O1 is a serial publication about the foreign and the familiar.
The name “O1” is derived from a visa classification for foreign workers, granted by the United States to “individuals with an extraordinary ability in the arts.” Issue No. 1 is a document modeled after the tedium and absurdity of the bureaucracy surrounding visa processes, and adopts the unwieldiness of a folded map.
The physical construction of this first issue and its contents are generated through a set of constraints that are arbitrarily based in accordance with real-world statistics and standardized systems. Each of the foreign-born artists featured in this issue were asked to write to an exact word count, which is based proportionally on the number of visas issued to that contributor’s home country/region in the previous year. This international A0-sized (841 × 1189 mm.) poster folds down into a U.S. letter-sized (8.5 × 11 in.) booklet.