Messing Things Up With Kelli Anderson

By Ana Piteira / February 15th, 2012 in Talks / New York / 157 views

As an artist and designer working with a myriad of different mediums in both the physical and digital world, Kelli Anderson fundamentally challenges social parameters. With the aim of discovering the “hidden talents of everyday things”, Anderson focuses on the importance of why she makes things as opposed to the tangible objects she creates. Throughout her work, Anderson encourages a philosophy of “disruptive wonder” that works to subvert expectations. In her inspiring TED Talk, Anderson uses three of her most profound projects to exemplify this concept.

A recursive bending holiday card that features a four-frame looping animation about the act of opening a card and as well as a record playing invitation that defies the expectation that paper is silent are both innovative examples of everyday design that can test social mores. Perhaps the most thought-provoking of the projects however, was the utopian newspaper. Anderson collaborated with other like-minded innovators and distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of a perfectly counterfeited New York Times. The newspapers were post-dated and described a utopian future with the front page reading that the war in Iraq had ended. “Intended to catch bleary-eyed commuters off guard, it initiated a conversation about activism and democracy”.

By tinkering with the details related to the shape, colour, type and texture of everyday experiences, Anderson pushes a “disruptive wonder” to destabilise a social order that does not necessarily deserve our respect.