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.
Contributors: Cindy Ji Hye Kim (3540 words), Yuanchen Jiang (2447 words), Hans-Jacob Schmidt (1103 words), Kuldeep Singh (995 words), Marcela Flórido (923 words), Sulki Choi and Min Choi (803 words), Maziyar Pahlevan (496 words), Liona Robyn Nyariri (359 words), Yotam Hadar (144 words), Yenwei Liu (31 words), Constanza Alarcón Tennen (19 words), Jenny Hung (19 words), Martin Bek (11 words), Nejc Prah (1 word).
The processing fee for an O1 visa is $1550. A copy of this issue of O1 magazine was priced at $15.50.