



These popup contraptions are extraordinary.
Created by artist Kelli Anderson, This Book Is a Planetarium (Amazon)
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
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In their clunky way of functioning, the past’s technology served this unacknowledged secondary function to humanity: These objects helped usglimpse —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.