I didn’t buy This Book is a Planetarium. I watched a flip-through video of it online, which somehow made the experience even stranger because I kept pausing every few seconds to go, “Wait. What the hell?”

Not in a design-school way. Not in an “innovative paper engineering object” way. More in the way you react when something reminds you that people are still capable of making things with genuine curiosity behind them. Things that are a little impractical and slightly obsessive and deeply thoughtful at the same time.

I think as adults we stop expecting wonder to happen to us in small ways. Everything becomes utility-brained. Even creativity becomes productivity-coded. You watch things while answering emails. You read while thinking about whether you should be reading something more useful (guilty as charged but I adore fiction). You consume so much visual information all day that eventually you stop processing all that you are consuming.

And then suddenly there’s a book that opens into a functioning planetarium. Literally.

And I kept thinking about Avvaiyar’s (a trio  or more of female Sangam poets) line about how what we know is only a handful while what we don’t is the size of the world. Because that’s genuinely what the experience of watching that book felt like to me. Every page kept unfolding into another possibility of what paper could become, and every time I thought I understood the gimmick, it would turn into something else entirely.

Images via Kelli Anderson, This Book is a Planetarium., instrument page.

The instrument page completely got me first because it made me think about when I briefly learned guitar in school before dropping it to join Bharatanatyam classes instead. Which became very funny because the guitar teacher was married to the Bharatanatyam teacher and they used to constantly tease me about it. At age 10, this made me feel deeply special and beloved, to be teased lovingly by an older couple.

He’d be like, “Oh, so you left my class for her class?”

And she’d go, “Obviously. She likes me better.”

And suddenly this paper instrument in a random artist’s book is making me nostalgic for an experience I didn't entirely have or instrument I didn't even enjoy all that much (much to my rockstar dreams dismay).

But beyond nostalgia, I think what fascinated me was access. Instruments are expensive. As is access to art or lessons. 

They belong to people who know what they’re doing or can afford it.. And here was this object made from folded paper and strings inside a hardbound book still managing to create sound. There was something deeply democratic about that, like curiosity was a public and portable entity, one you could interact with if you so wished. 

Images via Kelli Anderson, This Book is a Planetarium, decoder and calendar page.

The decoder page absolutely activated the part of my brain that becomes unbearable after watching one spy film.

Because I had also recently been watching war movies where people were constantly sending coded messages to each other, and then obviously Marvel takes coding in another direction entirely, and then design has its own visual codes, and now “code” mostly makes us think about software and programming and interfaces and digital systems. 

So I became weirdly obsessed with how one object could contain all these histories of communication at once. Obviously, more the paper codes than binary codes not just because I’m gender queer ;)) but because I'm an arts kid through and through xD

The calendar made me actually emotional in a way I wasn't prepared for.  Not because it was particularly advanced technologically, but because of how intentional it felt to manually move through time with it.

You had to adjust the date yourself. You had to participate in it, otherwise there is no experience.

And immediately I thought about my grandfathers because both of them always have calendars everywhere. Giant Dinamalar or Dinathanthi calendars hanging in the house. Temple calendars from Tirupati or from the grandparents’ latest pilgrimage. 

Random calendars that had survived three house shifts and were somehow still hanging in village homes years after they stopped being useful. I swear there are probably calendars from 2006 still existing somewhere in my family house.

And every morning somebody would tear a page or mark a date or circle something important.

There was always this physical relationship with time.

Now time mostly updates itself silently in the background for us. Phones change dates automatically. Years pass without ceremony. But this calendar in the book made me realise how much intention there is in physically acknowledging a day. Since both my grandfathers are now quite aged, still as agile and talkative as ever, mind you, I have become more and more aware of their mortality– for what is mortality but a lack of time?

Images via Kelli Anderson, This Book is a Planetarium, planetarium page.

The planetarium itself was honestly beautiful in the most childlike way possible.

You insert a light into it and suddenly the room changes. That’s all there is to it, and yet I gasp and fantasize.

I immediately started imagining where I would keep it in my room, what it would look like at night, whether it would feel like those astronaut projectors everybody suddenly became obsessed with recently (I adore mine, highly recommend). Except this felt so tactile, so present. You wish to see the stars, so you construct a little night light. 

I think adults desperately miss tactile wonder.

The feeling of touching something and realising another human being thought carefully about how you would experience it.

Images via Kelli Anderson, This Book is a Planetarium, speaker page.

The speaker page completely altered the way I think about books, honestly.

Because books usually offer intangible utility. They give you perspective or knowledge or emotion or distraction or companionship. But you don’t usually think of them as functional objects in the practical sense.

And then suddenly this book becomes a speaker.

And you’re like, oh wait a damn minute, how did i never think something could be something else?

So objects don’t actually have to stay within the categories we assign them, much like people. Our creativity and capacity for it is so great and dense, sometimes I taste it in rooms of thinkers.

I tasted this bit of creativity in the book and was moved by every emotion it stirred in me.

Images via Kelli Anderson, This Book is a Planetarium., spiralgraph page.

The spiral graph page might have been my favourite in the dumbest possible way because I am genuinely terrible at drawing circles. Every artist has one deeply humiliating basic skill they somehow still struggle with and mine is circles. Maybe lines and faces too…

So watching somebody place paper into the spiral graph and effortlessly create these perfect forms felt weirdly comforting. Like yes, sometimes you need tools. Sometimes assistance is part of making things. Sometimes precision comes from collaboration. 

And I think that’s what stayed with me after watching the flip-through.

Not just the engineering, although obviously that was incredible. But the fact that one object could contain music, time, code, light, sound, geometry, memory, and play all at once without collapsing under the weight of its own ambition. 

The weird thing is, since I had such human experiences with each page or what was offered in the book, the more I describe it– the more human the book itself feels to me. It's a multifaceted feat of design and it's put together with random items that sing and work with one another– what else does that sound like to you?

Which is also maybe what we’re trying to do with the archive.

Not literally make a speaker out of paper. I don’t think we’re there yet.

But I think watching This Book is a Planetarium made me realise that books do not have to behave so obediently. Documentation doesn’t have to be flat. Archives don’t have to feel clinical, academic or boring.  A book can ask you to touch it, unfold it, operate it, spend time with it. It can feel closer to a person than a container.

And for a project documenting tattoo artists, that feels important.

Because tattooing itself is so tactile. It’s pressure and skin and repetition and tiny physical gestures and objects passed between hands and people sitting together for hours talking about things they maybe didn’t expect to say out loud that day, or in complete silence except for the buzzing of a machine or plucking of your skin.

So if we’re building a book about tattooing, I don’t want it to feel emotionally distant from the practice itself.

I want somebody to open it and feel the same thing I felt watching that flip-through video late at night on my laptop — that slightly stunned feeling of realising there is still so much left in the world to discover, and that human beings are still capable of making things that refuse to stay in a single category.