empower you to follow it.

Follow that weird hunch.

(laughs) If you think it's cool, probably someone else will.

So this was another, you know, fairly high stakes wager.

This is a book that I co-published with the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

And this was actually a reject from the planetarium book because Chronicle Books told me that no one would want to do analog photography anymore.

So this is called "This Book is a Camera" And it's a very, very elaborately folded black piece of paper that works as a functional pinhole camera.

So all pinhole cameras and, you know, the earliest cameras in general were just light-tight boxes with a hole in them.

And it comes with photo paper that you can develop yourself.

So this is how it works.

You open it up, and in the dark you load in some photo paper.

And then, yeah, you lift this little dark slide that lets light go in through the pinhole and shine onto the photo paper.

And then you can develop it with instant coffee, baking soda, and water.

So, yeah, if the world is ending and there's no electricity and you need photos, this is where to go.

(laughs) You of course have to rob a convenience store to get the, (laughs) the instant coffee, but... (laughs) But yeah, you know, it's like I...

It's funny because like you...

I skipped one step here, where you have to use a light meter on your iPhone to see how long to expose the photo for.

And so in the time that you've taken that light meter reading, you could have taken, like, 25 photos on your iPhone.

So it's a little bit of like an absurdist exercise, but it really does, like, get people into, like, understanding, like, how light works.

For example, like, the whole book is diagrammed to explain that light gets inverted when it enters the pinhole and that every single time you take a photo out of the back of it, it's going to be upside down.

So it was kind of like a fun graphic design challenge to diagram that.

But it also takes pretty good photos.

So, like, this is a photo that I took on the Brooklyn Bridge.

And because it's lensless, because I don't have to choose whether I want the foreground or the background in focus, everything comes in at the same relative focus.

So here you can see there was this, like, Sharpie graffiti in the foreground, and then you have these rivets going back to the bridge; and all of it is in focus because there's no lens.

And so even though it is sort of like, you know, a predecessor technology, I won't say an inferior technology, it has, like, aesthetic qualities that are really, really difficult to replicate, like, with more advanced cameras.

Hopefully this will be coming out in the next year or so.

I have been prototyping what I think everyone has wanted from me for, like, the past decade, is "This Book is a Record Player."

So yeah, this is...

In this version, when you open the pop-up, it rotates 45 degrees and drops on the record.

And it's actually loud, so... (laughs) - [Speaker] Since the '60s.

- Yeah, so look out for that.

And I also, I was a fellow at the Exploratorium a few years ago.

And we also realized that you could build, like, a completely non electrified radio using just a coil of copper.

So, again, very, very low audibility.

It would be like, you know, a silent dance party for one.

But this is actually, this discovery... And you you can tune it, actually, by, like, moving around this metal plate on top of this other metal plate.

You can pick up, like, slightly different, like, AM radio stations.

But it's amazing.

It just, like, pulls electrons out of the air through the coil.

But this is what has slowed down... You know, I was already... With this, I was like, "Oh, I have 15 cover designs."

And I was like, "You know what?

It can't just be a record player.

It has to be a whole stereo."

So this is what happens in my life.

I get greedy and then they don't, the books don't come out, but... (laughs) But, yeah, so, you know, I've been thinking a lot about this question as I've made these things.

And I think that, you know, the difference between these, like, analog tactile experiences and more digital experiences is that, you know, lo-fi tends to be high sense, you know, that the more insubstantial the interface, like, the more, you know, tactile and less black box an interface is, the more that reduces the distance between my hands and, you know, this vast context, this vast physical context we're all a part of.

You know, if you've ever had that experience of, like, fussing with a radio antenna, like, on a car or on a clock radio, it really comes up these days because, you know, it's very easy to tune into any radio station you want, like, using, you know, very precise, like, digital technology.

No one would mistake that experience of, like, having to, like, fix the antenna as like a good one or one you crave.

But there's something about it, there's a certain type of revelation that comes in through your fingers, you know, that all this time you've been moving through a world with invisible car ads and country music, you know, that if only you had, you know, this antenna you could pick up on.

And so, yeah, I'm really, really interested in, like, bringing that into a book.

And I think that this is... You know, this talk is called "The Hidden Talents of Everyday Things."

And, you know, this is what I love about paper, is that you can fold a piece of paper a certain way and have it catch the wind and make air visible.

You can roll a piece of paper into a cone and manipulate sound waves.

There's this, like, feeling of intimate immensity when you use something so simple to connect with, you know, this phenomenon that like, you know, when you get into it, it's kind of difficult to understand.

It was really a copywriting challenge on "This Book is a Planetarium" to explain why all of these, you know, little pop-ups worked, because, you know, it kind of goes to like, you know, how does sound work?

You know, it's like you could kind of go on and on and on down into a rabbit hole with that question.

Yeah, but, you know, all of these... Oops.

I jumped ahead inadvertently.

All of these things are undergirded by, you know, all of the laws of physics.

So we're gonna talk about this project now, which is kind of depressing (laughs) in our current state.

But, you know, that feeling of awe, I feel like I only really get it, it's more readily imparted by a physical thing.

And this is something that I discovered on the first big graphic design project I ever worked on, which was this project that you're seeing right here.

So this is... A group of me and my activist friends developed this crazy project.

It was organized by a group called the Yes Men, where early one Thursday in New York City, we blanketed the whole city with an alternate reality.

And we didn't use, you know, any kind of like VR, or AR, or anything, we just used humble paper.

And we ended the Iraq War.

Guantanamo was closed.

We created real service that crisscrossed the US.

Appalachia got high-speed internet.

US government gave land back to all Native people.

We created economic policies that put the country on the path to equity rather than driving people apart.

And we set the groundwork for more informed future citizenry.

So these are all just headlines, but this was a paper that we made that we really wanted to feel like progressive Christmas, you know, where, like, all of the things that we were unhappy with with the world, just like one day we woke up and could read in the paper that, you know, everything was better.

And so, you know, it was this little utopian simulation where everything we wanted came true.

And we made it, you know, by essentially, like, hacking the authority of this familiar morning time object.

We took apart "The New York Times."

We analyzed the typeface, the leading, kerning.

(laughs) Actually found this PDF that someone inadvertently like, at "The New York Times," like, uploaded to the internet and forgot to put to noindex.

So knew exactly, like, paragraph widths and everything.

And we put it back together as this pristine counterfeit depicting this world that we wanted to see.

So, yeah, this was back in 2009.

And I feel like now that we've all lived through, like, actual fake news and, you know, wars without solution and, like, no ceasefire, I'm just kind of like, "Oh gosh, I wish we had these problems again."

(laughs) But yeah.

But this was... You know, I thought all graphic design was, you know, like this, where you're like, "Am I gonna get arrested today?"

(laughs) 'Cause we didn't bother telling "The New York Times" that we had improved their paper and their reality, we just mass produced it.

We silkscreened some really cute newsboy aprons and then we put in the hands of hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting commuters.

There were so many U-Haul trucks all over the city.

And every single person said, "Hey, can I pass out papers in front of The New York Times?"

(laughs) Only a couple people got to do that.

But, yeah, we really, we blanketed the city.

And I feel like people could feel for a moment what a different world might feel like.

(audience laughing) (audience laughing) (audience laughing) (Kelli laughing) (audience laughing) This poor guy's gonna get hit by a bus.

(audience laughing) (Kelli laughing) (audience laughing) Yeah, so the hoax part of this worked really, really well.

And, like, our fake paper made it onto the real news all over the world.

So it was mostly these newscasters saying like, "Look at this.

This is nutty.

Who would do this?

Why would anyone do this?"

But the people watching knew why.

It's like we live in a democracy, we all want certain things; they never happen.

Like, you know, it was this real moment of, like, you know, clarity, where there was this slippage between the, womp womp, "Look at this funny project," and then people like feeling deeply like, "No, we have a right to say what happens in this world."

So I feel like, you know, the paper really served its purpose, even if, like, only like 20% of the things, you know, panned out and came true.

Like, New York City got bike lanes.

You know, Appalachia has a little bit more internet.

You know, the war did kind of end, but, like, now we're in endless wars, so anyway.

But, yeah, so I want to sort of like come back to my first point and the reason why I'm showing you this project.

We also made this fake website, which was very hard to make.

It was a WordPress site that was an exact clone.

I know this looks like a fake toy website, but this is actually what "The New York Times" looked like in 2009.

And so we made like, attached it to a CMS.

We could have real comments, all of this stuff.

Most of the work went into this website.

No one cared about the website at all.

(laughs) So, you know, there's something about these analog experiences that you can hold in your hand.

Like, it's just very difficult to argue reality with something that you're holding in your hand.

There's different assumptions that we bring to digital experiences.

And this is something that, like, made such a deep impact on me as a designer back in 2009 that, like, there's kind of like this steady train of hype about, like, you know, everyone's jumping on the bandwagon of AI or VR or AR.

And I was like, "You know, I kind of like know what moves me and I know what makes me feel connected."

And so I've kind of like...

Even though I'm really interested in digital technologies and I know how to code and all of this stuff, like, this is really, it really made me feel like if I'm talking to a human audience, like, I want to speak human and speak on those tactile turns.

And this project was successful, I think, because it evoked this experience of awe, which is, you know, a psychological phenomenon that until recently hasn't been seriously studied, but is actually like a pretty big transformative force for humans.

There are these two researchers named Kelnter Haidt that define these awe experiences as characterized by two phenomena: the sense of perceived vastness and then a need for accommodation.

So it's not necessarily a pleasant experience.

It jars you out of your complacency and you realize, like, that things are different or could be different.

And so, yeah, with all of my project, I try to, you know, recreate that sense of disruptive wonder whenever I encounter it.

And I think that, like, the reason why these physical experiences hit us the hardest is because we are physical.

We are made out of the same matter, you know, that paper is made out of.

As humans, we think through our bodies.

There's this great quote by Hermann von Helmholtz that says, "All we know, everything is an event on the skin," which is easy to forget about in the information age.

But, you know, whenever you're reading words on a screen that's, like, light photons hitting your retina.

Every time you're listening to someone tell you something, that's wobbly air, like, hitting your eardrum.

Everything truly is an event on the skin; it's the turnstile which all data passes.

So, you know, I think we really felt this, like, the most, like, during the pandemic under lockdown, where it's like, "Yeah, I'm going to the cocktail hour with my friends," but then it's like you can't hug anyone, you can't smell them, you can't taste their drink.

You know, it's like, it's not the same; we say it's the same, but it's not.

So, yeah, I'm really interested, like, in my work, like even if, like, this video is always going to be, like, trapped behind a screen, I'm always interested in trying to, like, open up, like, multiple sensory pathways; to use paper that, like, feels tactile, so there's like, you know, it activates like the sense of touch as well as the sense of vision.

And, you know, this is...

I'm stealing this directly from, this idea directly from Bret Victor, who invented the touch gestures on iPhones.

So Brett Victor gives this example of, like, you know, when you have data, what a computer thinks of as data, you know, a computer kind of wants rows and columns.

Like, if you've ever worked with processing or open frameworks, if you've ever done a data visualization that way, it's gonna want your numbers formatted like over here on the left.

But if you ask, you know, a human being like, "Okay, where's the largest number?"

you know, "What is the pattern that these numbers are falling in?"

it's really, really difficult.

But as soon as you take those same numbers and put them on a map, it immediately, like, open those numbers up to that human sense, ugh, human sensory superpower of physical intuition that has evolved within us for, you know, thousands and thousands of years of navigating the world spatially.

So, you know, the same skills that you're gonna use to exit this auditorium and not run into all of the chairs will help you look at those numbers on the map and, you know, make assumptions about, you know, where they're going to go, where they've been, what the highest number is, what the trend is.

So, yeah, with, you know, a lot of my work, I'm trying to figure out like: How can I take something that is inhuman, like data, something that's imperceptible to us, that's invisible, and, you know, make it into something that you can play with like a toy and navigate physically?

This is an example of one of these experiments.

So I decided I was going to try to recreate the Eames' "Powers of Ten," which is a short film about scale in the universe in order to demonstrate the scale of the internet.

So, you know, I was wondering, like, you know: "How big is the internet?"

You know, they say that a billion images are uploaded every week.

Is it enough to recreate any film that I want?

So for every single frame in the Eames' zoom sequence, you know, from the hand, to the picnic blanket, to outer space, I did a Google image search to try to find, like, an exact match with that frame.

So here' my little side by sides right here.

And it just kind of like allowed me to interact with the, you know, in this push and pull, like, tinkering, like, handmade way with something that is such a big data set that you're really not supposed to interact with it that way at all.

So, yeah, this is my Google image search animation for the Eames' "Powers of Ten."

Picnic blanket.

Actually, the hardest frames to find were the picnic blankets because there's never a day where there's just one picnic blanket out on a green lawn.

It's either terrible weather and no one's out or there's like a 100 of them.

But, yeah, so this was like five years ago.

I really wanna repeat this experiment, like, every decade or so to see like how much the resolution of like internet search results is expanding.

So if you wanna play with it online, there's a website, kellianderson.com/remix, where you can, like, go through each frame.

Also made these, like, very fancy boxes for the flip books that I'm very proud of.

Like, when you pull the flip book out, it actually like counts down through the powers of 10, so... (laughs) But yeah.

Okay.

So I wanna show you more of, like, what I'm doing right now.

I'm really interested in objects that intentionally cultivate perception that are about, like, the human and refined perception rather than just refining the object and also make experiences that facilitate a connection with the various underlying structures of the world that inspire awe.

I've been playing around a lot with RISO.

I don't know if anyone else is addicted to this printmaking technique.

But I came up with this technique where I design a a contact sheet of animation frames in Photoshop and then print them out on this machine.

And a RISO, if you're unfamiliar with it, it's... Let me... Oh, I don't think I actually have a photo in there.

That's the best photo we get.

It's sort of like if you had two silkscreen printers and put them inside of a Xerox machine.

It's like a very, like, fast food printmaking sort of strategy where, you know, you can use spot colors and stencils and, like, you know, have this like really amazing effect.

But it has this digital interface on it, and so it's very convenient.

But the result of this, like, animation process is that when you put the frames back in and combine them again, it keeps all of those, like, little, like, analog glitches, like all of the noise, like if a piece of, you know, dust falls on or hair falls on, you know, the drum while it's printing, it shows up, all of the different ways that, like, the ink is like transferred onto the paper.

But, yeah, it's definitely misusing the technology because this machine was, you know, definitely made for office photocopier use basically and not animation.

But I feel like this particular technique really highlights what is special about these printed images.

So I feel like I just wanna do this all the time.

I feel like it's so much fun.

(laughs) Oh, I have one more.

(laughs) Oh, this was the rare paying client job, where Vice, they're now out of business, but they had a TV show where they needed these, like, station indents for it.

And they're such a great client because I pitched this idea, I was like, "You know that feeling when you're, like, riding a train and you see the reflection from the other side of the street and, like, the light is different?

Let's make an animation about that."

And they're like, "Yeah, cool," (laughs) which is kind of amazing.

My most recent, big recent animation project, I made an installation for a gallery in Milwaukee that asks the question of: What does time look like?

And then I have all of these little animations on constant loop.

And there are a bunch of them.

These are just a small sampling of them.

But the great thing about this process is that you not only get an animation, you also get this printed sheet of frames.

So, yeah, people would vote on what they thought time looked like by taking a sheet of frames.

And so we had all of these stacks and they would slowly winnow down.

And I think, unfortunately, the clock is still the most popular.

I'm kind of the one that's, like, over there, that's what I think time looks like.

(laughs) And so I was hoping that more people agreed with me there.

All right.

I wanna tell you a little bit about this project, so I'm skipping ahead just a bit.

I've been working with Letterform Archive, using their archives, using their materials, and just doing a ton of research to make a new pop-up book which is supposedly coming out this year.

I'm just gonna knock on wood.

I think we're gonna get it out this year.

It's all about this question of: How do letterforms get their shapes?

So certainly you all have probably noticed that there are a lot of different typeface in the world, a lot of different type styles.

And this book is all about, like, where those forms come from and why we have that variety.

And I, my interest in the book, and something that I'm really excited about, is that I really wanted to demonstrate how philosophy, how ideas, how culture, how zeitgeist, how these, like, overarching cultural moods get expressed in this, you know, kind of microscopic form of type.

This is an example by Aldo Novarese, where, you know, this was a Christmas card, so it says, "Ho ho ho."

But, you know, he's drawing that connection between these different periods of architecture, which are, you know, familiar to most people who have studied any kind of, like, art history or architectural history and correlating it with the type of that period that share a lot of the same morphological characteristics.

And it's interesting to think of why.

And it usually comes back to the technology that created those letterforms.

So, you know, this book has a lot of different, like, fun interactive pop-ups that are, you know, hopefully intriguing to anyone, to children.

But then it's accompanied by these kind of, like, deep dive historical articles about, you know, what was the technology that created this letterform?

What glitches did it offer designers?

Like, what, you know, how did this technology and culture, like, walk hand in hand to create this aesthetic that, you know, seems so flagrantly mapped to a specific time?

So here are some of the essays I.. You know, before this book has come out, because it's not come out yet, I had a show at the Center for Book Arts last year where I printed out, like, a lot of the essays in this, like, zine format.

But this is what the real book is going to look like.

And I just wanna show you a little real.

They're letting me make the most absurdly complex cover.

It's modeled after a seven-segment display, and it changes from A to Z.

This is a demonstration of photo typesetting to explain how that worked.

This is a demonstration of an early digital system called Metafont that parameterized type.

Oh, this is Wim Crouwel's beautiful grid G. This, which, I guess I already showed, accompanies an article about AI and type.

Yeah, so it's a very, very ambitious project.

And these are all rough prototypes, as you can tell by the magic marker.

But there's 17 different pop-ups in this book and, yeah, 20 essays.

So it's been, we've been working on it since 2019.

And it's so close to being done.

I'm very excited.

I think there's a couple more, a couple more in here.

Oh yeah.

I'm gonna jump ahead.

It's structured in this way.

This is a table of contents.

It says, "A letter is," and it fills in the blanks, and it explores, like, all of these different time periods and their conception of what letters were for in that time.

So we're using, like, a lot of, like, neon ink.

So it's basically like the most, like, over the top book possible, (laughs) which is why it's taken so long.

Yeah, so this is, like, a little book within a book that you turn the pages.

Okay, I think I'm just about out of time.

But if you're interested in hearing more about when this comes out, I'm sure both I and the Letterform Archive will be telling people a lot about it.

But it's very close, in the fall.

And I just wanted to let you all know more about this workshop we're doing tomorrow.

So we're folding this.

This is a Miura-ori fold.

It's a type of origami tessellation that you can crunch and compress all of this lettering on, which is super fun.

And it was named after a Japanese astrophysicist named Kori Muira who really did a deep dive in studying this form.

Okay, I'm out of time so I'm gonna go forward a little bit.

Oh, just wanted to show off some of my student projects.

I frequently teach.... Oh, frequently.

Once a year I teach a paper engineering course over Zoom.

And people from all over the world take this class.

And so just kind of wanted to, like, show off their work in here just a little bit.

My fun experiment that I'm doing this year with my time is that I've created something called Mail Club, where I do a different paper experiment every single month and then mail it to hundreds of people.

I'm not sure why I did this to myself, but it's been a good fun way to get, like, a lot of things done.

This was December.

We did some firework, you know, Happy New Year cards.

And the most recent one that I released is a collaboration with my friend April that we're calling the Project Impasse Toolkit, which allows people who are stuck on a project either a way of moving forward or a way of letting it go.

So April created these great permission slips where you can forgive yourself and let go of a project.

It comes with a box of tiny matches so you can light it on fire.

(audience laughing) (Kelli laughing) The little rolly pen is kind of like an oblique strategies nod, that if you're stuck, you can just roll the pen and it'll say, "Turn it upside down."

You know, it'll be like your best art teacher is looking over your shoulder.

But, yeah, I was very excited about these tiny matches.

(Kelli laughing) (audience laughing) Right?

It's so funny.

(audience laughing) Go outside, kids.

Go outside.

Not an indoor activity.

But yeah, so I am going to be out in the lobby.

I brought a couple pop-up books.

I have very few copies of "This Book is a Planetarium."

This is being reprinted.

So it's still available at Amazon, but I don't have any, which is wrong.

But, yeah, I'll be out there.

So if you have questions, come by and talk to me.

You don't have to buy anything from me, just come say hi.

So thank you so much.

(audience applauding) (crowd chattering)