Wellsbaum.blog

Writing about life and arts

Mechanical paper tech by Kelli Anderson

Mechanical paper tech by Kelli Anderson
Mechanical paper tech by Kelli Anderson
Mechanical paper tech by Kelli Anderson
Mechanical paper tech by Kelli Anderson

These popup contraptions are extraordinary.

Created by artist Kelli Anderson, This Book Is a Planetarium (Amazon) book contains interactive constructions of a planetarium, a musical instrument, a speaker and more.

Writes the artist on her blog:

I published a pop-up book of mechanical paper tech.
Expanding out of This Book is a Planetarium’s pages, you’ll find: a stringed instrument, a perpetual calendar, a decoder ring, a spiralgraph drawing generator, a smartphone speaker, and—yes—a constellation-projecting planetarium. With a little tinkering, turning, and futzing: the resulting paper objects actually work! (despite of being made from “almost nothing.”)

The book was designed to showcase the potential of the material world—while making a case for the inherent educational value of lo-fi experiences.

In their clunky way of functioning, the past’s technology served this unacknowledged secondary function to humanity: These objects helped us glimpse—and therefore connect to —the magic of the physical world. By being glitchy and fussy (and by sometimes requiring manual tinkering or duct tape), lo-fi contraptions more transparently revealed the underlying laws of the world to us.

You can find out more about the book here.

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