Origami, Aesthetics and Natural History

"Eyeball" series

2011-11-14T06:54:00.000-08:00

OK, I'll give in to popular judgment, and accept that this maybe is a self-portrait.

Anyway. So, I figured out how to do eyeballs properly from origami, and now am going crazy putting eyes on everything.

Note the magnets--the lozenge-shaped thingies. I use those on the 3D surface in places where clips can't reach, to hold layers together as the misted paper dries. (The paper is pre-treated with methyl cellulose and a light ink rub, so it stiffens up nicely.) --Anybody else do this?

Cheers!

Saadya

--------

And these are most of the Heads & Faces I ended up bringing to the CDO Convention in Tabiano, Italy, in December 2011:

Chameleon

2011-11-10T05:56:00.000-08:00

the first chameleon I've ever seen in the wild in Beersheva, I saw this morning climbing the Etrog tree in my garden

a healthy young specimen---

naturally I confronted him with an unfair comparison

he was utterly speechless

New Paper Heads

2011-09-03T06:25:00.000-07:00

A few heads showing off some of the latest technology. All are folded from uncut rectangles of paper --grays Canson, greens Fabriano--pretreated with methyl cellulose and a light ink wash, then wet-folded. The beard-nose-mouth is a construction mostly worked out six months ago; the eyebrows and "wheat-sheath" motif I came up with in the last few weeks. Enjoy -S

Horse Heads

2011-08-06T15:52:00.000-07:00

[Visitors seeking complete horses from origami--I've done those too; as well as equestrian models. Diagrams for the basic horse are in my book. This post is about the sculptural focus just on the horse heads.]

* * *

I doodled something along these lines 6 or 7 years ago, then discovered that the broader theme of Animal Heads in origami was being extensively studied by the South Americans-- Daniel Naranjo and (I think) Fabian Correa in Colombia, and Roman Diaz in Uruguay. Then I had the good fortune, traveling in Colombia in 2006, to catch the LAO-group's “Origami Heads” exhibition at the University of Antioquia in Medellin, which had a few Animal Heads in it too.

It's good to get back to this equine subject (a re-investigation triggered by a fan---hello, Danny]. This fancier version takes rather more than the original 7-step doodle and a fair amount of fussing is needed at the end. But I like these motifs in origami that can be carried all the way from simple abstract indication to as detailed a representation as you like.

This line of enquiry converges with a thought I had at the recent SieboldHouse Yoshizawa exhibition. How impressive those heads on Y's animals are, I remember thinking: how nicely shaped: expressive, of course, but I mean now also good & wide, properly massy, and with the right centered shadow-pockets for the eyes, etc. In good balance with the bodies too, the heads with an increased level of detail which is still never excessive. It struck me that this is one more lesson from the Master that we paperfolders have yet to absorb.

I'm still tinkering with the details of this horse-head, especially the nose and mouth. Fortunately on the Internet there is no shortage of fine images of real horses to learn from. A nice recent batch includes some shots of horses swimming and struggling to keep heads above water (wait for the annoying ad to clear).

Then of course there is the great classic, the Selene Horse (here and here).

And one can't avoid mentioning in this context the modern master of equine sculpture (also a student of the Elgin Marbles): Nic Fiddian-Green, toiling out there in his studio in England. His obsessive work makes me realize how casual & amateurish my own paper investigations are. And yet---it is right, for now, that they should be such.

And in a more abstract and modernist vein--equally great--there is Deborah Butterfield.

It's been two months since I've touched paper. A relief to see that the fingers still work

S.

---------

Added Tuesday Aug 9: Can't stop making 'em. Here are a few more.

Added Tuesday, August 16: These last two are now in the gallery of my Teacher in Jerusalem, the painter David Rakia. Address to go see them at:

Rakia Gallery
18 Shlomzion Ha-Malka Street
JERUSALEM

02-502-3450

“Sculptural Origami”--published!

2011-04-01T03:33:00.000-07:00

At last! my little book is now seeing the light of day.

Equally parts coffee-table art book, and hands-on, get your fingers twitching model and sculpture-making guide, there's a text, and there's a DVD, covering three of the four main branches of origami that I've been exploring in recent years:

FACES
ANIMALS
CURVES

I didn't want this to be just an “instructional manual” (= origami diagrams book) but even so instruction, that is, constructing-guiding-demonstrating-suggesting-directing-cajoling-provoking-leadingbyexample (with lots of hand movements) is very much the essence of this book, because it's very much the essence of origami.

So there are diagrams & step-by-step guides in both book and DVD, and there is some fancy talk, but the sculpture images are what's really meant to linger in your mind.

I give away probably the two most important secrets for how I make my faces. The DVD shows both basic concepts and one complete project for making a head. The text also shows how to relate faces to busts. Most of the rest you should be able to figure out for yourselves, by exploring.

Among the animals taught is my Horse, both standing and grazing postures. Your author humbly suggests that this model alone is worth the purchase of the book.

A few other animals diagrammed or DVD'd are pictured below. All are pure origami from one square, but none of the models is "complex".

Some extremely basic curve-folding ideas, easy enough to state informally, give rise immediately to striking and unexpected origami/geometric consequences. So, this book should interest also those of you who like to think about math.

The publisher worked hard on this book, and had to put up with my rants, raves and overall terror at having zero artistic control. But I have to admit, in the end it came out a handsome product. Thank you Dover.

Hope you all enjoy it!

Saadya

Erratum

Yoshizawa Exhibition

2011-03-09T06:33:00.000-08:00

I have the honor of announcing, on behalf of the Japan Museum SieboldHuis, that an exhibition of origami art by Akira Yoshizawa will be held in Leiden, the Netherlands, from April 30 to May 29, 2011.

Titled “Animal Parade. Origami by Akira Yoshizawa”, the focus will be on animals—as they have that special quality of 'liveliness' that the 'Father of Modern Origami' was noted for. There will be over 200 sculptures in various postures and groupings, from periods spanning the Master's career. These "range from gorillas and seahorses to a dinosaur and a horse of exceptional height", as per the exhibition website which is now up.

Lectures and hands-on workshops by origami luminaries (as well as by Yours Truly) are scheduled for the weekend of May 7-8.

This will be the largest-scale showing of Akira Yoshizawa's pioneering work in any setting outside of Japan, since the 1950s. The last such museum exhibit at this scale in the West was also the first one: the exhibition in Amsterdam's Stedelijt Museum in 1955.

This proximity (the museums are a few dozen kilometers from each other) is no accident.

In January, I had the good fortune to meet with Kris Schiermeier, Director of the SieboldHouse, who was visiting Haifa here in Israel, and was much impressed. I had gone to Haifa, actually, to meet Jaron Borensztajn, to try and gather some historical information about his grandfather, Felix Tikotin, the Japanese-art dealer who arranged the first Yoshizawa exhibition in Amsterdam 1955. But there I learnt that he and Kris were plotting with Mrs. Yoshizawa a second, historically-symbolic exhibition in Holland, scheduled for April. And now it will be taking place!

There is more to this story that I am not at liberty to reveal yet.

This is a very rare opportunity for anyone in the West--or anywhere for that matter--to see Master Yoshizawa's work in person. I can't convey how deeply moved I was the first time, a few years ago, that I held in my hands some of his works, models I'd known as a boy only from photographs in the Harbin books of the 1970s. Now a direct view will be available to anyone.

My only complaint is that the show will be up only one month.

More news will be posted here about what promises to be fantastic exhibition, as soon as it becomes available.

Saadya

Head

2011-01-25T14:08:00.000-08:00

Made for Jaron Borensztajn, collector and grandson of Felix Tikotin, the great Japanese Art collector and dealer who arranged for Akira Yoshizawa his first proper exhibit outside of Japan: the 1955 exhibition at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum.

More news about Yoshizawa in Holland—hopefully soon.

Instructions for this head, all except the ears (a recent development) can be found in my book, Sculptural Origami, which will be out any day now. This sculpture is from a single uncut rectangle of watercolor paper, acrylic-painted on one side; then wetfolded—an old technique, not coincidentally, of Yoshizawa's.

Stephan Weber

2011-01-11T03:08:00.000-08:00

Last week I had a communication out of the blue from Stephan Weber, first by email then by Skype. Stephan had recently gone back to doing human heads (“masks”) and must have been pointed to my site, where he found a lot of similarity of intent with what I've been doing.

I first encountered Weber at “Masters of Origami” in Salzburg, 2005, a show put together by the Red Bull corporation. That was a landmark exhibit, full of first-rate origami some of which was also high art indeed—but Stephan's pair of giant, almost snorting red bulls, struck me as that exhibition's focal point. Immense, vigorous, detailed, absolute icons of latent power, I could not take my eyes off them. Stephan tells me he was tasked by Red Bull to make them about a week before the show opened, and complied.

Stephan divides his time between Germany (was it Cologne?) and Patagonia, Chile. What he does in Chile I don't know, except that he likes to go fishing and is rebuilding after a hostel he owned was destroyed by a volcano. In Germany he works the holiday season folding and selling on the street. (These details are sufficiently sketchy that I'm sure Stephan will pardon me for disclosing them.) This constant practice over the years has made Stephan the fastest folder in the world, and also attuned him to what delights an audience and where in the longer sequences their patience flags. That in turn has shaped his approach to paper and his concept of an ideal origami design: it had better be short and effective.

At “Masters of Origami” I was too shy to ask him to make me one of his bulls (a ten-minute folding job for him), though Joseph Wu was lucky enough to get one. We didn't really communicate. But I watched from the side as he did his public folding, surrounded by Austria's fashion models—young blond Claudia Schiffer lookalikes—who were gazing on, with an expression of rapture.

It's strange but one lives one's life vicariously, through other people too or more exactly fantasies of them. We do it with them and they do it with us. He is jealous of where I've gone with the Faces or the thin layer of analysis that stretches over the spontaneity, in origami and other things; or the fact I can string a few sentences together. I am jealous of his speed in folding; of his animal spirits with the paper, and very sure sense of paper's qualities; and especially of his direct contact with people, the most extreme and direct form of origami connection, that almost no one else has. Also the persistence and spirits needed to do this 11 hours a day, 40 days on end. He sings for his supper: what do we do? That's what's called earning one's living honestly, not this writing of books or or giving lectures or doing commercials or all the other stuff origami professionals do for a buck, no offense. I can't do what he does but I can sure admire it. And living out in beautiful reaches of South America half the year, well for me that's just another unlived fantasy.

I tried folding his Bull twice (first from a visual reconstruction, later from diagrams), but had trouble with the proportions. In terms of a teachable sequence, it is a crude, ugly fold, with few landmarks. That is OK; not all origami has to have the goal of teachability or repeatability. We can't all be hyper-referencers like Komatsu or strict 22.5-degree-enjoyable-sequencers like Roman Diaz. There is real virtue, if also drawbacks, to the raw, blind attack on the square of paper, wrestling the form from it almost without thought (but with the benefit of years of tactile experience) in the most direct and quick manner. Speed! Touch! Results!--And if possible also: linelessness!

Of his animals, the Bull is far and away the best; others, like the Squirrel, the Hounds, can't help calling to mind comparable models by other designers (LaFosse, Komatsu, Montroll, Joisel, Yoshizawa) and not always gaining from the comparison. I think there are great advantages to maintaining a certain distance from the broader origami world, but periodic contact and competition is a good thing too and it is undeniable that origami has progressed faster and farther than other arts because of its extra social & communicative dimension. Yet some people need a certain isolation to develop a purer sense of themselves, and I very much respect that. Certainly one grows more curious about these characters who keep themselves apart. I am rooting for the holdouts.

------------------------------

Added February 17, 2011. I am pleased to learn today (it had nothing to do with me) that Stephan Weber will be a featured guest at the 1st Origami Canada convention, to be held in Vancouver, BC October 5-9, 2012.

Fashion in Bloom

2011-01-03T09:03:00.000-08:00

In origami it is the smooth surface and clean initial shape that I love, out of which erupts 3D form and line and texture, catching the eye at every instant.

This eruption out of purity and simplicity, and the retention of it for as long as possible, or the transformation of it into other, reduced forms as the development progresses, is what I like in the work of the best origami designers, those few who know the true cost of complexity. But it is a characteristic also of some of the most beautiful shapes in nature, those of many birds, for example; or flowers, which retain an innocence or a cleanness of line even as their parts differentiate and complexify and turn into the sophisticated instruments of attraction that they must necessarily be.

So it is with special interest that I am following the career of one particular designer—not of origami, but of haute couture—whose work has some of this very innocence and sophistication of the floral bloom, its fragility and its might, its order and its organic casualness. She is one of several fashionistas around the world now incorporating origami into her work at a quite high level. But her line in couture reminds me of paperfolding, or its hopes, even when it does not, for instance, incorporate tessellations into a throw-shoulder piece.

What strength and femininity there is, in that floral eruption.

You'd think the theme of the bloom would have been completely mined by now in the fashion world. But when it arises out of one's nature, as it does with this designer, the bounty can be endless.

One day I will do a show with her.

I met her in Budapest in 2009 as a guest of the Hungarian Origami Society.
Not so well known outside her country, she deserves to be.

She is BAHARAT.

Toward a Lineless Origami

2010-10-26T05:24:00.000-07:00

It's not entirely impossible as a goal, as these experiments show.

But how far can this be taken?

==============================

Posting these before I ruin her face from overwork, as I surely will. You can still see the smoothness of the paper I am trying to preserve. --S.

=======================

Added Nov. 17. Here she is at a later stage.

And finished:

Cansonettes

2010-10-10T04:56:00.001-07:00

Wet-folded from an uncut rectangle of Canson paper.

In recent years most of my face-work has been from foil-backed paper (and in the 1980s it was from pure foil), but I've always wanted to see which of the techniques work also with pure paper. I'm slowly learning how to wet-fold, so here are some preliminary results.

Embryology (1)

2010-06-14T15:35:00.000-07:00

It is sometimes said that the process by which an origami animal is made resembles that which real living organisms go through—that origami yields up a sort of “parallel embryology”. This is a charming metaphor, but just what does it mean, and how far can it be taken?

Let’s start with one sense in which this is not an analogy at all, but a literal description. There is a key stage that all animals go through as their forms develop, that involves folding. This is the stage of gastrulation (and also the next stage after it, neurulation). That is when the embryo changes from an essentially 2D shape to an essentially 3D one. The egg has been fertilized, several cell-divisions have taken place, and now there is a fluid-filled ball (called the blastula) of up to several thousand cells, its wall one or two cells thick. Paperfolders will recognize what next happens—invagination at a point on the sphere, then a line, and finally a circle—as a sink: material from the outside is pushed inward, to form a second internal layer. The part that stays outside is called the ectoderm (‘outer skin’); the part that moves inside as a continuous sheet is called the endoderm (‘inner skin’); and in some species (like our own) as the paper is pulled over the lip, bits of it break off (ingress) to rejoin inside as a third layer, the mesoderm (‘middle skin’). Out of these two or three skins, all of the animal’s body parts will be made.

The next stage, neurulation, is even more visibly origami-like. The gash or the circle through which the material has been stuffed closes to a point: drawn shut like a purse-string. (This will be the anus.) One surface of the elongated spheroid flattens; a fold-line appears on it, a single meridian on the spheroid. To either side, ridges rise (mountain fold-valley-fold-mountain-fold) and then start to join. Where they join, the cells intercalate (almost: zig-zag folds on either side, slotting into each other); this will be the animal’s nerve-cord, very soon its spine. Meanwhile at the far end of the spheroid (now also the top of the nerve-cord) the valley is wider, so as it closes it curls up and bulges appear. The head with the brain, visibly, begins to form.

Of course it is more complicated than this. Gastrulation happens very differently in different species (though with a similar end-result and similar genetic basis in all, indicating an ancestrally unitary process). So the above description fits a frog better than it does, say, a chicken (where, instead of a round sphere you start with a flattened one: a pancake perched on top of an egg yolk.) Mesoderm formation, where you tear off bits of paper and stuff them inside, is nowhere origami-like. A huge amount of cell-signaling goes on during gastrulation, with cells being ‘position stamped’ as the layers slide and pass under each other, information that will be crucial in later developmental stages: that too can’t occur in a dumb mechanical process like origami. Cells are also constantly dividing and the sheets are expanding, which is quite different from the unstretchable surface that paper presents. And of course the motions here are guided entirely by the cells themselves, with no outside fingers (or even chaperones) doing the pushing and pulling. Nevertheless and despite all of that, form creation at this stage is primarily an issue of folding sheets, the developing embryo obeying constraints and realizing opportunities for regularity and efficiency that folding alone can provide. And so in a very meaningful sense, all animals, three-dimensional, bony, keratinous and full-blooded as they turn out in the end, are products of origami.

Origami people who have read this far—you’re in for a treat. Have a look at this video of a frog embryo as it undergoes gastrulation and neurulation.

That’s it—that’s when the magic is done.

Origami—purist origami from a square—is still largely about making animals, for all the sailboats, jackknives, racing cars there are in the folded world, or plants for that matter. And here’s Why. (One fraction of why.) The smooth square you start with—has rotational symmetry, or at least you can spin it 90 degrees about its center indefinitely without changing it, and flip it over and do the same. But then you fold one edge to another, and look what happens. You’ve created a spine in the sheet, first and foremost—a region with a different texture and thickness, that is also an axis, and also a hinge. You’ve given up much of the initial symmetry, though there is still some left; but in particular you've set up a frame for a bilaterally symmetrical form. You’ve brought corners into alignment, pairwise, with pairs separated. Edges have been transformed: where before they were equal, there are now three different kinds. All this in a single step! You will be hard-pressed to make any other move later on that introduces so many new qualities to the developing form (though if you’re worth your salt as a designer, you will go on trying to find such.)

No matter. The basic shape after that first fold is already more animal-like—because of the spine, because of the bilateral symmetry it imposes, and because of the two separated pairs of ‘legs’. There is no real head or real tail unfortunately, only a marker of sorts where they should go. Alternatively, if, as in most origami animals (so I would guess), the first, spine-forming fold is along the diagonal, then you will have a head and tail already positioned and the legs will have to be figured out later. You will frown at that single pair of corners of the triangles—it’s the wrong number and in the wrong location, centered rather than spread near the head and the tail. This problem can be dealt with, of course, but everything costs.

Now let’s look back at the embryology case. The flattening of the surface (as the material stuffed inside crawls up one inside face of the spheroid) and the stage of neurulation—fold-forming the chord /spine—is exactly analogous to the ‘first fold’ in origami. That is, this is the move that marks and positions the physical spine (not via a single mountain-fold but by a mountain-valley-mountain; that’s what it takes both to get a channel and to build up thickness). This is also the move that finalizes the imposition of bilateral symmetry on the developing animal: henceforth there will be a left side and a right side. There wasn’t quite before. One end now will give material for the head and one for the tail—just as with the square. Top and bottom of the animal—in the case of the square this has yet to be decided (things can still be turned inside out); in the case of the embryo, since the chord-fold is on one face of a temporarily flattened sphere, that’s the top and whatever’s on the other side becomes the bottom.

So at least some of the crucial moves, purposes and effects are VERY similar as between origami and biology. These beginnings and what happens next have lingering implications for the shape of both real and paperfolded animals, and the resemblance is retained.

I know that this is not really what people have in mind when invoking the origami-as-embryology metaphor . Presumably the analogy is more innocent: you start with a simple, pure form, the square (as pure a shape as the egg); manipulate it, differentiate parts, move them around, progressively add detail, and finally round out the shape and breathe it into life---all in a linear sequence that can be repeated more or less identically by any folder given the same diagrams/DNA. What could be more lifelike?

I’ll come back to this ‘innocent’ concept in a later post. For now though, we can chalk this up as one of those rare cases where a metaphor’s validity outstrips it’s intent.

Saadya

2010-06-14T15:32:00.000-07:00

Allogrooming

2010-06-03T03:05:00.000-07:00

I once suggested in jest that the reason origami is so successful in calming people and bringing out conciliatory instincts is that humans are basically primates, and a calming activity that used to take up a lot of time in our social life--allogrooming--disappeared without a trace once we lost our body hair. There’s been no good replacement ever since, and origami is the first thing in a while that even comes close. All that intense concentration and fussing with fingers in a social context over something small that needs puzzling out. --Of course no one was really meant to take this sort of idea seriously... least of all me…

snagged from Dave Brill's Freising photoset. Thanks Dave!

Blockhead

2010-04-26T05:46:00.001-07:00

It’s not just in the weird paperfolding that I do, but also in the most conventional sort of technical origami, that a principle of “non-interference” applies. After all, those individual toenails or flight feathers one is showing off can't be allowed to cause trouble for the rest of the bird, can they? I am something of an extremist with this principle, and often try obstinately to squeeze out as many features as possible in the middle of the sheet while leaving the edges entirely unblemished.

Cheers!

Confuse-ye-us

2010-04-26T05:45:00.000-07:00

Simplicity

2010-02-17T10:53:00.000-08:00

Down pending revisions (may be a while). For now, enjoy this oldie

bas-relief

2010-02-16T09:41:00.000-08:00

If the Internet hasn't completely frazzled your brain and fragmented your attention-span, there’s a 100-page book, written about 100 years ago, that I’d like you to read.

It is Emanuel Loewy’s “The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art”. You can find it here.

It gives a lot to think about; some of which strangely enough bears also on origami.
Go ahead and read it and I’ll get back to you in a few weeks.

S.

Pajaro para Román

2009-11-20T02:30:00.000-08:00

In honor of his new book.

-------------------------------

Another version.

[Added December 15:]

And---here's a set of images that no origami designer can fail to be inspired and humbled by:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/12/15/science/20091215-birds-audioss/index.html

Animal Signaling, Origami Liveliness

2009-10-15T07:22:00.000-07:00

This is mainly a ‘natural history’ posting, not an origami posting, but you origami people should all read it all the same.

First off, have a look at Olivia Judson’s fine article in last week’s New York Times science section. It is about how animals have different calls to warn their group-mates about the approach of different kinds of predators.

* * *

Neat, no?

I touched on this subject once before back when starting out on this Blog. This was when drawing attention to just how weird the Owls look, among all the avian species; in particular noticing that (a) all owls have haunting, rather 'unbirdlike' faces, (b) many owls have specifically mammalian-looking faces, and (c) some owls have even more specifically a face that looks like a cat's (facial feathers that resemble fur, pseudo-ears that resemble cat ears, a hook nose flattened against a flat triangular face, yellow eyes, etc.). By “cat” I mean of course not just the ferocious predator known as the domestic cat—but it too.

Suppose we grant the observation. Why would an owl want to look like a cat? What do the two even have in common? Casting about for an explanation, I speculated that this might be a form of mimicry directed at the prey. If the owl, sitting in the bole of a tree at night, can trick the rodent or small bird into thinking it was a different sort of predator—and cats are the main competitors for the same sorts of prey Owls go after—it will trigger the wrong escape-strategy in the prey animal, and thereby gain an advantage.

Now, this was almost the subject Olivia wrote about. Actually what she discusses is a more general and more fascinating phenomenon: the fact that that some prey animals have distinct calls for warning troupe-mates about the approach of different kinds of predator (e.g., one call for an eagle, another for a leopard). But the direct implication of her account is that there must be a different correct way of reacting to each of the different types of predator. Maybe the optimal escape-strategy is ‘freeze’ if it’s a cat, ‘get to the nearest tree’ if it’s a bird: I don’t know the details (few of which have seem to have been researched, so far as I can make out). But there has to be a difference—or the different calls would not have evolved.

And if that’s the case, it pays an owl to look like a cat.

* * *

What does this have to do with origami? Very possibly nothing. Except that good origami animal design tends to involve a great amount of close observation of actual animals, and a lot of thought about animal categories. This bears repeating. The thought that goes into the design or execution of good origami isn’t just folding-thought, or even just or primarily geometric thought (as might be concluded from some of the ways origami is being pitched to the public nowadays) but science and sensibility much more broadly construed. I think it’s already true of this young art that in the history of sculpture in the world there has never been as wide or as detailed a study of the forms of so many different species, in any medium. This sculptural study is being carried out by some fairly intelligent people who insist on 'getting it right’ and who also care something about the animals themselves, along with their representation in paper.

Also it seems to me: origami still has the advantage of being a borderline art, even as it claws its way toward respectability. For a long time it was practiced and transmitted in the West by magicians, and in the East by members of the ‘floating world’. Something of this marginal existence and tolerance for—even courting of—unrespectability is part of its essence. Yes, we have to be intellectually disciplined, rigorous with the folds, or the thing won’t come out—but we still have a liberty of thought that you rarely find in academia nowadays. (Maybe encouraged by the material's manipulability: you can as easily fold the sheet this way as that, because in the end ‘its only just paper’.) Given that we have no reputations to lose, or maybe have lost them already, we can afford to make risky speculations, backed as said by a great deal of observation and reflective musings as the paper is fiddled with. If you suggested an idea like the one above at a university, the hoots you’d hear would not come from the owls.

* * *

Olivia Judson’s article also contains a striking photograph of some Diana Monkeys, taken by Tim Ockenden for Agence France-Presse.

Now, each time I see one of these pictures, or see some well-made animal paperfolds, I come back to the strange question, why on earth it is that origami is so suited to the making of animals---I mean, where does it get the ‘life-like’ quality it is so famous for, and why is there more of it in folded paper than in works made from stone, wood, plaster, bronze or now plastic.

With these Diana monkeys in the photograph the question is slightly less acute, since there’s a beautiful color change and one that seems as if crying out to be reproduced in duo-colored paper by, say, Quentin Trollip. Birds, for instance, often pose a greater problem for origami than these monkeys, since a common color number in birds is three rather than two, and paper unfortunately has only two sides. (I will discuss the question of why animals have the number of colors they do, hopefully in another post.)

As to the general problem of what is specially ‘lifelike’ about this medium, I confess it’s still a mystery to me, even after years of thinking about it hard. But let me take another crack at it.

* * *

To fix ideas, let’s use a concrete example. Hard as it is sometimes to tell things from photographs—here is an image of Roman Diaz’ Elephant from his “old” book. (Roman’s new book is about to be released by Nicolas Terry's Passion Publications.)

Here, the folded form is 3D, and in that respect more lifelike than simpler forms. But still it is exactly missing at least two very prominent aspects of actual, living elephants: the thick, impenetrable mass of that body and its supporting columns; and also—let’s not forget it—that elephant smell, which is the smell of a zoo. And even so, or perhaps for that very reason, there is an incredible amount of ‘liveliness’, ‘presence’, and ‘potential motion’ to this folded form.

One idea that suggests itself to explain this liveliness is that of the ‘ricochet’. 'Life' or 'liveliness' is, in a sense, what you are left with after you subtract all physicality and substance from a corporeal being. But 3D origami from dry paper is also a 'subtraction' from a massy representation of all its mass: it’s another way of ‘bouncing back’ or ‘ricocheting’ from the expectation of substance. And maybe that's why it suggests its counterpart: life or liveliness.

This is a cute, probably too-sophisticated idea, but the first problem with it is that an origami animal is not just the skin or outer surface of an animal, done up in paper. It is not, for instance, a paper version of a cicada's nymphal shell. Part of origami is the folds, not just the material. If you were to somehow render just the outer surface in paper, you would not get the full lively effect that origami animals are able to achieve.

Or so I claim; but whether this claim is true or not it at least it has the virtue of being not theoretical. The closest anyone has come to to making 3D paper outlines of an animal’s surface is the paper-and-wire sculpture of Polly Verity, who is known in the origami world for her leadership of the field of curve-folding but not for animal origami design ‘proper’ so far as I know. Yet have a look at some of these (mythological) animal sculptures she has made.

They are elegant works, maybe the best of their type; they use paper on a wire frame and gain a gentleness from paper’s translucence and fragility; and some of them include origami elements (tessellations) along with the other manipulations of paper that involve cuts. So they draw on some of paper’s qualities and some of origami’s too. I would even say that as finished art products most ‘regular origami’ would have a hard time competing with them. Nevertheless they are not strictly paperfolds and it is my impression that they don’t get all the way to the liveliness that ordinary animal origami can reach, I would say more cheaply.

But look for yourself, and judge for yourself.

What all of this suggests, if true, is that the integrity of the paper, and the visible folds, are essential, necessary elements in generating the liveliness, along with the use of that material, paper.

* * *

I want to risk introducing another ‘natural history’ idea into this mix. The basic idea is that origami is using the language of flowers to represent animals with, and flowers are a little different from animals in their signaling qualities.

From the origami side, the idea is that, in being made of a flat colorful surface which folds and unfolds its way into its final shape--that is, suggests the possibility of its form being made and unmade by folding, growing and changing in the now--- origami is using some of the visual language of flowers. And so if you are making an animal via origami, you are extracting and applying the distinctive attractiveness and fragility and disarming properties that a flower has and giving them to the animal, which has them only in part.

From the natural history side, it is worth asking what differences there are in the kinds of beauty (or attention-striking properties) a flower has, as compared to an animal, and why these differences exist.

Though the notion has only been around since Darwin, and has only been taken seriously in the past 30 years, and still is under-appreciated in my opinion---a good deal of animal form and coloration is driven by sexual selection, and some of it by other types of signal selection too (signaling to parents, signaling to offspring, social-status signaling etc.). But sexual selection itself is not monolithic: it has the two rather different functions of attracting females and threatening away male competitors.

In animals, these two functions are sometimes performed by the very same signals. In other words, although nature has evolved a fairly universal language for signaling threat (especially ‘aposematic coloration’ or warning colors), in animals, some of these very same signals, or modified elements of them, get used also for the opposite purpose of attracting a mate. In animals, then, there is a certain blurring in how the signals evolve as between ‘come-hither’ indicators and ‘stay away’ markings; these tend to take over parts of each other. If an animal has a striking feature, it may or may not be used to fascinate a female with, but chances are that this conspicuous feature is also a warning.

This is not true of flowers. A flower’s signal does not contain any element of threat. It is meant simply to attract visitors and disarm their wariness as it tricks them into serving it and shakes its pollen upon them. If a flower is not ready to attract, it does not broadcast its signal; if it wants one pollinator to come but not another, the most it does is broadcast on a perceptual channel unique to its preferred pollinator (e.g. ultraviolet colors for bees, red for birds), shift its flowering schedule, etc. What it does not do is broadcast signals that are also threats. I can think of virtually no counter-examples to this ( the "Bat Flower" might be one). --A flower's striking qualities are all attractions.

That means that flowers are a purer case than animals for studying the evolution of the language whose meaning is 'come-hither'. So if you want to see what evolution can do when it is driving forms purely to attract, flowers are where you should look.

* * *

What are the consequences of this for origami?

(1) If you think that origami is borrowing flower-language for its representation of animals , then animals are getting an 'added value' by being done up in paperfolds. They are getting the disarming, inviting quality of flowers—which even the actual animals don’t have (or maybe it is masked by what’s threatening in them, and takes some extra empathies from us humans to notice them).

(2) If you use origami not for making animals but for making flowers, you might get a closer representation of your subject than you would, say, from using plastic or fabric. But even if you did, the added value would be less than it is with animals. For now you are competing with flowers on their own turf. I say this of course without my admiration dropping by one iota for those--like Olga de Pedro--whose sense for the colors, folding and arrangements of paper flowers is impeccable.

That's it for tonight.

Saadya

October, 2009
Beersheva, Israel

Possession

2009-10-14T10:32:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to the opening of a small exhibit by Ilan Garibi and Herman Mariano, at the Henkin gallery in Holon, Israel.

Garibi: strong folds, clean, tasteful color choices and combinations, voracious explorations of his new love, tessellations, some of which are more muscular than a lot of the delicate-and-fussy things I’ve seen in this line before.

Good to recognize a new force on the scene here in Israel (even if I’ve been slow to do so, hiding out as I have in the desert.) Pleased to meet the person too, for further qualities of character not immediately evident in the folds.

I will let these images speak for themselves; but see also here.

Good also to see the tradition of origami-themed shows being upheld in this space: the last one here at the Henkin was mine (five years ago---way too long for this space), and before me came Tomoko Fuse, and before her Paul Jackson.

There are some real origami powers in this country, but they are scattered. The group Ilan belongs to has a terrific set of people but for various reasons has been able to retain perhaps a third of the known folders of quality in Israel; and the unknowns, who one catches sight of at various events, probably outnumber the knowns. Maybe Ilan is the man to heal the rifts and unify the ranks. We will see.

The other exhibitor here is Herman Mariano, who I’ve written about before on this Blog. I think, up to about 4 or 5 years ago, I could claim with some confidence that this retired architect was the best folder in the world of origami animals, who is not himself an origami designer. And if I can’t say that now it is through no fault of his own—he continues to advance, well into his 80s—but rather because origami has exploded in so many directions now and there are so many new talents lurking that any such a statement would be incredibly hasty.

Actually, good enough as this show is for the masses who have no other option, the real treat is a visit to Mariano’s home, an origami household the way one imagines but rarely encounters it, the animals perched on the bookshelves in front of the texts. And the books themselves—besides the very large origami library there are all the wildlife volumes and videos that he studies each time he prepares to fold an animal model. Tucked away in odd nooks and stashes is his paper collection, the finest I’ve seen, brought in from all over the world or purchased on whim; papers for which Mariano has developed his own treatments to color and stiffen as needed. Those who come to the exhibit can see perhaps some of the products of all this industry; but for me the special delight is that apartment itself, with the ‘morning energy’ it exudes. Cleanness, color, order, youth, readiness for work, ranging intellectual interests, eagerness for study, experiment and exploration: music. The whole shining glory of origami in a few dozen square meters.

* * *

I have to confess that my first reaction--by no means my last--to this show, this quite tastefully arranged exhibit, was to frown.

For you see, some of those Mariano-folded animals--perhaps a half-dozen of them--had been in my Tikotin Museum exhibit a few years ago. And here they were again---“my” pieces, now placed in new positions, set among different companions. Somehow I had come to feel proprietary about them, I mean, as if I had designed or made them myself, to the point where I was vaguely annoyed that they had been moved about and joined with other fellows at all, let alone without asking me.

This is of course nonsense, but I am reporting the feelings as they occurred. And will take the time now to worry about them a little.

It sometimes happens with a complete stranger, a beautiful woman—a certain kind of beauty—that you feel a mixture of ownership, physical kinship with her, I mean quite as if she was a daughter or sister or something. You see a part of yourself in her; and then you feel like you have rights. Of course she is herself entirely hers, but now owns a part of you, is the truth of it. But you can’t shake off the impression, the mutual belonging, the sense of possession. Some of that can happen with origami too.

I knew a woman once who had played with folding paper as a young girl, quite on her own, not knowing that there even was such field as ‘origami’. Later she visited Japan; and when she came back she began publishing a series of origami diagram booklets on the cover of which her name appears in big letters, while inside the preface extols the unique educational properties of her diagramming technique. Meanwhile the names of the designers of the models (Yoshizawa, Francis Ow, many others) had all mysteriously diaappeared. For, you see, those designers had come up with the same things she had already thought of as a girl (more or less); so they were hers. Today, if you press her on this admittedly delicate point, she is liable to add: she’d thought all these models were “traditional” (rather a stretcher, as she must have learned them either from books with the author’s names clearly spelled on them, or from teachers who would have named them for her.) But never mind. I see this as an extension, maybe a little more extreme, of the same possessiveness that all good origami can arouse. One falls in love with a model, learns it, folds it, and then it becomes part of oneself. All sorts of feelings from childhood attach and surround it. It is easy to start imagining one has rights.

Proprietary or territorial feelings can be awakened even with something so transitory as an exhibition space, when once you have put up a show in it. Mind you--this is not a space you ever owned or even rented: all you did was inhabit it for a few weeks or months, invest all your heart and soul in it; and now, it seems to you, by golly, it is yours in some way! What are these others doing in it! Yes, it is a pretty exhibition, you fume. But surely your successors must at least owe you something merely from the fact of you having been there before them, maybe cleared the way?

This is nonsense, and one had better get over such resentiments quickly if one is to enjoy the show, or anything else.

* * *

Ah, pride, possession, ego, rights.

A few years ago I put up that exhibit at the Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art. I worked hard on it, with the very limited resources and limited international reputation I had at the time, but with some solid friendships. It ended up being a great success--strong reviews, enthusiastic comments from the public, record crowds for that museum and so forth. It was a significant moment for origami on the Israeli landscape; and it mattered to me that this be done in the Tikotin museum, which is the institution with probably the oldest connection to origami in this country (first via Felix Tikotin’s direct association with / assistance to Yoshizawa in the 1950s, and later via Eli Lancman, the museum’s director for many years.)

But what I most wanted, and I think achieved from that show, was to set a high bar for the display of artistic origami---as high as the display of any prestigious work or historical artifact in any major museum of art today. I had strong material to begin with, gathered from all over the world, and what I most wanted for it was respect.

Now as it happens, a "successor exhibit" to that one, in scale of ambition if not in size (in size it is double), is taking place right now in a museum in the city of Zaragoza, Spain. "Origami, El Arte del Papel Plegado", is at the History Center of Zaragoza; its curators are Felipe Moreno and Jorge Pardo (I understand it is a production of the Zaragoza municipality, the History Center,the Aragon origami group and the AEP.) I haven’t seen it or very many images from it but by all accounts it is a smashing success. Over 20,000 visitors have come in just its first month; it is the best-attended show in Zaragoza at this moment, has broken all records for this museum, lines forming around the block on weekends (where the group’s folders are giving impromptu lessons), students being bussed in from the schools and a waiting list of thousands of pupils.

I am pleased without qualification in their success. And also proud. Not all of us can design models that change the field or steer it in a particular direction (or, not all the time…). So if one wants one's field to flourish and grow, and also to have an influence, then one would like ones words to allure or sting; one's images to excite and linger; one's half-baked idea to induce its completion; one's moment of courage, to generate further courage. If that Tikotin show played a role in piquing the regional pride of the Aragonians into concerted action or or set an example of any kind, I could not hope for more. And if their show now raises the bar for those who come after them, they will have done well.

But I can easily see, with a slight twist of the screw, how such pride and satisfaction could turn into pride-of-possession of a very different kind. If I was built just a bit differently I might now be grumbling at being outclassed. I would be saying to myself: “Why, they never would have done this if it wasn’t for me…” “If I hadn’t recommended him, he would never have…” “If they hadn’t seen the photographs…” “If he had never met …”

Nonsense. The Zaragoza group is the oldest origami group in the world, dating back to the 1940s: it existed before every other formal or informal organization of paperfolders. Felipe Moreno has been its heart and soul for a very long time now--you can see him in those old, black-and-white photographs. The Aragon group and the larger AEP organization have demonstrated great efficiency in their conventions and exhibitions, seem able to work in marvelous unison—have somehow managed to overcome the tensions which have crippled the public expression of origami in several countries that I know of.

As a general rule, it is unwise to take credit for another person’s existence, or art, or success; there are few things as guaranteed to produce ill-will. With origami it may be worse: people who do it seriously as adults are liable to have started in childhood, years before you met them; when you take credit for what they now do you can expect them to feel you are laying claim to some of their most deeply anchored experiences. And of course, if you do not just claim credit but try to cash in on perceived rights to gain special privileges of one sort of another, you have crossed from private delusion into public venality.

The other side of this coin from the assumption of rights and privileges are assumptions of gratitude. In this field one had better feel grateful for one’s precedents, because there are a lot of them. Every one of us stands on the shoulders of giants, and has cause to be thankful for great numbers of people in our still-small circle: for their models, publications, teachings, techniques, social organizations, generosity--for labors which in the vast majority of cases have been ones of love, done entirely without remuneration. Not one of us stands alone, is self-made. Our community is a web, and it must not be jumped on too heavily, even as the bad apples are shaken out.

A slight propensity to take excessive credit for oneself, when married to a full-blown personality disorder, can have explosive results. For if there is no restraint on ego and possession, it won’t be just other people’s models that are taken without mention, and not just exhibition spaces that come to be “owned”--permanently--but entire geographic areas that are laid claim to. The sharing and collaboration that is a basic feature of origami in some parts of the world, will be turned into its opposite. Origami events, private gatherings, commercial efforts, educational undertakings, maybe even the act of folding itself alone in a corner, will in that person's mind have become a private possession, subject to his or her exclusionary rights. “Any origami that takes place in the region of Nagtamar,” the Evil Queen was heard to say, “either goes through me or doesn’t happen at all.”

In speaking of 'rights' and 'possession' in this blog post I have not touched on the issue of copyrights, a subject over which much ink has been spilled. But it is clear that the same people who have a distorted sense of their own entitlements, are the ones that will play fast and loose with copyrights too.

It may be that the philosophers of old were right, and there are no pure vices: every vice is an exaggeration of what in healthy proportions would be a virtue. For ego, possessiveness, territorialism, are essential in this field too, in their right measures. If you are a designer you damn well feel proprietary about the form of origami you have staked a claim to: whether it’s modulars, tessellations, birds, insects, pleat-folding or whatnot; and if some pimply-faced newcomer dares to make an entry in your field that meets or surpasses your own, you are no designer if you don’t itch and sweat a little. You had better get cracking, learn what he knows, and do him one better. That is territorialism, competition in its healthy sense; not the exclusionism and expropriation that is antithetical to the spirit of origami.

Ilan and Herman---I enjoyed the show.

Ilan Garibi’s and Herman Mariano’s show runs at the Henkin Gallery in Holon, Israel, through November 8, 2009.

“Origami, el Arte de Papel Plegado”, runs at the Centro de Historia de Zaragoza, Spain, through 21 November, 2009.

Beards

2009-07-23T05:52:00.001-07:00

Nine-faced Jar

2009-06-29T07:00:00.000-07:00

It was time to make another of these, so I did.

Folded from an uncut rectangle of foil-backed paper, two edges glued to form a cylinder.

9, because I wanted the viewer to see about 3 faces at once. (And because 8 is a boring number.)

Known inputs. A pot with faces I glimpsed at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1990s, probably from bronze or ceramics; those little figures adorning portals to cathedrals, which from a distance look like pencil-marks or charcoal scraped on paper; David Huffman’s beautiful Tower Form. Thoughts about how the figures in a bas-relief are in process of freeing themselves from full immersion in their background (as in painting) to full independence in our world (as in sculpture)---and so thrive in this half-subservient state. Studies of face-making folds over the years, seeking always the minimum necessary lines . And technical investigations into curved folding.

About just the latter, a few words.

Apart from the pretty shape, I am showing off two kinds of curvature.

1. Curved hinges. Note the lines that descend from the top and taper inwards. Each line curves, but it bends to neither the left or the right: it is straight in the X and Y dimensions, curving only in the Z. And even so the planes to either side hinge along it. (Which fact is highlighted by contrast with the straight folds emanating from the bottom, which seem to behave normally.) This is not so common even in the world of curved-folding.

2. Bulges that emerge suddenly from flat areas, sometimes without the benefit of hidden folds, pleats etc.

A reaction I'm always happy to get to my curving origami is, ‘I don’t see how this is even possible’.

To which a response is: Sometimes, when you find that the one thing you have to do is impossible, it might still be that you can do two things, both of which are impossible, except together.

Saadya

posted also on Flickr

Ripple-Pop

2009-06-15T04:46:00.002-07:00

Going through my files, I found this short video from a few months ago, that I thought you might enjoy.

By the way: In the month of August I will be traveling--by train through Central Europe, with ‘origami stops’ in Prague, Budapest and Zagreb; then on by plane to Toronto and by car to Algonquin Park (and by canoe to the interior). Then back to Israel.

If you or your group would like to host me or meet in the above cities or points in between, send me an email.

Saadya

Sphere from a Circle

2009-05-18T05:03:00.000-07:00

Here is a new method for folding an uncut circle into a 'sphere'.

1. Fold concentric circles
2. Divide disk into equal-sized pie-slices (any even number will do)
3. Draw zigzags along the radii
4. Reverse all folds in alternating pie-slices
(or in a less elegant version, just crimp the radii)
5. Fold up
6. Secure with pins

In this technique the sphere is not hollow. The main difference from the more usual way of making spheroid shapes in origami is that instead of folding up 'walls', one folds polar cross-sections of the sphere. In fact this sphere has the odd mathematical property, that its center is the center of the circle, its "surface" the edge of the circle, and all points in between on the sphere are in the same pair-wise order (in distance from the radius) as in the circle.

Greater accuracy and surface coverage can be obtained with some effort by using many 'wedges' (=pie slices in the original circle; looked at side-on they are 'arms' or 'meridians'). But since the height of the sphere shrinks in direct proportional to the number of wedges, you'll get a perfectly delineated ball only at infinity, and then it will also be solid--and the size of a point.

____________
Added June 2010

Here are a few further points of interest about this form.

This Sphere is related to the Concentric Winder. Imagine each of the layers of the Winder 'peeled': reverse-folded-along the same diameter line, at various angles, so that the Winder is 'rotated in space'. You will have something like this Sphere. (Some such idea was part of the conceptualization of this model.)
Like the Winder, the Sphere also offers a negative illustration of the Albers Effect: Because of all the movement back and forth, the surface of each wedge can remain flat-on-average, without being forced to twist from its plane as it does with Albers disks or Yenn annuli.
Less obviously, this Sphere is even more directly related to the folded Albers disk: for the latter too has circle-lines marking off approximate outlines of spheres. (Because of all the Albers twisting this is harder to see.)
Perhaps the most surprising aspect, besides the directness with which the wedges rotate and condense into meridians, is that the initial paper circle has one curvature, the smaller sphere another, and yet the circle just magically adjusts its curve to oblige the needs of the sphere. Moreover it does so no matter how many wedges are put in, that is, regardless of the relative size of the sphere! Somehow everything always works out.
I put my name on this Sphere, for its simplicity; that doesn't mean there are not more complicated things to be made by following its principles. This is new ground, there is considerable scope for variation--so go discover something for yourself!

Finally I have to admit---I got lucky here. This really should have been discovered 80 years ago by Josef Albers. He after all was asking the right kind of questions, viz., what can you do to a sheet or a pattern that will cause the surface to change its expected behavior. This led to his discoveries of both the Concentric Circles fold and of the Hypar. In retrospect I see now that this Sphere is just a cross of those two Albers shapes (though that's not at all how I came to it), a step which for some reason he didn't take.

Cheers!

Saadya

Organic Circle-fold

2009-03-12T10:23:00.001-07:00

Faced with a Circle, one draws a blank. Where to start? The shape is too symmetric: a blind eye. How, where, will you find different parts in this Unity? And supposing you do: what creases can you put in, that will possibly preserve anything of the circle's original circularity?

Some of these problems, as it happens, are faced by living forms as well. By the fertilized ovum, a single pregnant cell, or by its descendant the blastula, the nearly homogenous sphere of 1000 or so identical cells. These too must divide or fold, to create form. The sphere in nature solves its problem, breaks its symmetry—by gravity perhaps, telling it which side is up and which down, or by some accidental imperfection on its perimeter. In the blastula a fold line arises (the ridge of it assuming special significance later on) and the whole magic of gastrulation begins: nature's origami on steroids. And then differentiation, growth of the different regions can proceed, each part developing according to its own strict rules.

I tried something similar with this circle, making the most obvious division and then applying the most obvious distinct pattern-folds to each part.

The resultant form is ‘organic’ --- reminiscent of how organs emerge in plants and animals, with intimations of branching and budding and leafing and embryo-curling. ‘Organic’ too in the sense more usual in art, of a thing that is like a living form but is not specifically representational.

Curve-folds, and corrugations generally, have this quality that is present in some but not all origami: in principle you can see all the folds at once. There is nothing tucked away, nothing up your sleeves--there are no sleeves. The magic is all out in the open. So the continuity that is key to origami's aesthetic, the sense that the thing is an integral whole despite all its details, is even more apparent than usual. That too can help make an origami shape seem more "organic".

So, this is one thing that can be done with a Circle. What else can?

.

Curve-fold Fountains

2009-02-26T01:28:00.000-08:00

(or: "Feather Caps")

Made from an uncut... semicircle.

As usual I am exploring the interactions (geometric, aesthetic) between curved folds and straight ones.

Saadya

-------------------
Added March 7:

"Angels Instead"

Made from a circle with a radius cut.

toward a Buddha paperfold

2009-02-26T01:20:00.000-08:00

Borrows an idea from Giang Dinh.
Made, as it happens, from a square.

S.

--------

Added Feb 28:
And since the technique exists anyway, one may as well apply it.

Fanwheel Flasher

2009-02-02T08:20:00.000-08:00

This is in the ‘so simple it seems to have been overlooked’ category. Or maybe it was just too obvious to mention. In any case I haven’t seen it before.

It is just an ordinary fan from a rectangle, with one edge glued to the other to make a full circle. Only, instead of the corrugations meeting the long edge at 90 degrees, they meet it at slightly less. That small change is enough to allow the whole thing to collapse, as a regular circular fan cannot.

This is another instance of the guideline--I hesitate to call it a "law"--that in collapsible origami, skewed angles work better than perpendiculars. Perpendicularity is all about equilibrium, among multiple options and stresses; skewedness is all about disequilibrium--and decisiveness.

If you make this, don’t forget that for a fan to form a circle, the long edge of the rectangle must be at least 2pi times the short one. A ratio of 6.5 to 1 is a reasonable approximation.

How it came about: I’d been studying fan disk shapes made with curves instead of straight lines, some of which are like those which Nishimura and Christine Edison have also been making. These disks collapse to some extent---that is one of the first things one notices about them. Always on the lookout for “special properties of curved folds”, for a while I thought the collapsibility was a function of the curviness. Alas: closer inspection reveals that it is because curves are, by definition, not everywhere perpendicular to the long edges. Simple curves either hit the bottom edge at an angle, the top edge at an angle, or both. It is that angle, and not the curviness as such, that is doing the work of allowing the collapse. And an angled straight fold does a better & purer job of it than a curved one.

It is hard for me to believe that the familiar paper fan, one of the oldest of forms in origami, can give up ANY new tricks at this point. But you never know. If anyone has seen this before, please drop me a note. --Until I hear otherwise I’ll claim this one as my own.

invented December 3, 2008

Saadya

P.S. Ray Schamp just pointed me to the beautiful images in a paper by Taketoshi Nojima on collapsible forms. This shape is not in it, but others using a very similar principle (from a flat disk instead of a rectangle) are.

Huffmanesque

2009-01-15T12:20:00.000-08:00

This is, I believe, the first successful reconstruction (with a minor extension) of the beautiful Concentric Circles form by the late David Huffman.

I wrote about this form once before, and was a bit brash and over-confident about it. It is NOT a simple cone with concentric folds about its center, as I then thought, but is slightly more sophisticated.

Mea culpa. In my own behalf I can say

1. It’s very hard to tell things from a photograph, especially a face-on one that flattens the object

2. None of the other people who have written about this, and who ought to know, got it exactly right either

3. If it weren’t for my mistake, I would never have come up with that neat wind up toy. Which it seems now I can even take credit for.

Invented March, 2008. I've written about this form elsewhere.

Here is the Huffman idea again. A pattern of serene geometry, an otherworldly form.

Saadya

added July 1, 2009: I just saw essentially the same explorations of cone-folding in Ron Resch's gallery, dated to 1969-1970. He and Huffman knew each other; but I have no information on who looked at these ideas first. Still, Resch's published explorations are much wider.

Dimple-Lock

2008-11-22T08:53:00.000-08:00

[Revised Dec 1, 2008]

This is a way to join two sheets without glue, along a common mountain-fold, at a single point. It uses the ‘dimple’ method I’ve been discussing in recent posts. It's a pretty tight lock; for two free-moving sheets I don’t think I’ve seen one as tight.

1. Valley fold through both sheets, about 2 or 3 cm from the edge to be joined.

2. Remove one sheet, turn it over.

3. Reinsert.

4. Make a diamond dimple through both layers. (Put your hand between the layers from behind, and press in with a finger.) Sharpen the folds, both the diamond mountain fold and the valley at its center.

5. Close the dimple, sharpen the triangles that form next to it. (The far corners of the triangles are arbitrarily located so you may as well align one of them with the cut edge of the overlapping sheet and the other symmetrically).

Step 5 will also make both sheets conical. It is best if the cones of both sheets are oriented in opposite directions--otherwise you will have to invert one of them later.

6. Put a valley fold running through the apex of each of the triangles formed in step 5.

This is how it should look, front and back:

That's it! The lock is formed.

7. The next step is optional. The sheets are not flat; if you like, you can flatten them (from the tip of the cones) with a shallow triangle reaching to the edges of the paper. --For many purposes this step will not be necessary, and it does not add to the tightness of the lock.

By the way, I discovered this locking behavior while exploring what happens when you close a dimple on a single sheet (it locks up a section of the sheet), but it was obvious right away that the move could tie together two sheets too. And more than two as well; but the greater the number of sheets joined at a single point, the less sharp the folds of the exterior sheets and hence the less tight the lock will be.

Of course, because the bond is at a single point, it's more impressive to join two sheets at their corners, rather than at an edge as in the diagrams. The photo up top shows two squares joined at their corners with a Dimple Lock--its strength being tested via the famous 'Sandal Test'...

Saadya
Invented November 15, 2008.

Gifts

2008-11-20T08:42:00.000-08:00

No, not new designs. But it was nice to have an excuse to make these cuties again. Would you believe—I hadn’t folded a bird-base in six months??

It feels good.

2008-11-05T00:52:00.000-08:00

Dimples

2008-10-27T11:06:00.000-07:00

Some technical notes on the latest line of thought. Artist-types and casual readers, please ignore.

A fan shape, or for that matter a simple accordion pleat or even a single mountain fold, can be embellished with “dimples”. These can be curving folds as in the Peacock’s Tail (last post), but they can more easily be straight ones: squares or diamonds with a valley-fold diagonal. They can be applied to one side of the paper—mountains only—or to two, mountains and valleys both.

If applied to one side only, the sheet will start to bend or curl toward that side. And if done to both sides, the curling of the surface can be made to balance out. With fans, the curvature starts to assume a shape resembling a clam-shell.

If a pattern is applied to both sides, there is an natural version with a nice mathematical aspect, with dimples on one side repeated every fourth corrugation line, and diagonally below it.

Dimples interrupt the straightness and destroy the rigidity of the lines in a corrugation. Indeed it sometimes seems the only thing keeping a corrugation from collapsing forward is the line itself—that frontal mountain fold: with very little of the walls behind it doing the work, let alone the valley folds in back. Once dimples of a certain (surprisingly small) size are put in, the structure will buckle with a little pressure.–I am sure this fact has been studied by engineers: since trusses too, and not just corrugations, are affected by the phenomenon. The point is one can put in such dimples if one wants a corrugated structure to give way in a sort of ‘controlled failure’.

What is true for all dimples but especially noticeable with curving (oval) ones, is that the first mountain fold (the one defining the dimple itself) creates a sort of ‘shadow’ valley fold area behind it, spreading out from its north and south poles like a magnetic field, but at one preferred location. This is the ‘optimal line’ for drawing in valley folds, but what defines it?

Whether as an accordion pleat or as a fan, dimples prevent a corrugation from closing flat. This is undoubtedly a loss of one nice feature of a corrugation, collapsibility. But there are certainly gains to be had too, aesthetically at least.

Corrugations allow curving bas-relief forms to stand out nicely, with ovals merely being one of the simplest forms to make (for some other examples see the insert in the last post). The fancier a bas-relief gets though, the more material it consumes and the more the corrugation or fan or mountain-fold will have to bend forward to accommodate it.

I don’t mean to say that curving forms can’t be also put directly on an initially flat sheet. Of course they can. But when there’s an initial mountain-fold or a series of them as with a corrugation, there is (a) more volume to begin with, so some 3-D effects are easier to generate, and (b) the flexibility of the corrugation can so-to-speak be drafted for the bas-relief form, so the overall effect on the surrounding area can be minimized or disguised.

Dear Fans
And now a word about fans. A proper fan can’t be made from a square, if one uses the whole length of a side for the part that unfolds. Such a fan will only open to a maximum of under 57.3 degrees. The curve atop a fan-edge approaches that of a slice of a circle's edge; to make a full circle the length of the corrugated rectangle must be at least 2PI times that of the height. For a half-circle, at least PI times the height.

It’s interesting, though: a fan that opens only partway, can be made to open more by decreasing its radius. In origami, i.e. without cutting, there are only three ways to shorten a radius: by ‘trimming’ material from the cut edge (results in a cylinder forming at the edge), by moving up the point of origin, or by shortening the length in between--through dimples, pleats and so forth.

As the radius decreases relative to the circumference to below the 2PI threshold, the corrugations take up the slack and the cut edge will no longer be taut. But there are techniques that can make the cut edge not only not taut, but ‘ripply’, with wavy edges resembling ornamental lettuce or the edges of a torn plastic garbage bag—in short, resembling those forms that Eran Sharon [corrected link], in an article I am fond of citing, likes to study. Hopefully more on this in another post, when I've worked out the details.

Readers who have made it this far may enjoy the following new occasional feature of this Blog:

CURVE FOLD TEST QUESTION

Suppose you put in the following curve-folds (let’s call them ‘leaf’ folds) in a sheet, identically in the top and bottom but inverting the direction of the folds. Take a moment to look at what happens to the sheet around each ‘leaf’.

Now: are there any other folds—curved or straight—that can be put in, such that the top and bottom parts will remain completely symmetrical?

Feel free to write me privately with your answers, at: YoursTruly@YoursTruly.net, replacing "YoursTruly" with "saadya"

Yours
Truly

Peacock's Tail

2008-10-21T05:15:00.000-07:00

Around the time I launched this Blog, a question on my mind was: Is there any shape more beautiful in origami than the Paper Fan---that starts from the fan as its point of origin? In other words: Can the Fan be improved?

The answer is – I suspect not. But there certainly exist highly fruitful progressions that have begun from this shape. I am referring to forms by, I believe, Kawasaki and Paul Jackson from an earlier generation, and in this one, the methodical “geometric” explorations of e.g. Ray Schamp and Goran Konjevod. All of these add a layer of complexity and visual interest and sometimes too a curving third dimension to the fan-shape’s basic two, but at a cost to the purity of that primal form, the sunburst. The cost is greater than the benefit, in my opinion. But what is to be done: we can’t remain virgins forever. It is the same problem with the Square, which invariably is more beautiful and pure than the tarantula or unicorn that is made from it.

Anyway, while seeking an answer to this question in my own language, I turned to the Peacock, which clearly does successfully ornament its fan tail (if success is to be measured in what works for Pea-hens.) This is my rendition of its pattern, using curved folds.

And lest we forget, here is an image of the original. Rather more sumptuous, I have to say.

Looking more closely at the Peacock itself, it is curious that in trying to woo the Peahen the male is using eye-spots (‘ocelli’), which generally in the animal world are ‘agonistic’ , i.e. warning signals.

Now this of course is not the only instance in nature where a ‘cold’ signal has been transformed into a ‘warm’ one. Indeed it happens all the time: a famous case from our own species is the smile—bared fangs being threatening almost everywhere else in the animal world. But usually, what is needed to “invert” the meaning of a signal is some change or added element in it. If it's the smile--you see this more clearly in the Mandrill, which also has one--rotating the direction of the teeth display, so that it's horizontal rather than vertical, is what changes its meaning from threat to appeasement. If it’s so-called “aposematic” coloration—warning colors, which are usually the two colors of yellow/orange/red against black, each region in large pools, spots or bands, divided clearly from the other color—that pattern needs to be replaced with colors other than the above, or with more than two of them, or with finer gradations between them rather than clear demarcations, sometimes carried through all the colors of the rainbow. And if it is eyes, these need to be softened with blush or lashes rather than outlined sharply. And then the signal will mean ‘Come Hither…’ instead of ‘Keep Off!’ (It is striking that the Peacock’s actual eyes, the one it sees through, are not softened like the ‘ocelli’ but rather made more fierce via cross-eye bands.)

Here with the Peacock, it seems to me, though there is a softening iridescence too in the tail's ocelli, the bird is counting on the further fact that these ‘eyes’ are also egg-shaped. Now eggs, for all their suggestion of mystery and fecundity and wholeness and expectation for us humans, are positively ravishing symbols in bird-language. The female when incubating has to stay fixated on & near to & worried about this exact shape for weeks or months on end, so she is primed to it. She has an ingrained weakness for just this oval-form, and a male who can display it in his body or in a pattern has a distinct advantage in sexual selection. (Or so I have suggested once before on this Blog. And how can the shining ovals of a displaying peacock NOT be read by a bird-brain as a shower or sunburst of fecundity?)

That, at any rate, was the theory. But while mulling these thoughts over I wondered what would happen if we used human symbols for the ocelli instead of peacock ones. Here is the first thing I came up with.

How about it, Ladies?

S.

Animal Symmetry and Representation

2008-10-14T15:09:00.001-07:00

One of the reasons origami lends itself so well to the representation of animals is that animals are basically symmetric, and shapes made from a folded square—aligning edges, corners, flaps or other reference points—themselves tend to be naturally symmetrical.

In animals, the main symmetry is of course bilateral (reflective), but there are other symmetries as well. Hind legs and forelegs are ‘symmetrical’ in the sense of being similar to each other, so you have translational symmetry (copy and move) along with a sort of ‘allometric’ symmetry (plot features on a grid, stretch the grid). Digits, that is fingers and toes, are further branchings of limbs, and like branches elsewhere are a form of symmetry: ‘repeat the same thing, at another extremity, at a smaller scale’. In origami the similarity of the small-scale activity to the large-scale one is even more apparent.

Actually, symmetries in an animal can be even more subtle, and extend to body parts which look quite different from each other. One of the amazing discoveries from a quarter-century ago is the complex of “HOX” genes, a stretch of very similar genes which trigger cascades of embryonic growth, in animals as diverse as insects and mammals. The sequence of genes is lined up on the chromosome like beads on the string; each successive gene must have evolved initially as an additional copy of the one before it, which copy then underwent modification, causing its function to vary slightly (or greatly). Thus, antenna on an insect turn out to be modifications of feet: damage the gene and what grows on the head will in fact be feet. But an insect’s body parts, from labia to abdomen, and not just its appendages, also are controlled by repeats-with-variations of identical genes of the Hox complex, and that (on top of the basic segmentation) accounts for some of their self-similarity or symmetry. Amazingly, too, the effects on the body appear in the same spatial sequence as the genes in the chromosome—each next gene controlling the next segment of the body. Here for instance is how it looks in Fruit Flies:

[Image from this blog, which has a nice description of Hox and Homeobox genes. ]

Now, origami is often spoken of as being ‘biological’ in some way. Sometimes it is even referred to as yielding a ‘parallel embryology’. This analogy is actually quite deep, but it pulls in various directions, and it seems to me that at least part of it can be explored by thought about Hox genes and the repeating patterns of origami. Other aspects of the analogy, such as the crucial use in nature of ‘folding skins’ to create animal form, as in gastrulation; or some of the ways proteins like to fold themselves up, we will perhaps touch on in future posts (time, finances, war conditions, etc. all permitting, of course).

Getting back to symmetry: Generally speaking, a symmetrical origami design shows the animal in its most recognizable form. Clearly though, many animals assume postures—and some of them, even physiques—which are NOT symmetrical, a good deal of the time; and if one wants to represent these out of a folded square that can take special tricks and techniques . Robert Lang has a handsome Fiddler Crab with one arm much larger than the other, as it should be; and I seem to recall a Seated Lion someplace (by Giang Dinh?) with its body flung to one side, again a very typical posture for a lion. In these cases there is one characteristic asymmetry within an overall symmetrical plan, but the animal remains quite recognizable despite that.

Trouble starts, however, with those animals that lead most of their lives trying to avoid presenting a clear or symmetric outline. And here, Bernie Peyton’s expertise, both in his scientific career and as an origamian, becomes quite useful. Bernie is a wildlife biologist—in older parlance, a ‘naturalist'—who has spent 22 years studying Spectacled Bears in their native habitat in the Andes. Now, I don’t know about spectacled bears, but brown and black bears, along with quite a number of other furry animals, go out of their way to avoid showing an easy-to-read profile---most of the time. Most of the time, the head is lowered, the colors of the face and body parts blend in to the rest, so what you see is this lumbering mass that is not easy to judge the scale of from a distance or the emotions of even from closer in. Almost the only time the features become pronounced—with head raised, ears clear against the sky, arms outflung, the body too perhaps raised up on two feet—is when the bear needs to threaten somebody. It then becomes distinct, its size and intentions clear, and turns into just the sort of symmetrical, stick-figure shape that origami is so good at representing.

But that is not its typical posture; so if one wants to represent the animal as one is likely to encounter it in the wild—in a warm and not a confrontational context—that takes special efforts of design, observation and sensibility. In "Lying Bear", Bernie Peyton lets the animal be visually distinct by raising the ears just slightly over the line of the body, but the body itself is still massy and indistinct, limbs thrown akimbo in a casual asymmetric sprawl. So it is both amorphous and distinct, in precise balance.

One wonders: since this sort of representation is naturalistic for the animals but not entirely natural for origami, why choose the medium of origami to make it with? Why stretch paperfolding almost to its limits when, say, a wood-carving could have done the job more easily? Bernie’s answer no doubt will be that some of the special aesthetic qualities of origami animals --I mean their fragility, freshness, liveliness and transience--are important for him to convey, given the habitat destruction he has seen at first hand with such devastating effects on his animals. That is a noble reply but artistically, it's not entirely satisfactory. More work needs to be done, it seems to me, to make the sort of highly naturalistic, animated shapes Bernie hopes to capture, come to appear more natural to origami. —But he is already pretty far down this path.

Meanwhile, here is a different take on a Bear, in its less typical if more symmetrical form. On the warpath, in other words. Less naturalistic, if you like, but more natural for origami. The design is by Nicolas Terry; the fold is by Herman Mariano (who decided to make it a Brown Bear rather than a Black one). I had the privilege of showing both of these bears in the exhibit last year at the Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art.

A quick plug: Most readers know this already, but just in case you don't: both of these top-rank animal designers, Nicolas Terry and Bernie Peyton, along with the uniquely inventive and ebullient Vincent Floderer, will be present at the “Ultimate Origami Convention” in Lyon, France, between the 8th to the 11th of this November (2008). Get there if you can—you are in for a real treat.

Saadya

Don Luis

2008-10-09T12:50:00.000-07:00

Not much lately to show origami-wise, though a few things are cooking. Meanwhile here is a little study I made a few days ago of a Velazquez, oil and chalk on wood. Just keeping in shape. --S.

Concentric Winder

2008-09-01T10:17:00.000-07:00

[Posted August 2010, despite the above date.]

I promised some comments on this basic shape---which is more a geometric demonstration than an origami model, but one that still needed inventing, discovering or just someone to "claim it" as their own.

By the latter I mean, that I'm pretty sure that all the people who worked on cone-folds over the past half-century---most notably Ron Resch and David Huffman---would have come across this idea themselves, in the course of fiddling to find a cone-fold state that is aesthetically most pleasing to them. But if so, none of these pioneers paused and said "this is sufficiently interesting to put my name to it." For it is a "stupidly simple" idea, maybe too stupid for David Huffman, an engineer who liked things to be simple but to at least seem complex. Yet as you'll see, here and especially later, there are a lot of consequences to this one form, which you don't realize UNLESS you embrace it, stupidity and all. --Take it in, like you would a stray cat.

* * *

First off: How does it work? Well, if you had just a paper disk and made a cut along a radius, but no mountain-valley folds, you could twirl one layer up underneath the other to form a cone—and the more you twirled it the more acute the cone would get. Now you've added mountain and valley folds, but so what? The cone reverses its direction along the concentric folds: that's the same as turning a cone upside-down in the air. Nothing in the above logic has changed. But it does look a lot stranger.

Here are a few other thoughts which this somewhat hypnotic model prompts.

Align the slits, count the layers—and you’ll know just how much you’ve shrunk. If the slit on top and the slit on the bottom line up, you’ll have made at least one complete turn. The width of the Winder, compared to the initial disk, shrinks exactly in proportion to the number of turns: 3 layers or turns yields a Winder that is one third the size of the original disk, and so on. (The outer edge will consist of three full circles on top of each other, so it is dividing the original outer edge into 3. Since C= 2pi r, if C is divided by 3 so is r.)
Negative illustration of the Albers Effect. Some of you may have seen the twisty, contorted shape you get when you fold a paper disk that has mountain and valley folds, but no radius cut. That is a phenomenon explored and probably invented by Josef Albers, in the 1920s. The contortion happens because the radiuses of all the circles are shrinking (toward the center, along the folds), but the circumferences are not (there are no folds interrupting them), which is not allowed by the above law, C = 2 pi r. This "Albers Effect" contortion is avoided here--the shape stays flat on average--because the excess circumference is allowed to slide over the layer below. This point was stressed recently at the Italian origami convention, by Herman Van Goubergen.
Positive illustration of the Albers Effect. If you unwind a tightly-wound Winder, eventually it will start to approach the condition of a disk without a radius cut. That is, at some point it will stop being satisfied to be flat-on-average, and the surface will begin to wobble. Unwind it further, and the contortions of the Albers Effect will begin to form. (Question for extra-credit: why does this happen when it happens, and not before?)
Illustration of Curve-fold Law II. One of the laws of curved folding which is most significant for origami is that the surfaces to either side of the crease—which are also curving—can never through continuous movement be brought flush to each other. With these curves which are perfect circles you get a limiting case illustration. Here the walls to either side of the crease not only never become flush, they never even touch—yet in principle they could be brought closer ad infinitum.
This too is an answer to a question that many of you (OK, some of you; OK, just me) may have asked, namely is there anything special about circular curve folds, compared to folds that are curving but not circular. Clearly this sort of infinite winding maneuver is possible only for sets of concentric circles; it would not work for any other set of curve-folds, and not for sets of circles that are not concentric.
Vary the spacing. Notice that while the concentric circles drawn here are equidistant, they didn't have to be. Instead of a flat-on-average surface you could make, for instance, a dish shape that grows shallower as you unwind it—or any number of other shapes. Try something new!
Complaints about the Cut. I showed this form in Chicago to Bradford Hansen-Smith, who is easily the world's most accomplished, and certainly its most obsessive, explorer of folds that begin from circles. His first reaction was: I tell my students, NEVER cut the circle.
My answer (now: in person I was more polite): Sheesh! Do you think that as an origami person I LIKE making cuts of any kind? If you insist on avoiding a cut, you can fold the circle in half after scoring the concentric circles, then do the same maneuver along the folded edge. It will fold up to a tiny shape in the same way. But it won't reopen to the full size of the initial circle, only back to the semi-circle, which is a loss, it seems to me. Besides, this form is saying something important about the relations of circles, cones, the dynamics of curve-folding, AND a radius---which is properly conceived as a cut.
Similarity to other forms. This Winder is related to other forms that exist in origami today, in particular, a certain nice extension to the idea behind “Thoki’s Hat”, by Thoki Yenn. In that variation, instead of starting from a single disk, you start out from a flat “disk” with an “extra-long circumference.” (Take several paper disks, stack them on top of each other, and cut them all through at one radius; then join the radius of the top disk to the radius of the disk underneath, and so on going around like circular parking garage. Finally corrugate the whole stack with mountain-valley concentric circles: this gives you a single, ‘extra long’ disk to work with—or an extra-long annulus, if there’s a hole in the middle.) It may be worth pointing out that the Concentric Winder creates a similar sort of a ‘stack’ without having to glue disks together. It also follows that some of the forms produced by one method, should be imitable in the other.
The point to bear in mind is that when you wind up this form, you get a stack of disks that happened to be joined, each to the one below it, along a line. The existence of these mostly separate layers also creates possibilities for manipulating them separately---the significance of which, we'll see in a bit.

David Ben Gurion

2008-08-28T06:31:00.001-07:00

Sisters

2008-08-08T01:54:00.000-07:00

Yoshizawa, Spain and Japan

2008-08-07T11:57:00.000-07:00

[I had occasion, a year and a half ago, to hold in my hands for the first time in my life some original works by Akira Yoshizawa, in the home of a private collector of Japanese art in Haifa, Israel: a collector of discrimination and taste who had been given these works by Yoshizawa himself in Japan in the 1960s or 70s. Maybe one day I will write the full story of that visit. Meanwhile, here are some notes from my journal at the time. Still sketchy & inconclusive; possibly ill-considered: --but this IS a Blog.]

---------------------------

January 14, 2007.

The Yoshizawa things. Made an impression on me. But yesterday too I was singularly impressionable.

Resilience of the paper. Much stiffer than you can imagine but still paper-like. The paper itself does not seem excessively thick, perhaps 70-80 lbs, but it has the stiffness of thick Bristol. I must try this heavy wet-folding myself.

Looking at these works---one gets, transmitted from the touch on paper, an idea of the experience of the man: the winters, the poverty, the struggles of post-war & post-atom-bomb Japan, and this man’s isolated & defiant lifelong battle to make this nothing into something---all that comes across. Of course I am reading what I know and imagine, back into what I saw. Even so, there’s a world of experience, in that still-visible touch.

I’ve been thinking vaguely about these themes of late. Origami in the 19th century was already starting to bubble up, to break out of the confines of tradition it had languished in for centuries---both in Japan and in the West. But in the West, in Spain and Germany, there were more of these bubbles; and when the tradition turned creative in the hands of a few individuals, it did so first in Spain with Unamuno, and very shortly afterward with Solarzano (in Argentina) and others; while in Japan it was Yoshizawa by himself for a VERY long time. Unamuno and Solarzano were far less prolific than Yoshizawa was in his lifetime, were probably less talented; certainly they were less single-minded. They did not have to fight so hard to change origami into something else, that would command respect, in part because the tradition that considered this occupation childish or female or of no-account was not as strong in Spain as it was and is in Japan; and also because the idea of doing something ‘of-no-account’ held (and still holds) a certain charm to the Spanish mind, did not NEED to be defeated. Witness Gaudi; witness Miro.

And so in Spain, an origami developed that was more social from the outset: it was done not by one person but by several---by members of an intellectual class, who delighted in showing each other & teaching each other their new fold-sequences. (In this respect Spanish origami may have picked up a kind of social lightness and grace that it had possessed during Samurai times in Japan.) In Yoshizawa’s hands, conversely, the attempt was to change the production of origami into an ART; that meant, understanding paper qualities, pioneering paper stiffening techniques, and developing an evocative sculptural touch that only a master practitioner can have. In Spain, an origami develops that is more about straight lines and teachable folds, about elegance and delight of sequence; in Japan, an origami develops which is more about the end-result than the process, or where the process is something one is more secretive about.

[…]

Material and Immaterial

2008-07-14T07:43:00.000-07:00

Last week I went to see the paper arts exhibit at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv (“Material and Immaterial”—a nice title, will have to use it myself sometime) which was curated by Paul Jackson of the IOC. A solid, tasteful, well-arranged show of paper arts of various kinds, mostly by practitioners in Israel. Very little origami—three or four installations I think, depending how you count; but with one powerful installation of representational origami by French master Eric Joisel. Of his three faces I especially liked one that looked to be from leathery paper, presumably wet-folded. And the Joisel vases/bottles too were compelling, especially as another, permanent exhibit in the same Museum has historical glass bottles that form a nice counterpoint to his. (Glass has, over history, worked its way out of opacity and into translucency, as blowing techniques developed; and some of that same transition is kept in one of the Joisel bottles—with the layered paper at the narrow top being opaque, the thinner bulge below suggesting lightness & translucency. Interesting to compare glass and paper----)

It is not a fault of this show, and I mean absolutely no disrespect to the many & gifted other paper artists there: but like most exhibits even good ones of contemporary art today, there is little that sticks in the eye, heart or mind five minutes after seeing it.

The exception is the origami, and that one Joisel mask in particular.

I ask myself whether I have a jaundiced view here owing to my fondness for paperfolds, or to my own specialty within it. But having looked into my heart, as they say, I think not; and I conclude that origami, alone among the paper arts, and almost alone among the contemporary plastic arts, has the ability, without shocking or social commentary, to linger in the brain, to cause delight and wonder. This is a quality, in other words, of the medium itself. Of course the particular works have to be good enough too. The choice of Joisel for this show in Israel was specially apt, for lots of reasons, but I imagine that works by other top designers could have had the same effect on this score, I mean would have shown origami to stand out from the rest of the paper arts, in a category apart.

But it was good to see these things together in one place, for it confirms a suspicion I’ve long had (and not me alone of course). Art-objects made from paper may be interesting, clever, colorful, ironic, contemporary, humorous, youthful, expressive, and all the rest. It really is amazing all the things you can make from this one immaterial material. And nevertheless and despite all that: the moment you take a scissors to the sheet of paper, all the magic runs out of it. It bleeds right out of the cut.

Saadya

Locks

2008-05-20T23:42:00.000-07:00

At the AEP convention in Leon, Spain, earlier this month, I asked Miyuki Kawamura, the young Japanese rising star of modulars, the following question: How many types of lock are there in origami? Her answer: Hundreds. --Well, but in broad categories? --Maybe, twenty.

Someone should publish a running list of lock types, with little sketches or photos. This would be an open database that anyone could later add to. It would not make that person money or much prestige but it would be incredibly useful for all of us in origami, for all sorts of reasons.

I am not a modularist, but merely gaze on the field from a respectful distance. Yet even for us single-sheeters locks are important, and it is clear that modulars is where the subject is explored most thoroughly and directly. It has to be.

I work on faces and much of the work tries to keep the sheet flat or nearly so, but sooner or later one wants to bend the sheet around and then the question is, how do you join the edges in back.

Three-dimensional animal origami, which is all the rage nowadays, and rightly so, obviously also faces the same problem. Invariably there is a seam line, under or in back of the model. This is a consequence, almost mathematical, of the fact that the paper starts out with edges; and when you work flat, edges, though probably different ones, stay present every step of the way. You come to the end and still have them. If you started out with a tube you might have less of this problem, and with a sphere possibly not at all (nature’s clearest origami is indeed spherical--there is a blastula: it gastrulates), though even with these the problem of locking flaps exists. Also, such rounded forms are harder to work with: we actually need those edges of the flat sheet pretty badly.

One has to admit, the sort of thinking that comes to the end of a process and asks ‘now what’, finding itself stuck with a problem it should have known all along it would encounter, is pretty defective. Though that’s the state a lot of us are still mired in. Komatsu in his owl, Diaz in his polyhedral/volume studies, and Joseph Wu in some of his 3D work have made efforts to carry us a little beyond this primitive condition.

In any case locks are interesting, I want to say “satisfying”, all by themselves, quite apart from any pragmatic function they may serve in hiding ugly seam lines and as a replacement for glue. There’s a distinct pleasure when a flap fits into a slot and ties a form nicely together; when all the messy sliding about gets brought under single control; when all degrees of freedom suddenly disappear. --And it is origami’s job to study what is satisfying.

So how about it, Miyuki? It would take you all of five minutes. (OK, five hours.)

Saadya

Another bird---

2008-04-25T06:13:00.000-07:00

Just seeing if I can't incorporate lessons from ‘technical origami’, here in the form of point-split feet, within the overall simpler, streamlined language that I still believe is more appropriate for birds in origami.

This model is under 30 steps long.

From a weird variation of the Preliminary Fold, which instead of dividing the center into 8 x 45 degrees, divides it into 12 x 30 degrees. More on this later.

S.

Concentric Circles

2008-03-25T04:28:00.000-07:00

[Revised January 2010] There are lots of ways to get a sheet of paper to fold up nicely. Here is one way I would never have come up myself: that is, if I hadn't tried to copy somebody else's work. I failed, but came up with a different interesting something which seems not to have been remarked on before.

The work in question is the piece of David Huffman's shown by the Institute for Figuring, who mistakenly label it a “Tower of Concentric Circles” -- when (a) it is not a tower and (b) Huffman has another model which is. I imagined at first that this was simply a cone with concentric mountain-valley reverses, which is what I tried to make. You can see from the Huffman photograph that the cone-tip is twisting its orientation as it moves toward the center, which wouldn't happen with concentric-circle folds around a cone's apex, but I explained this to myself as either a trick of lighting or as some flexibility in the form that allows it to be bent that way post-folding (no such flexibility exists as it turns out).

My correct subsequent reconstruction of Huffman appears here. The rest of this article (except the final paragraph) continues as originally written.

* * *

Some tentative remarks on the Huffman piece recently appeared in Erik & Marty Demaine’s useful if rather partial "history of curved origami sculpture". Yet at least as of this writing (mid-March 2008), the Demaines neglect to mention a rather striking feature of such concentric circle patterns, the fact that you can do THIS:

Nice, no?

The math here is pretty straightforward. Think how if you have a disk with a radius cut, you can make a cone of it by tucking one cut edge under the other, and then sharpen the cone continuously by twirling the cut edge underneath. Now notice that the same reasoning applies also to all horizontal slices of the cone (=concentric circles on the disk), which can be made into mountain & valley folds. It’s a neat illustration of several kinds of symmetry, and a way of folding a sheet into a quite small shape that does not involve any straight folds. --How small? Mathematically you could wind the thing up forever, but physics as usual gets in the way--here in the form of the thickness of the paper, which causes the surfaces at some point to stick.

[Note, 2010: This is my "Concentric Winder." I have a few new thoughts about it, which I'll put in a separate Blog article.]

So far as I can imagine, this trick will work smoothly ONLY with concentric circles (though there is one other spiral form which almost works too, albeit with surfaces not exactly flush to each other). The mountain-valley pairs need not be equally spaced, but they do need to be circular and to have a common center. So, I will hazard the claim that this seems to be a means of compacting paper that is unique to sheets curved-folded by means of concentric circular folds.

Now, leaving Huffman aside, with this very same model you can also explore a different property of concentrics: the one that the Demaines are interested in, following work pursued over the last century by Josef Albers and his design students in the Bauhaus, and by Thoki Yenn and Kunohiko Kasahara in the origami world.

Notice that when the form is wound up--with more than, say, one quarter of the circumference tucked under itself--the ridges of the mountain & valley folds add to the stability of the disk, which is flat on average. That is the familiar corrugation effect coming into play, the same method that gives the added stability to wavy plastic rooftops and corrugated cardboard.

When you unwind it though, a strange thing happens. The corrugations weaken---that is not itself surprising, as the mountains/valleys are growing shallower. But long before the disk becomes altogether flat, the surface will have LESS stability than a comparable disk without the mountain and valley folds. In fact, the disk starts to look for any excuse to break out of the plane: it refuses to stay flat! By the time the disk is unwound completely, it will naturally assume a contorted, saddle-like shape.

Why is that? Notice that the mountain and valley folds add some springiness to the paper, pulling the edges, and indeed every part of the interior, closer to the center. That means the circumference now has to occupy the same space as a smaller circle. It can’t do that while remaining in the plane, so it bulges out of it. The same reasoning applies to each of the smaller circles, so you get a nice uniform twisty shape that is saddle-like.

If you hold a sheet of paper taut in your hands, and then move your hands closer together, the sheet will also bulge from the plane, for the same reason. It has nowhere to go but up or down.

The Demaines elsewhere write that “We know almost nothing about curved creases,” and in this context state that "forms that we are just beginning to understand" can be made by various permutations of the concentric-circle technique. Presumably these expressions of ignorance or humility aren't being made only on the authors' own behalf, but for all of MIT, perhaps for all of Computational Origami so far as they are aware, or for 'art and science as a whole'. But the math, at least, that governs transitions in surfaces undergoing differential expansion (which is what is forcing the curvature) has been known for some time, and the physics too has been investigated at some depth--among others by Eran Sharon at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (for a general discussion see American Scientist, 2004). More to the point for my purposes, this sort of curling or bending behavior is not unique to concentric circles: ANY set of folds that squeezes the interior of a sheet faster than the exterior, is going to cause the remoter parts to warp and bulge from the plane. The curling phenomenon will happen with concentric circles that don’t share a common center, with ellipses, spirals, suitable non-parallel curves, curves that do and that don’t intersect, indeed with suitable straight folds too. The outcome is especially elegant and ‘pure’ with concentric circles, but unlike the phenomenon Huffman was exploring this is not a property unique to concentrics or even to curved folding as such.

The results of the Demaines's explorations of concentric folds, now in the show at MoMA, are interesting and visually striking. I am annoyed however by the title they gave their works, "Computational Origami". So far as I can tell their objects were made by a process no more and no less "computational" than the very similar works taught 40 years ago by the late Thoki Yenn (followed by Kasahara, but preceded by Josef Albers), which the Demaines have extended--nicely, but not in any way 'computationally'. Given the title and the distinctive, rarely seen look of such origami, the public can't fail to conclude that this is what origami looks like when computers are involved. (There may very well be such a look for origami, but this isn't it!) Erik being a professor of computational origami at MIT, and being also a manager of the archives of Thoki Yenn, the unfortunate impression is conveyed that the field is being grabbed for himself at his teacher's expense. --But pulling back from such criticism, the Thoki Yenn twisting-origami method is clearly eye-catching and I can only hope more origamians will explore it. For myself, I am curious whether this technique can be adapted for the purposes of an origami that is not only abstract/geometric, but also figurative and expressive.

Saadya

Llopio’s Moment of Truth

2008-03-11T04:34:00.001-07:00

This model with all its drama and flourish was designed by Neal Elias in the 1960s in the USA, and folded expertly a few years ago by Eyal Reuveni, here in Israel.

Full of suspense, presence and equipoise, it is the only ‘dated’ work I included in the Tikotin show, besides the Yoshizawas. But it not only holds its own against the four decades of advances in origami technique that came after it, it even remains distinct, like an island jutting from the sea. It’s kept its innocence too. Though it points in the direction of technical origami, this creation by the pioneer of box-pleating manages to avoid most of the clunkiness to which that technique is prone in lesser hands. It is not "showily technical", does just enough to get the job done, and so holds a quiet strength.

Elias was also the pioneer of the joined two-object model, and of course of the significant color change. I’ve noted elsewhere that having two objects of equal weight in a sculpture turns it from being a noun phrase (‘this is an A’) into a verb phrase (‘A is doing Y to B’). With two linked objects, besides an implied action or relation the viewer can shift his self-identification from one object to the other and thus invert the inflection of the verb. That may be part of the fascination. Here in origami the dramatic possibilities are still more pronounced: when everything is formed from a single sheet of paper, you perceive what the sculpture is meant to be, notice its different parts, and sense the fateful continuity between them, all in the same quick flash of recognition.

One does not need to have Spanish blood, or to have seen it shed in the bullring, to appreciate the drama of this moment. For this is what the viewers have come to see: the ‘Minotaur moment’, when matador and bull, before one of them cedes its life, suddenly become one. How perfectly is this union of souls expressed here, with matador and bull made of the same stuff and the same color: separated now only by the sheet that joins them, with its metaphysical union and two-sidedness. (As in that beautiful English word which also means its opposite: to cleave, which is both to cut and to cling--both scissors and glue--and which term presumably derives from leaf, the primordial sheet.)

It pleases me to think that this old work on a Spanish theme might give courage today to folders in far-off places: to people in sunny or southern climes, in Spain itself perhaps, or in South America, or even South Africa. Some place locked within fields and mountains, where news of the world does not fast filter in. For when one is disheartened by how much is made of technical origami in the various media today, it is good to remember what paperfolding once was, and still is, about: Firmness of purpose in the cleanness of line; purity of soul in the expanse of clean surface; whimsy and lightness, as in the dexterous grace of the knife-thrower; the joys, conjoined, of intelligence, simplicity and magic.

Three Tenors

2008-01-27T09:05:00.000-08:00

A homage of sorts to Carlos Corda.

S.

"Japanese Art"

2007-11-16T10:01:00.000-08:00

I’ve been spending so many hours lately in the company of some great Japanese and Asian Art--for example, the okubi-e prints of Kitagawa Utamaro. It would be strange if nothing whatsoever of that rubbed off on me.... Here are a few things where the influence has, hopefully, been favorable. --I post them with some hesitation, for clearly there is still a long way to go.

These are all variations on a theme, wet-folded from paper of various kinds. Actually, I’ve been wanting for some time to branch away from foil-paper folding, my main medium for face-work. Foil-paper is a beautiful & rich medium unto itself, which is either a department of or a field adjacent to origami; but there are certain paperfolding values that foil manipulation just can’t capture. And in any case it was high time I learned how to wet-fold.

More is coming.

I’ve held off doing figures that are viewable 360 x 360, not because that is not a desirable result in itself, but because I wanted first to be sure I have a technique which preserved clean surfaces in the face, so that it would not invariably be grimacing, grotesque or “fantasy-oriented” as it is with some of the others who work onhuman figures. Now that I have such a method I can proceed to the rear and work down to the rest of the body, if need be. But I am in no hurry to get there. As I see it, the technical problem to be solved is not how to go all the way round or get all the way to the toenails. It is how to assure that each step does not “injure the paper”, to adapt a quaint concept from Yoshizawa.

The last few works are less “Japanesey” but still perhaps “Asian”: I may have had in the back of my mind (I certainly wasn't directly copying anything) some Tang Dynasty sculptures with the clump on the top of the head and that beautiful air of disarming tranquility, that you can make with a dollop of clay. That is possible with origami too. And since it is possible---it is necessary.

Saadya

Smell of a Bird Base

2007-11-16T09:13:00.000-08:00

Been having trouble lately with my Birds. Partly this is nature’s fault: Many birds have at least three colors, rather than two: a topfeather color, an underbelly off-white, and red or brown for foot & beak. That’s not even counting the black of the eye. With origami you’ve got two basic colors to work with plus a pseudo-grey from shadow-pockets—not quite enough for this particular job.

One could, I suppose, bite the bullet, and add another sheet with one or two new colors. Joseph Wu has gone in this direction with his elegantly-marked Frigate Bird. And I seem to remember Nicolas Terry doing something similar to get a multicolored frog.

An option for those of us stuck, religiously, with single-sheet color-faithful origami is to confine ourselves to those birds that do follow a 2-color scheme. Pigeons, for instance, which run the gamut of gray-scales and blended patterns, sometimes come in an all-gray or all white body plus reddish feet. Likewise there are quite a few avian species in which the females, who tend to be interested in crypsis rather than showiness, keep their color-numbers to an origami-manageable minimum. (There are, of course, always reasons why an animal has the color numbers it has.)

Another problem is idiosyncratic---or maybe just personally idiotic. A long time ago (20 years… sheesh!) I convinced myself that a standing bird is fundamentally a four-pointed creature, from which it follows that it should be designable from a bird base (5 points: hide one). If you want to use the fancy techniques that have since come on line, to add complexity or detail---open a beak, pry apart toenails, start the wings a-flutterin---this ought to be doable optionally at the last minute, modifying extremities to taste, rather than by designing complexity in from the outset or inventing new bases as I believe Roman Diaz once argued is necessary. All the above poses a certain challenge, since to date I have not been able to pull this off entirely successfully.... Roman in a recent letter even claimed that “The smell of a bird base is difficult to disguise on a model.” But what to do? I happen to like the smell of a bird base.

So here's where we are, on a cold November night.

Curved Folding, revisited

2007-10-24T03:46:00.000-07:00

Work in progress. (i.e., I haven’t ruined it yet.)

The aim and method is the same: the minimization of lines; the exploration of the inherent softness there is in smooth paper surfaces joined by curves and open folds. I think in the end paper has more possibility for expressing tenderness, or at least receptivity, than even skin on flesh, nature’s original. But for that one needs to get away from the angularity of most origami.

It’s been about a year since I’ve done anything new in this direction. I guess we all have stages where that keening high origami brings, fades of itself or is forcibly set aside. I have Joseph Wu to thank with his invitation to exhibit at Vancouver's Pendulum Gallery (in tandem with PCOC 2007) for getting me jump-started: What I sent him may have been older material, or things derived from older ideas, but the juices now seem to be flowing. I doubt that anything less than the knowledge that people like Joseph and Michael LaFosse and possibly Roman Diaz will be there (among other luminaries) to see those things and harrumph at them, could have got me going---

Cheers!

Saadya

Mother and Child

2007-09-10T10:06:00.000-07:00

I was very glad to get Giang Dinh’s “Mother and Child” for the Tikotin show, and glad too, that by independent decision this image appears on the catalog’s front cover and on the invitation card. For it nicely represents the guiding thought of this show: that origami can sometimes be an art, as high as any of the traditional arts. Mere modesty & self-restraint keep me from saying there are even heights of artistic expression which origami can reach that are not possible in other media of sculpture. (Of course origami has its limitations too.)

If one asks why that is, here—what makes this work art and great art at that—there are some obvious points to start with. Immediately noticeable are the clean modern lines, the long curves and fluid surfaces. Also the work has a manifest simplicity: while there are certainly areas where it is not easy to guess how the thing is folded, the bulk of it, and the main inversion at the bottom, is perfectly obvious and followable by the eye; there are no tricks, what is achieved is achieved without technical sophistication, which is unnecessary and has no place here. Then too, there is a concept expressed: the shy child peering out of its mother’s protective skirts. This is not one of the common variants of the mother & child theme in sculpture, but is closely enough related to them, and on reflection is better expressed in folded paper and in this form of fold than it would be in pretty much any other way. The genetic relation between the figures is signaled both by a repetition of form and the physical continuity of the paper, simple but deep ideas that one recognizes with instant delight.

In the dim recesses of history out of which origami sprang, 800, 1,000, 1,200 years ago—in the rituals of the Shinto religion—paper, white paper, was associated with purification; and folded (and cut) ceremonial representations of humans and deities began to emerge, with folded animals soon to follow. This figural work of Giang Dinh’s has an aspect of purification too, in its whiteness and smooth contours. And it is also religious in its way, though the religion seems more a sort of Christianity; there is the protective mother and child theme itself; and the innocence of the child expressed in its shyness; and the drama of the vaguely nun-like robes. That drama and the odd externality of it—mystery expressed through concealment, enrobement; individuality scaled back to just a face and a gesture—also has associations with the traditional stage performances of Southeast Asia, a fact far more explicit in the other work by Giang Dinh in this show, his series “The Dance”. But it is “Mother and Child” which brings together tradition with modernity, ideas of origin and purity and innocence with replication and continuity, and a new fusion of East and West in a single lithe, iconic package. I take my hat off.

Fleeting Life

2007-08-29T02:35:00.000-07:00

[Added 2011. Visitors from theequinest: Roman Diaz sent in these fantastic horses for the Tikotin exhibit, with sequence numbers stuck in each; I arranged them as best I could, chose the name "Wild Horses" for the whole installation, and took the photograph. Diagrams for Roman's Horse are in his book "Origami for Interpreters". I dabble in this theme too, and you might like these equestrian figures, other origami horses (scroll to bottom), or these Horse Heads.] Diagrams for my Horse may be found in my book, "Sculptural Origami".]

At the very last minute that it was possible before the Tikotin opening, Herman Mariano handed me this fine “Kiwi”, designed by Roman Diaz, that he had finished the night before. --At 81, Mariano shows no signs of slowing down. For this Kiwi he used a coloration technique that is new to him: applying dry pastel to the flat sheet, muffing it around with cotton then spraying on fixatif. (Paul Jackson has already been doing this for several decades: as far as I can tell from looking at his things, Jackson applies one or two pastel colors to a reflattened sheet AFTER precreases have been made so that fold lines will pick up extra color). –Pastel is about the only application that can actually augment the ashy dry paperiness of paper while coloring it, keeping surfaces lively, fragile and translucent: all other color treatments tend to make a sheet seem heavier, shinier or more opaque. More, in fact, like the traditional deadening materials of metal, wood or stone.

An odd, possibly unintended consequence of that treatment here is that the beak of this Kiwi looks a little like bone, more so than keratin (which is in fact denser and shinier than bone). Now, we already know that Diaz has studied the difference between representing animal bones in origami and representing animal flesh: there’s his humorous (why?) "Cow’s Skull", which is unmistakably skeletal rather than fleshy; and in his recent "Wild Horses", something was done to the shape of the heads that makes them look vaguely bonelike, as an animal straining to run slightly does—pushing or pulling against death. Somehow or other this effect has transposed itself onto this innocent Kiwi, half-living, half-already-extinct-fossil, in this interpretation of Diaz by Mariano.

Opening

2007-08-18T08:56:00.000-07:00

Recovering slowly from the opening of the Tikotin show... According to the Museum’s final count, 594 people packed themselves into the exhibition halls in the two hours of the opening on mid-day Friday; I’m told they haven’t seen such crowds in many years.

All of this initial success can be credited neither to the quality of the show (which no one knew about beforehand) nor to the publicity (which was pretty slight). Rather there must be a great pent-up curiosity in the public about origami. Now however that the exhibit's been seen I expect the numbers only to climb as word of mouth spreads.

The dignitaries came too, of course, and warmly congratulated each other. I was moved however to hear Tikotin's daughter Ilana tell about that funny little man, Yoshizawa, who would come to their home in Japan, and who would never stop folding.

The night before the opening I went round & counted how many discrete objects there were (a herd of horses counts as six objects, a work of modular origami as one). My total came to 162. The number of “installations” or “sensible groupings” (a herd is one object, a pair of birds another)--which is more subjective--varies between 60 and 100.

Here is a very modest sampling. Click on the images for a higher-res view.

Saadya

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Treasures of Origami Art", works by 25 world-leading origami artists, showing now through the end of the year at the Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art, 89 Hanassi Avenue, Haifa, Israel. Please call the Museum for hours: 04-838-3554.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Robert Lang's Cervids

Linda Mihara's Connected Crane Quilt

Yoshizawa main table

Yoshizawa Swan family

Top: Giang Dinh's fine wet-folded series, "The Dance". Below it is Yoshizawa's Elephant, one of the works that was in the original 1955 Amsterdam exhibit arranged by Felix Tikotin.

Ron Koh Goldfish

Tomoko Fuse Tessellations

Fuse Modulars folded by Fuse acolyte Rosana Shapiro

Ray Schamp's "Corrugations" wall

Tomohiro Tachi's Teapot

A tessellations table (one of three featuring Eric Gjerde, Christine Edison, Christiane Bettens and Joel Cooper)

Old Goat

LaFosse Butterfly

Some things of my own

Tikotin Exhibit--first images

2007-08-15T10:12:00.000-07:00

I've been enormously busy with this show, the opening is the day after tomorrow... But I have to say it looks magnificent. Here are just a few "teaser shots". --More to come

Saadya

Exterior with "cranes"

Main display case--Elephant at center is Yoshizawa's

Joel Cooper's "Cyrus"

Y penguins from the 1930s

Roman Diaz' "Wild Horses"

View of Haifa Bay from promenade back of Museum

Camel in the Knesset

2007-07-18T13:55:00.000-07:00

This camel is on display now at the Knesset, to help Israel's parliamentarians think this week as they mull over conditions for its Bedouin population.

Saadya

Flitting Bird

2007-07-11T03:03:00.000-07:00

Designed 1987; new treatment for the head--last night.

S.

Lines

2007-06-28T09:33:00.000-07:00

. . . . .

What is it men in women do require
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
What is it women do in men require
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

-- Wm Blake

Great old word that, lineaments, no longer much in use. An outline hinted at, is how we would put it today—except that outline suggests too much of contour and silhouette, not enough of the body lines. Lineaments: the lines, the main structure, the suggestion of it, the indication and idea of it, projectable from the surface, leaving aside almost the body itself, the skin and bones and flesh and motion and the very soul—all there but abstracted.

What besides origami accomplishes this, hovers so precisely between idea and entity? Intelligence not quite incarnate, still hinting, suggesting, but obeying for all that its own strict laws.

. . . . .

Treasures at the Tikotin

2007-06-23T06:18:00.000-07:00

I am thrilled to announce here that beginning August 17, and running through the end of the year 2007, there will be a large museum exhibition of artistic origami in my country.

The exhibit, “Treasures of Origami Art” will be shown at the “Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art”, in the scenic port city of Haifa, Israel. The Tikotin houses the most significant collection of Japanese and Asian art in this part of the world.

The show’s theme is the emergence of origami into a full-fledged sculptural art. About 100 origami installations will be in it, representing works by some 25 artists and designers from 10 countries. These include: Akira Yoshizawa, Robert Lang, Tomoko Fuse, David Brill, Michael LaFosse, Joseph Wu, Roman Diaz, Brian Chan, Linda Mihara, Giang Dinh, Tomohiro Tachi, Joel Cooper, Ronald Koh, Arnold Tubis, Nguyen Hung Cuong, Saadya, Eric Gjerde, Christine Edison, Ray Schamp, Christiane Bettens, Fernando Gilgado, Bernie Peyton and Xander Arena.

There will of course be expert workshops, large-scale origami and various “publicity stunt” events held in tandem with the show.

I’ve been working intensively on this project for the last 8 months, and on and off for several years now. Stay tuned for more information in the various media soon.

Hope you can come!

Saadya

Wet Folds

2007-06-23T06:10:00.000-07:00

I’ve been asked more than once by people who see my curved things: do you wet the paper? And occasionally: do you press the paper into a mold?

The answer to both questions is of course no. And as to wetting the paper, I don’t often practice wet folding (though a bit more so of late) but instead like to glue the paper to a stiff aluminum foil before starting out.

But it took me a while to understand what people were really asking here; and also to realize that even some of those who have heard of wet-folding may have a mistaken idea of what it entails.

People think when they see a curving surface (especially one curved in two directions), that since paper in its natural state is flat, its surface properties must have somehow been altered: that the paper has in fact been stretched. And they think that moistening a sheet of paper is what lets this happen. The question about ‘pressing into molds’ is contemplating the reverse: that the paper is being compressed.

This of course is wrong. A thin moistened sheet will sometimes blister, or its edges will ripple, because locally the paper has expanded and has no where to go but up or down. (A fine, interesting article on this subject was published last year by Eran Sharon.) But in origami that is never an effect you want, as it is entirely uncontrollable: indeed one uses thicker, more absorbent paper precisely to avoid any such blistering. If you get wrinkles or blisters from treatments that involve liquids (e.g., when you glue sheets together or prepaint using inks or watercolors), you’ll probably leave the sheet overnight between flat boards or under a sheet of glass, to salvage something of your labors. At all costs you want the sheet to be flat.

So if wet-folding does not alter a sheet’s “Gaussian curvature”, what does it do?

Let’s define things. Wet-folding in origami is the process of lightly moistening your model as you fold, with a damp cloth or spray mister; sometimes the moisture is applied only to specific regions.

It serves three main purposes. (1) It changes the way paper responds to indentations, and hence gives folded paper a softer and more rounded look. (2) It allows stiffer papers to be folded without cracking. And (3) it releases and repositions the sizing or glue that some papers are made with, so that when the model dries it sets into the 3D form you left it in with great permanence (I recently had occasion to handle some Yoshizawa works from the 1960s, they are as stable & solid as if made yesterday—and will be, I bet, in 500 years.) In short: wet-folding is a sculptural technique, a temporary softener of paper, and a great stabilization method.

I am most interested in origami’s aesthetic and sculptural properties, though these too of course have a physical substrate; so let’s focus on (1).

Wet-folding allows paper to take dimples and indentations softly & evenly. The look of this contrasts with dry folding, because dry paper prefers to take folds that are straight lines, or alternatively to crumple (= form straight-line segments with messy twists around vertexes, and mostly flat planes.) When paper is wet, it behaves a little more like cloth. Pressures dissipate not in a crumple-pattern but continuously. The result is that visually, you are dealing with surfaces --uninterrupted smooth areas where the form is indicated by roundedness, not by fold lines. (And where there are fold lines, they are read a little differently from their dry-fold counterparts: they are thicker, meatier affairs.)

This has a certain inexact analogue in painting, where you can represent forms either via draftsmanship or by what is called (in a different sense from origami) “modeling”—i.e. gradations of shade or color to indicate curving surfaces. (That the mind has these two ways of processing nature’s forms was a fact known & played with by, for example, Leonardo, who likes his painted smiles to hover between gladness and the ache of knowledge. To accomplish this he’ll sometimes use ‘modeling language’ to indicate innocent joy--you can see this better if you let your eye lose focus slightly--and a contrasting ‘linear’ language to indicate secret, perhaps painful knowledge. The smile seems to flicker in and out of existence as your concentration wavers...)

The comparison to the drawing/painting dichotomy is inexact, however, because of course in drawing, a line can be curved too, and can vary in stress; whereas in paperfolding, an edge-line is going to be straight and have identical weight the vast majority of the time. So really what we are comparing in paper-folds is linearity on the one hand, with a model being either flat or 3D but composed of flat planes--these can suggest ‘bones’ or architectural outlines or intellection and abstraction of form--and on the other hand, the thicker and more graduated curving forms, the haunting ‘emotional’ and expressive look of wet-folded origami.

The Minimal Flower

2007-05-07T12:22:00.000-07:00

We haven’t had a ‘natural history’ post on this Blog for a while, despite its name which I’m still committed to. But this investigation of flowers is triggering various new thoughts on flowers themselves, not just the origami of them; and its time to put these down---while they’re fresh and crude, in fact. Before a guarded professionalism, the curse of the times, withers their innocent bloom.

First, though, an old thought. No one seems specially surprised that flowers are delightful, exquisite, turn-ons, ideal objects for gifts, distinct and different and inviting of fine discriminations between them, a joy to multiple sense-organs, and connected more than etymologically with much of what we mean today by being “cultured” or “cultivated.”

The question is, why should any of this be. Flowers are basically an invention of insects, who taught the first angiosperms, 125 million years ago, what forms tickle their fancy. Why should what appeals to creepy-crawlers have anything to do with us? It’s been some time since we parted company. The last common ancestor between invertebrates and vertebrates lived 600 million years ago: a marsh-edge feeder, I understand, who had rudimentary vision at best. That there should be anything in common between us today as regards aesthetic tastes would seem a very considerable feat even for the sometimes astonishing forces of convergent evolution.

I have, needless to say, my own thoughts on what drives these confluences that turn up in nature’s aesthetics—which, presumably, I’ll get around to publishing one of these years, maybe after the war. (Hint: these theories are NOT chemical.) For now, though, it seems to me we ought to just be amazed.

Tinkering, lately, with those origami flowers, especially those irregular Miuras, I’ve noticed this: if you make tiny variations in the pattern of zigzags on two flowers that are otherwise identical (in color, size etc), you can’t include them both in the same ‘bouquet’ and expect them to be read as the same species of flower. The eye immediately picks out minute differences in angles, numbers of folds, and so on. Of course, in nature each individual flower unfurls, blooms, shakes in the wind, withers and goes through countless other changes while still leaving enough constants to allow a quick identification of it. Given a flower’s function—to get you from flower A to flower B of the same species on another plant, while bearing pollen—this is not altogether surprising.

But there’s been much talk in recent decades among psychologists, or nowadays, neurologists, about a ‘special face module’ in the brain that lets us quickly read human & animal faces, both for purposes of identification and to read the emotions expressed. That’s one reason, by the way, why it’s trivially easy to make SOMETHING in origami that will look like a human face (the module has a low activation threshold), but not at all easy to make the specific human face that you set out to, expressing a particular emotion, and have it be realistic rather than a caricature (there is high discrimination sensitivity). Now, I would bet that there is some similar module in our brain—maybe the same one—working for flowers too. And this would be another point of contact between ourselves and the insects. (You neuro grad students out there itching for a cute research project---here it is. Plug in those electrodes, see what lights up.)

[>Added February 2010: For a new scientific appreciation of the opposite idea, that insects (bees) have a 'face-recognition module' just as we do, see here. The researchers have not yet speculated on whether the module for recognizing faces is the same as the one for recognizing flowers.]

A question that’s as much about flowers as about the origami of them is: what are the minimum requirements for a thing to look like a flower?

At first glance it seems that almost anything can serve: a splash of color against the green is almost enough. The other day at the Beersheva Library's gallery I saw some splendid abstract, Pollock-like still-lifes by a Russian painter named “Zukhov”, who does just that: some random drips and daubs and splashes--and you have a vibrant bouquet. And in nature too, there are so fantastically many forms of flowers and whorls, the flora seeming to compete amongst themselves to come up with the latest fashions—that it would appear ludicrous to lay down any general rules for when a thing starts to look floral.

But this is origami, and we can't just leave it at that; we actually have to make something. And anyway for me, given the line I’ve been pursuing lately the question arose in a slightly different form. It bears repeating: What is the simplest origami pop-up shape you can make that can reasonably be called ‘a flower’?

This is, of course, an instance of a question asked when approaching any origami design. What is the simplest representation of an X that you can get away with? Or: what is the threshold where a bent-up sheet of paper with a few flaps, creases and bulges, turns into ‘an X’? Or: What will make fellow-designers green with envy at the thought: now why didn’t I come up with that?

Minimalism, I hasten to add, isn’t the only or even the main objective in design, just one possible goal; and it’s of course true that excesses in minimalism can be infuriating--seem to be insults to the viewer's attention or intelligence. (Most ‘one-crease’ origami strikes me that way.) Nevertheless, the minimalist effort does establish a sort of lower representational boundary that I maintain it is always important to find.

One of the simplest forms I can think of that counts as a pop-up, is the venerable and ubiquitous preliminary fold. Pull at the two flat exposed corners, and the two bent corners pop right out; push at those same points: the others climb right back in.

Unfortunately—but interestingly—this shape is not quite complex enough to be read as a flower. Even if you make it from a nice brightly colored square, say red or yellow, and prop it against some greenery. (Try it and see.) It is however enough for representing a simple roundish leaf, if the paper is green.

Here is small variation that makes the preliminary fold more compact, and so perhaps better for pop-up purposes. (Make all interior angles 60 degrees.) But the result will still be read as no more than a ‘leaf’--if even that. 'Design minimalism' may have been achieved, but 'representational minimalism' has not.

With a just trace of added complexity, however, the “preliminary fold” can be made to be read as a flower. Instead of dividing the surface into four, divide it into nine. It will still close back, more or less reliably. There are three main options for how the thing can close, but it doesn’t matter which one does so long as it closes.

Take off slight triangular amounts too from the north and south corners. The bent-back corners help close & open the model a little better in the middle. But they also let you read the slender mess of lines at the flower’s center-region as some visual noise within the geometric pattern: i.e., as the sex organs.

So it seems that what you need from a 'flower', besides a splash of color, is this: a minimal hint of geometric texture—i.e., a pattern. Division into four does not quite constitute a pattern, apparently; and patterns based on odd-numbers seem a touch more ‘organic’ than even ones. Further, a certain amount of noise, darkness or other difference should exist in the center of the form, to invite visual-tactile exploration: if you’re an insect who’s alighted, that’s where you’re going to be pulled to. Finally, I’ve found that the color of the flower really wants a green underline or undercup as contrast.

But that’s about IT. Further elaboration is of course welcome; but these seem to be the necessary minima.

--Is this an observation about flowers, or only about (origami) representations of them? Given that a flower works by putting on a show for us of insect-minds----is there a whole lot of difference?

Miura

2007-04-25T07:39:00.000-07:00

Not all the flowers I’ve been showing (and others I haven't yet) do I fully understand the mechanisms of. For most I have at least a vague sense of how they work, but some are surprising even to me. That is: while looking in certain obvious directions and playing with various forms I’ve across a few that behave as wanted—they open and close reliably and in interesting ways just by pulling and pushing at two points. That doesn’t mean I necessarily know what’s going on.

Of the three principles I mentioned in an earlier post—preliminary fold, Miura and twist—the Miura map fold has perhaps been studied most by physicists and engineers, its pattern having been invented after all by a physicist who wanted a nice reliable way of unfurling and refurling satellite panels in space. Even with this pattern, it seems to me, there is room for further research, and studying pop-up applications is a great way to do it. I’ve echoed the Miura pattern symmetrically across one axis, to take the shape of a leaf or a flower; it folds up just as nicely as the unreflected pattern. How many more axes can this be done for? More to the point: the Miura pattern can be made VERY irregularly, and it will still fold up—in one unvarying sequence, and ending up flat; but pulled or pushed, it will go through an interesting succession of phases before it reaches the end state. (Unlike the regular pattern, which is a smoother and more simultaneous, hence for me a more boring process.) What guides the expansion or collapsing sequence with these irregular Miuras, and their sudden bursts? How much irregularity will be tolerated before the succession breaks down? What happens with radial forms of Miura? And so on. The beauty of origami is that you can test these questions out almost as soon as you’ve thought of them. And if you’re a tenured university professor someplace, you can even write a paper & get a nice grant for doing just that.

At the right level of abstraction, the Miura map fold serves a paradigm for what one looks for in an origami pop-up. --How does it work? A two dimensional sheet with numerous fold-lines usually has lots of options for folding back up when pressed at two sides or points. Some of these options lead to misfolds, as every tourist knows who has had the frustration of trying to close up a normal paper map. What the Miura map fold does is force the two-dimensional sheet to collapse first in one dimension, then in the other. It reduces a 2D problem to two 1D problems, and solves each in turn. You end up with ONE succession of folds, with a single choice at every one of its junctures. –What other fold sequences are like that?

These problems have a math & physics aspect that is not too closely bound to the specific mechanical properties of paper. Solutions would work just as well for a computer simulation, for hinged plywood sheets and indeed, for satellite panels. But some possibilities for pop-ups probably do rely on paper’s properties to some extent. Everyone who has done any significant amount of origami knows that paper has a memory. For almost any model, it is much easier to fold the shape after it has been unfolded back to the flat, than to fold the thing from scratch. I’m not making just the obvious point that existing creases make the folding easier: Rather, of two fold lines on the flattened sheet (say, both of them mountain folds), one made earlier in the fold sequence and one later, slight pressure on the sheet will tend to make the earlier line fold up sooner than the later one—much of the time though by no means always. The paper often has a partial preference for folding itself back up the right way, so that it takes only a little guidance or coaxing to make sure it doesn’t head into misfolds. --Why is this? And as a practical matter: could one design a model or pattern with an eye to just this effect? So that with the minimum amount of guidance, the model would fold itself back up entirely the right way? And using principles that have nothing to do with Miura folds? --It seems to me this too is a feature that a proper investigation of ‘pop-up’ origami might reveal.

Bestowers of research grants, lurking wherever you might, take note.

More Blooms

2007-04-01T10:04:00.000-07:00

These three are activated: Click to watch them bloom.

No radically new flowers invented since the last post: instead I've been working on everything that surrounds them--the background card action, the necesary leaves, stems, vases etc; while rapidly trying to figure out how to film these things (my double-chin finally having found its purpose and vocation).

Where things are headed: More and more I want the background card to pick up the non-flower elements; and I'd like to purify this so that the card too is origami as far as possible. Recent experiments suggest that very nice pop-ups can be made of just origami corrugation patterns--I mean, dropping the flowers altogether. I'm a little reluctant to go in this direction as there are some VERY talented people out there already doing similar things, who can do a better job of it if they cared to: I mean of course Fernando Sierra, Ray Schamp, Polly Verity, and Christine Edison, to pick a few names at random. One thing I've been exploring that I don't believe has been done yet by the tessellations crew, is mixing elements which are corrugation-based, and therefore expand in all directions, with those which are 'fixed' or 'hard-folded' and don't (or at most flatten boringly when pulled on).

A book is in the offing: The Handbook of Blooming Origami.

Stay tuned--more blooms may be appearing in the coming days. Its spring after all

Meanwhile:

to whom it applies: Pesach Kasher VeSameah
Happy Holidays, everyone.

Saadya

All images, videos, and the underlaying design of the blooming origami flowers on this blog are: Copyright 2007, Saadya. All rights reserved

2007-03-31T13:53:00.000-07:00

Blooming Origami

2007-03-18T07:19:00.000-07:00

Just in time for spring.

Click on an image to see what happens.

The idea here is

(1) the opened flower should have much more than twice the surface area of the closed one; it should not just fan out but expand in all directions as it opens.

(2) It must close back reliably the same way.

(3) Should be pretty, and look like a flower.

(4) If possible, it should change dramatically through different stages as it is opened.

(5) The flower must be origami—from a square, no cuts, and glued only to the background card.

The only mechanisms I know of so far (but I’m pretty ignorant) that do any of this reliably are the preliminary fold (opens to 4X; & with a variation, to 9X), the Miura fold (opens to an indefinite multiple of X), and twist folds. All of the flowers shown combine these principles to one degree or another.

Origami and Pop-Ups

2007-02-27T10:33:00.000-08:00

Having had zero experience of pop-ups till last week, common prudence would suggest not wagging my tongue on this subject at all. But Prudence, Dear, you’ve never really stopped me before, and my tongue hasn’t wagged for a good few months now. It seems to me that thinking about pop-ups sheds a little light on the nature of origami too; so here goes.

Some of the magic of both of these ways of manipulating paper is the same: you start with a flat surface, perform a simple action or series of actions and Presto! have a three-dimensional form, or a shape otherwise of visual interest.

Moreover—manifestly in pop-ups, but implicitly in origami, the process is reversible. You close the book and the form tucks itself away; or you unfold your glorious insect (heavens no!) and get back the original square. —It suddenly strikes me that this unfoldability may be at the core of the origami rules, don’t cut, don’t glue; and possibly at the heart of the feeling people sometimes have (only reinforced by the choice of a flimsy material like paper) that the formed origami object isn’t quite an object, but an ‘object-in-becoming’, on the verge of existence. For the hand in origami can always be withdrawn; no final decisions have been made. What’s done can be undone. No cuts, no glue: that means also, no commitment: nothing’s been sliced away & thrown to the trash, or joined in a union which no man may pull asunder. --No doubt too, that accounts for the appeal origami has for some of us terminal procrastinators. Grow up, they keep telling us.

Pop-ups, of course, do use cuts and do use glue; liberal amounts of both. I was struck by this when I tried to make a pop-up that combined an origami element with other effects: how different the feeling is, when you take up the scissors. Integrity is lost; and one feels quite the sinner, violating that membrane.

The brain too is differently tasked. Pop-ups when done by the masters can show great cleverness or intelligence, but the genius, one feels, is distributed across the page, and is combinatoric: parts keyed & notched together to form some rich, total, tandem effect, from an economy of movement on the part of the viewer/reader. In origami, by contrast, the intelligence is sequential, and is distributed more in time than in space: your result has a long history of folds behind it, not the simultaneity which is the hallmark of the pop-up. One long event in time, giving rise to a single object in space; as opposed to one short event in time, and a multiplicity of interacting objects in space.

Also, though it seems stupidly obvious now, I just hadn’t thought of it before: Most origami models are created through compaction of the initial material. Things end up smaller than the square or rectangle you started out with. There may or may not be a stage of enlargement, when you open the folded-up thing part-ways, pull at the base of the boat to create a glorious hull, open out some flaps to reveal a fine and sturdy box. If so, and only for that stage, origami exists in the condition of the pop-up, with its expanding surprise. But the pop-up lives in that state always, which is the opposite of origami: a form emerges from the stretching of the bundled-up thing, from the unfolding of it. [A pop up invariably starts from the flattened state, but what each of its parts is trying to do when it opens is achieve an even more flattened state (a thinner one), only it runs into obstacles with other parts each trying to do the same—and the result is a 3-D form.]

It’s been proposed that much origami, which has a final stage in which it moves from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional, can work as a pop-up if the sides are suitably glued to an openable surface. That is no doubt true, but it seems to me you won’t often get the best of both worlds by this marriage. From the origami side it is a little like those compendiums of “climax” themes in classical music: you are given the memorable high points, but without any of the build-up that grants them richness or depth. The creation history, the fold-sequence, isn't what opens to your view except for its ultimate stages. And from the pop-up side, the same 3D form more or less can be made with a lot less bother if you allow yourself a few cuts, as pop-ups typically do; so you might well wonder, why the person has gone to all that trouble. The integrity of origami is a little wasted here.

Closer to my heart is origami designed in advance to function as a pop-up, or to pass through different interesting stages via simple, global moves--pulls, pushes, twists, flexes of a whole surface into a cylinder. The tessellations folks are doing a lot of things of this vein nowadays, although (strangely, to me) the potential for pop-up applications is not being sufficiently explored. Thank goodness, then, for Jeremy Shafer, who hasbeen mining this seam-line now for some time.

Meanwhile, still far behind, here is my first trembling contribution. The flower is straight & simple origami, from a square; the leaf action, in many ways more interesting, is not.

[Video removed; see this post for more advanced developments of this idea. --S.]

Hope you enjoy.

Saadya

For VeganBird

Not Another Swan

2007-01-07T05:15:00.000-08:00

“Not another swan!”, groused John Smith, some 30 years after founding the British Origami Society. “[A]fter all, how many new swans do we really need?…Are there yet more fine horses still waiting to be brought into being?”

Did someone say, “Horse”? Hmm…. No. Today we are making a Swan. Sorry, John.

This swan does not inflate, I regret to report. It does not shake its wings when you pull its tail. But it will FLOAT—for long enough, anyway, till you fold another one. And you can teach it to a child.

Instructions (quick version): Make a stretched bird base, double-rabbit-ear the neck, sink a tail, make a head, upend bottom & tail. Q.E.D.

Saadya

Old and New

2007-01-01T06:52:00.000-08:00

Horse

2006-12-25T02:11:00.000-08:00

I won’t say this is my favorite model. They are all my favorites while I am working on them. But this Horse--I have been with her the longest, starting I think in 1993. Also I have a set of ideals, almost an ideology, for animal origami design, and this is the model that comes closest to embodying it.

1. It is from a square

2. It uses clean angle divisions (15, 22.5) for all major folds (and most minor ones)

3. The preferred angle basis is 15 degrees (which I happen to like)

4. It uses strict referencing till very late in the sequence

5. The referencing is not artificial, but natural (= few/no extra steps just to make references)

6. The number of folds, given what you get at the end, is small (about 40 for the basic, standing version)

7. For horses in its class, paper usage is highly efficient

8. A quite reasonable model is produced with no post-folding, but material enough is there so that an accomplished folder can sculpt it to his heart’s content

9. Different poses or expressions are possible, because many long limbs are independently repositionable without affecting the others (head, neck, mane, tail, legs to a small extent)

10. It is from a Base or ‘embryo’ that can be readily modified to yield other animals

11. No body lines appear on the model that aren’t there in reality, and all those on the real animal are on the model

12. It is closed-back

13. Long limbs are visually continued by body lines

14. It is a beautiful animal.

Shortcomings too may be listed:

1. It is mainly a ‘flat’ model, though it becomes three-dimensional fairly naturally owing to paper thicknesses. (Unlike, e.g., the Pigeons from earlier this month, which are 3D directly by the folds.)

2. Legs should be longer still, to allow proper hooves and more motion poses.

3. While it is ‘closed-backed’, it is ‘open-headed’

4. If done with duo-toned paper, the head comes out a different color, as do the inner sides of the legs. This may or may not be desirable.

As if to balance out these deficiencies: unexpectedly, a version can readily be made that is also an Action Model.

DESIGN HISTORY. Of the three poses shown, the Galloping variation is most recent and has been through only 2 revision cycles (a few evenings’ work) so can’t be called perfect even if it’s good enough to show . The Grazing pose is much older & has been through 3 or 4 revision cycles, the first of them very long ago; I’m not fully satisfied with it either. But the Standing pose, the oldest, has been through at least 7 cycles, beginning I believe in 1993, then set aside till 2004 when I came back to origami. (During which time standards had toughened--for instance ‘open-backed’ animals like this horse used to be suddenly had become 'inferior'). At this point I’m not sure I can improve on this model any further, but you never know.

TRIPARTATE DIVISIONS. The length of the side of the square is divided into three, and so are the main 90-degree angles. The first—the length-division—is pretty much arbitrary; you can vary it and still get a decent animal only it will have a somewhat longer or shorter body which may not be suitable for a horse. (In fact a more perfect Horse can be made with a slightly different division, but I can’t be bothered to establish a reference of "side x 0.31".) The division of the angle into three is more fundamental; for clean folding purposes your options are either 15 or 22.5 degrees, and I happen to like multiples of 15. --Among other reasons because it was less common in 1993 when I started, though it is famously used in David Brill’s fine Horse from an equilateral triangle.

NATURAL FOLDS. A fold sequence can use strict referencing, or it can use ‘judgment calls’ or bizarre fractions for references. The designer most famous for strict referencing is the wonderful Komatsu, and he is liable to devote a fifth or more of the steps in a sequence to establishing marks precisely on the square. (He too has a Horse, of course, and a noble beast it is.) This calls attention to the act of referencing, which is in part why Komatsu has the reputation he has; but it seems to me that a higher & tougher design ideal is to establish references without special moves dedicated to them, that is, to make active, form-creating moves and base each next move on references naturally left by previous ones. Referencing is then no less strict for all that it happens silently.

EMBRYO. I worked hardest here to develop a supple animal base, or what might be called an ‘embryo’, which can be turned into a Horse or into any number of different animals. (It really is like embryology: remember Von Baer’s Law, that organisms are more like each other the younger the stage you look at them, both within and across species.) I prefer to get to an embryo stage much sooner than some other designers do, because this speed is what gives you the flexibility to change poses (or species) if need be.

SCULPTING. I'm a reasonably good sculptor and will often tinker for hours with a ‘finished’ model to get it into the right pose or expression. As a model designer this theoretically puts me in conflict with those folders who want a model at the end of a fold-sequence to come out as close to finished as possible, with little or no post-folding. Actually the conflict is less than it might seem--and enters at a different location than may be thought. Like everyone else, I want a model to be as good as it possibly can be straight off the assembly line. But I also try to design in as much flexibility as possible, so that if tinkerers like me DO want to change things at the end, they will not be locked in by the structure of the model. Designing for maximum uniformity of result is a very interesting concept, but there is also such a thing as designing for maximum variability, and it is not necessarily less challenging.

CREASE PATTERN. Someone who never folds from crease patterns really has no business unleashing on the world a CP of any model of more than minimal complexity. Understanding and skill is needed, to know what to include & exclude. Nevertheless—I promised, so here it is. --A holiday gift: to you who like such things.

Added Dec. 2010: Diagrams for the standing & grazing poses now available in my book, "Sculptural Origami".

Sparrow

2006-12-17T11:15:00.000-08:00

I gave in a little too easily a few posts ago to the claim that a bird base doesn’t conveniently allow a two-winged, split back without pre-placement of grafts, etc. Actually here, the desires of the origami designer to show what can be done with points come into conflict with nature’s aesthetics, since most of the time birds are standing around, their wings and tail really are conjoined in one streamlined, seamless unit. But supposing you do insist on showing wing-tips as points—it is not necessary to have them be fully independent. It’s enough to indicate the separation. And if so, a bird base is perfectly adequate to the task.

In fact now that I’ve been around the world, so to speak, with fancy bases and fancy variations to them, I keep coming back to simpler things. The traditional bases turn out to do the job better than the fancy ones! Here is that damn plain-vanilla Bird Base again. And this time I think I can illustrate the idea of continuous complexity directly with this model:

Basically, the moves are:

1. Bird base

2. Color reverse one face of the base

3. Rabbit-ear the other (colored) side around the paper’s squared-off center, while sticking a finger to open the pocket underneath

4. Color-reverse the head too--by loosening the paper almost all the way, making a shallow rabbit-ear, then closing the whole assembly again.

In diagrams here is where you would be in about 10 steps:

One could, in fact, stop hereabouts, or slightly afterward, and have a perfectly reasonable ‘childish’ model. Or perhaps one can think of this as an embryonic stage.

But even if you don’t stop, you should at least pause here, and let the purity and cleanliness of these surfaces and lines sink into your soul. The expanse of unmarked paper, held flat or curving, that shows paper for what it is; and the few long folds, where origami can be seen in its fundamentals. Whatever you do from this point on is going damage the purity of the form. --That may very well be necessary, but you’ll want to minimize the damage, and weigh the benefits of every choice against its cost. Anyone incapable of feeling pain at what about to be lost here will never be more than a technical folder.

To complexify, you might decide to point-split feet, split open a beak, cut the tail into virtual wings plus a tail, ornament the tail further, put feathers on the wings or whatnot. What should guide these choices? There’s a tendency, in today’s testosterone-driven origami, to do what’s technically more difficult, or at least more elaborate, so that you get these scales of complexity: if there are claws, then there must also to be an open beak, wings detached from the joint, etc. etc.

I humbly suggest that restraining one’s gonads here is the wiser course. In design it is generally asked what is the most you can make out of the material you have at hand. That makes perfect sense. But it can also be reasonable to ask, what is the least you can make of it, and still have something worthwhile. For the ratio of means to ends is what finally gets considered, not the absolute values of each. That is the rule for art in general; and for origami, which is all about the Something-from-Nothing, it is true all the more.

* * *

The Sparrow up top is my first experience folding at home with Origamido paper. Boy is it a pleasure! I wish I could afford it! It's what we'll all be folding with in the Origami Afterlife.

Let me wish Michael LaFosse and Richard Alexander a smooth transition to their new quarters in Honolulu. I was born in Boston, even if I don’t live there now, and as a native let me say: this departure is a real loss for the city and for the entire U.S. East Coast. Bon Voyage regardless.

Happy holidays everyone.

[Added 10.29.07]

Pigeon Frenzy

2006-12-08T03:07:00.000-08:00

I’m not going to show you two week’s worth of experiments on the Fat Pigeon. My table is littered with bird carcasses, and my brains are in worse state because once I start I don’t stop and now two weeks are gone from my life. The problem, besides the wounded pride hinted at in the last entry, is that I foolishly listened to R. J. Lang two years ago in Barcelona, when he said ‘birds really ought to have their feet point-split’. I disagreed, but out of politeness conceded that “this was at least true for pigeons.” And here was my old Fat Pigeon, standing around pigeon-legged instead of pigeon-toed.

Unfortunately the most obvious way of solving this puts a nasty pleat at the edge of the paper; legs and claws can then be made as long as you like. Now, while I dislike box-pleating I am not opposed to it in principle, if the pleats are put to some artistic effect when the time comes. But here the pleated bulk ends up in the worst place, locked uselessly within wings and tail; and to tie up 20 or 30% of the square just so you can later pry apart some toenails—no, that I will not do. So far as I’m concerned you may as well start with a rectangle or cut the paper.

I have since come up with some more reasonable solutions, supposing feet must indeed be split. But let us first look a little more closely at this assumption, and what is behind it.

Birds have feet, no? So splitting toes is a way of making improved, more representationally-accurate origami—isn’t it?

Not necessarily. Have a look at this picture of an old and rather tired Robin, Googlized at random. (Or better yet, go outside and look around—you’ll doubtless find some small birds there). Can you see the feet? Well, can you? It turns out that feet are something of an embarrassment for bird aesthetics. That is: even male birds, which use flashy colors for their bodies and even sharper detailing on their heads—along with eye-catching profiles that may be egg-like or sinuous—even such birds, who are hardly ashamed of calling attention to themselves, use the universal language of crypsis when it comes to their feet. Feet and even legs on small birds are often thin, reedlike and brown, blending right in to the ground or twig they are perched upon. Sometimes they are knobby and ugly, in contrast to the gorgeousness up above, and in that way too slide attention off themselves.

In other words, a representation of feet may be accurate anatomically without being accurate visually. Drawing attention to them, to show that you are a moderately competent designer who knows how to split a point, is doing something that may be in conflict with what the bird is trying to do, and also with how a bird’s image lingers in the mind.

What, then, is driving the point-splitting of bird-feet in origami, if it isn't aesthetics? It seems to me there are two factors. First is that the older style, from early Yoshizawa, where feet were made by a simple (or a double) reverse fold, really is unsatisfactory in many cases. The bird ends up looking like it is wearing boots. Point-splitting here is a legitimate response to a problem, and is indeed an improvement if (a) you want a stable standing animal and (b) the bird’s feet are going to be looked at anyway. Of course you can also bite the bullet and leave the legs as one long point, or eliminate them altogether as LaFosse had the courage to do.

But a second factor is the current fashion of super-complex, hyper-technical origami, which regards it as an embarrassment if any long points are left anywhere unsplit. A pleasant illustration of this is provided in the Swan by Noboro Myagima, that appears in the AEP Convention Book 2005 (another ‘Barcelona bird’…). The folding sequence is 149 steps long. But at the end of these 149 steps, you do not end up with a Swan which is noticeably better than the ones you learned as a child, that took 10 or 15 steps. Myagima’s model does, however, have one advantage over those older, more modest ones: its feet are point-split. We may note that it holds this advantage over real-life swans too, which, alas, are stuck with merely webbed feet .

Getting back to the carnage from the last two weeks:

I took the Fat Pigeon [CP], a form almost 20 years old--a completely natural, lyrical, geometric sequence from a Stretched Blintzed Bird-Base--and made endless modifications to it, sacrificing purity of sequence for end-results (for we are no longer virgins). To list only the changes I am keeping: Off-centering the Bird-base, allows the tail to be made longer than the wings without additional folds. Off-centering the Blintz buys you all sorts of things. If you want to, you can have a model that’s fully rounded (I mean 360 x 360 degrees). I chose instead to use the extra material from the overlapping ‘blintz’ for various color-changes and also to design what is, at last, a reasonable lock, so the front stays in one piece (without wet-folding etc). Wing ornaments and so forth can be added optionally.

* * *

Simple as all this still is----it may not be simple enough. A standing bird has fundamentally four points, even when its wings are slightly split. A four-point model ought to designable reasonably from a bird-base. And if it’s a bird base, then the principle of continuous complexity ought to apply, and feet can be point-split if one cares to, a beak opened, and so forth, all from essentially the same beginnings, and stopping whenever one has had enough.

Can this be done?

Stay tuned.

P

2006-12-02T11:50:00.000-08:00

Sink or Swim

2006-11-28T03:30:00.000-08:00

The awful thing about this origami business is that it keeps changing. You can never rest on your laurels. At any given moment, somebody, somewhere is doing something mind-boggling, or worse, is busy outpacing you at the very thing you once most prided yourself in. I shudder to think what will happen if Ronald Koh ever comes out with a book—having seen a few of his Fish, the best in the world, and knowing something of the design problems involved: won’t a book will make it clear he’s one of the foremost animal designers of our time?

But there is no need for dreadful anticipations. As we speak, out there on the edge of the universe, in Calgary, Canada, Roman Diaz is plugging away at his Birds: carrying the study of avian origami to what I think everyone will recognize as new heights. His bird from the post before last (Nov 1 2006) is not so much a homage to Michael LaFosse’s Cardinal as a rival to it, in elegance of straight-line form and color (if not in simplicity of design), something I would scarcely have imagined possible. And in the ‘Calandria’ of the last post (Nov 9) there is more improvement still: this time on the rounded form of the bird. --All of which personally would be an unmitigated joy were it not for the fact I’d staked out some of this field for myself, once upon a time. I am not yet ready to cede at least partial ownership of it. Not without a fight anyway. I don’t mind losing but not quite so easily...

Let us pick nits. Roman says, if my feeble Spanish is getting it right: (a) very many birds in origami are indeed made from the Bird Base; and (b) without using High Technology, a standing bird with wings folded on its back will not show two distinct wings, but only one conjoined surface, if made from the Bird Base or any of the other traditional bases.

As to (a): I’m not at all sure this is factually true. We may have to consult the Origami Database (supposing it somewhere contains the useful category of bases a model was designed from) to see how many birds really are made from the Bird Base as a share of the total. The term itself certainly did not originate from any such preponderance of designs, any more than the ‘Fish Base’ is so called because most or even many fish derive from it (of that I’m surer: they don’t). Presumably only one bird ever gave rise to the term ‘Bird Base’—the Crane. Historians are of course invited to do their stuff here.

When I set out last year to show an assortment of ‘Bird-Based birds’ of my own design it was not because this seemed an especially natural or widespread thing for model-makers to do; the point was rather to show that there was life in this tired old base still, and that models of considerable purity and power can be made from familiar beginnings and relatively low technologies. (Dare to be ridiculously simple, stupid and obvious, my motto seems to be.) I was annoyed in particular by the birds Robert Lang had displayed at Barcelona (2005), which took over 50 steps to make; a few trials over the years had suggested that slightly simpler, but just as effective birds ought to be makeable in no more than 10 to 15 steps--or say 20 if you point-split feet, which isn’t always an improvement.

But having considered the matter further, it now seems to me that the Bird Base really is a natural beginning for birds, standing ones especially—even ones with substantial amounts of detail. That’s because it puts the points in all the right places and leaves them pretty much independent. If you want to add details that cost you limb length (e.g. point-split feet), you can always compensate by shortening the other elements proportionately (ideally adding detail there too). This then yields a design virtue I try to get from all of my own origami: something we may call ‘continuous-complexifyability.’ (Ugh. Ugh!) That is: a design should yield good enough results in its most simple format, but also be able to sustain gradual increments of complexity or detail, if that’s desired, without modifying the superstructure. The ideal would be for Roman’s useful ‘progression of bird complexity’ illustration to be the literal truth about adding details to the same model (or barring that, to the same concept). With a Bird Base, that is almost possible.

As to (b), the point about folded separate wings: As a generalization that may be true. But it also depends on what you consider to be the ‘Traditional Bases’ and what you take to be ‘High Technology’. (OK, so Roman did not use this term.)

For instance, here’s a picture of an actual 1987 model, the ‘Fat Pigeon’. It’s from a Stretched Blintzed Bird-Base. Does that count as a “traditional base? The technology is pretty ‘traditional’ too, i.e. practically obsolete, though in ‘87 it was state-of-the-art.

For the record, about six months ago I simplified this model (abandoning legs altogether) and made a version from a plain old stretched Bird Base. Here it is. This modification follows two design principles, the first one tried and true—“KISS”, or, ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’—the second more theoretical and unproven: “POETIC”, or ‘Put Opposite Elements Together, Idiot, in Combinations.’ (yeah I just made this up.) Here the ‘combination’ is of 3D/rounded form with 2D and even 1-D elements--the paper’s cut edge, made visible.

And what about the Bird-Frog Base? That’s at least hybrid-traditional, and is getting more traditional by the minute. You can make a split-tail (not split wing) bird from it easily enough. I’ve also made a Whooping crane (1988) from it and, following the principle of continuous complexifyability (…), just adding toes, a Heron (2005). Its close cousin is the Crane designed by Daniel Naranjo and further developed by Roman Diaz himself—which is from a Waterbomb base, and so unquestionably “traditional”. The wings in all these cranes can be folded up in exactly the way actual cranes do it, creating a two-winged back, though for origami this would clearly be a waste.

But it’s true. If you add just the teensiest graft to a plain old bird base you can get away with a lot more. In particular you can not only get the wings on the back to split but send the tail shooting up between them, which in my lexicon of bird emoticons, is the very expression of Joy.

Thus far I’ve been discussing history, some of it ancient history. Hopefully next time I’ll have some new things to show.

So: am I holding my own? What do you think?

Folders of Columbia

2006-11-28T03:15:00.000-08:00

Thanks for the terrific time you showed me the other week at the well-organized origami convention, and before that at the impressive mask exhibit and the LAO meeting. It is heartening to see how origami is flourishing and specially exciting to meet the design talent now emerging in your country.

I will remember your cities of Medellin and Cali---where the women have the most amazing figures; where (in Cali) at night in the rain, open-air busses go around with music blaring and people dancing on them, because those Columbians they can’t stop partying for a minute; and where (in Medellin) origami is taught at the University as a required subject …

Cheers

Saadya

"Expression" and "Idea" (part II)

2006-10-15T17:04:00.000-07:00

There are different ways to engage and delight a viewer with something you’ve made, for instance, at the level of thought and at the level of feeling; but either way ‘engage’ usually means a mix of being clear and being obscure--both obscure and clear enough to make the viewer figure things out for himself and be able to reach the happy conclusion of recognition. With ‘model-making origami’ this happens almost automatically when the viewer recognizes simultaneously what the object is and that it is just paper with a few folds that the mind has figured out how to read. (So if the model is too detailed or if it is post-painted, we work less at translating it from paper-language and it gives less joy...) This would be a ‘cognitive’ ploy--it works at the level of thought, of recognition. But emotion comes into play in origami too, especially, it seems, with wet-folded models, for reasons I’m far from clear about.

A model can be stiff and cold and just say “this-is-a-that”, but it can also DO stuff and so engage the imagination in other ways. Think of the object as being like a noun: it can fit in lots of different sentences, or stories, but maybe there is not enough there to invite the imagination of them (unless you are a child). Well-made sculpture, as Roman points out in his comment, does not leave the thing to float entirely free, declaring just ‘X’, but often adds a bit of carefully-chosen adjective or verb to the noun (goat grazing, bird perching). When done right the posture or action seems as though it is about to change. That’s part of what gives the thing ‘life’: it has its own autonomy, a freedom of choice your imagination has granted it, to move beyond what is actually represented. When this succeeds, the object and you are bound up in a story-making relationship. (It is ‘interactive’, even if the wings don't move when you pull its tail.) And when the object is origami, and you're the one who has folded it, the imagination-space has been widened by a background of creation or parentage as well as by a link with the mind of the designer. A history of guided moves, along with the choices made and unmade. (Thanks Roman for helping me think this through.)

If the object is composed of several main parts, then you have a ‘sentence’ with more of the elements filled in: A is doing B to C (or stands in relation B to C). If the two parts are of equal weight, you tend to notice the verb more than the nouns—the sculpture is about the relationship. With more than two parts you are starting to control a whole story, with a protagonist to be identified with, subordinate clauses, a background scene etc. In my experience such sculptures tend to function more in painting mode than in sculpture mode; that is, they are sometimes less physically ‘present’, maybe because there is less freedom for the parts or the whole to do something other than what they are doing. Somebody is telling you a tale, the objects are not confronting you freely or directly and of their own accord. (Mobiles are an exception that proves the rule.) --Sentences or stories exist in a different space than objects do. But even with stories the obligation remains of engaging the viewer’s imagination—by obscurity or by every other trick that will serve. And so you introduce, for instance, suspense.

This is taking us a bit far afield. I wanted to focus here on the work of one great 'conceptual ' explorer, who has something to say about pure model-making (the naked noun, stripped of all verbiage) and also about the nature of paper itself.

He is of course Herman Van Goubergen. I will not be speaking here about all of his work, only the theme in it of the two-sidedness of paper. (Another theme is the difference between flatness and three-dimensionality, but we have already been stressing that quite a bit in this blog.)

Three models of his come to mind. First (1988?), there was his Lion-with-color-change. Now, color-changes are not uncommon in origami, today anyway, and if one is looking for pioneers here one certainly will think of Neal Elias before Herman Van Goubergen. But what strikes me with this model is that the color-change potential of paper is not just being used, it is being called attention to. The subject of this model is as much ‘The Color-Change’ as it is ‘The Lion’. I am not entirely sure how this is effected. Maybe it is because in the front of the model the color change comes out so cleanly at the right places and nowhere else; or maybe it’s because at the rear, exactly where the model is ‘anatomically correct’ it is also ‘color-change incorrect’. Attention is naturally drawn to that part of the anatomy anyway and when a further visual cue is added you become aware that both nature and art are engaging in some extra signaling—all of which stimulates thought. (Thought, I insist, more than feeling: cold idea more than warm expression.)

The next model in this progression is ‘Above the Water, Under the Water’ (1996?): a model is posed on a glass ledge over a mirror; viewed from above you see a bird, but in the reflection from underneath you see a fish. —When I first encountered this model in Salzburg last year I immediately thought of M. C. Escher, who likewise was specially enamored of birds that turn into fish and with the idea that the same thing looked at from a different perspective can be a different thing. (Escher even has some prints in which you look at a puddle of water, see things reflected in it, floating on it and submerged in it: above, on and under). I pointed out these possible connections to Van Goubergen, an iconoclast and original thinker if ever there was one, and he seemed none too thrilled about them.

This model is using not just the color change but also the fact that an origami model almost always ends up with a top and a bottom (or a front and a back), and that it is by convention only that we attend to the top in mentally constructing a model out of what we see, while disregarding the messy underside. Once again Van Goubergen is calling attention to a fact about paper and paperfolds—or about ourselves. When other designers, most notably Joisel, find the two-sidedness of 3-D models objectionable they quite sensibly apply their immense ingenuity to hide or to eliminate it; Van Goubergen makes use of this property and so forces us to consider it.

Nice and subversive.

But the apex of this progression has to be that VERY strange Skull of his (diagrams in the Origami USA 1999 convention book and in Origami Tanteidan #72). A shape, not immediately recognizable, is placed on a mirror: now the reflected underside combines visually with the directly-seen top, and it becomes a skull. Brilliant! The color-change aspect has been done away with, the idea has been purified. It is now only about tops and bottoms. The model’s normally-ignorable underside can’t be ignored at all, because without it we don’t so much as have a visually constructible object. Bottom and top are of equal importance and neither is sufficient by itself for a unified model. Fantastic.

By the way: this sort of optical trick has not, so far as I know, ever been done before and it is something of an honor for us in origami that it was done in paperfolds first.

If you ask, technically, what the connection is between the idea of the color change and the top-and-bottom aspects of origami models, it is this. Paper starts out with two sides, which may be bi-colored; but while you can quickly hide the color (e.g., by a blintz) the result will still have two sides. The two-sidedness of the developing model continues essentially through all stages in which it is folded flat. Since three-dimensionality is usually given only at the very last stage, the model typically retains a top and a bottom, or an outside and an inside plus a seam-line, the latter of which we have no choice but to ignore.

This then is an ‘expression of an artistic idea’, in at least the following respects. It is an idea about paper, or paperfolds; about the mental construction that parallels the physical construction of origami; about redeeming the ignored; about one thing that really always was two and two things that again become one.

Isn’t that a lot of 'idea' to pack into a single square of paper?

Saadya

"Expression" and "Idea" in Origami

2006-10-09T11:35:00.000-07:00

Just a few years ago I read some words—either by John Smith or David Lister: one of the ones who can write—to the effect that it’s unlikely origami will ever be used as a means of ‘expressing artistic ideas’. Just what the author thought was impossible or unlikely may not have been precisely spelled out, but it's always been clear that origami imposes severe constraints on creation so that it’s not the first medium you think of if what you are after is self-expression.

Even so, it’s always dangerous to prognosticate, and the boundaries of ‘expression’ and ‘idea’ are being pushed back these days too as part of origami’s general advance-on-all-fronts.

It seems to me that there are several different concepts embraced by these terms, and that it may be worth unpacking them a little.

I. There was and still is an old-fashioned sense of expressiveness in animal origami which was for a long time associated with the name of Yoshizawa, though he’s acquired quite a few heirs and rivals by now. I think everyone knows what this quality is or reacts immediately and strongly when faced with it; but it is still very hard to pin down in words. Is ‘expression’ the capturing of a particular species in its essential details? Maybe; though sometimes the representation is very abstract or minimal, and that is thought sufficient or even preferable. Is it the capturing of an emotion expressed by an animal? One of its typical gestures? Or perhaps it is eliciting a particular kind of emotion or expression on the part of the viewer?

In the end one resorts to some words that sound about right. These great designers and folders were somehow able to capture the soul of the animal or the thing, and to breath life into a sheet of paper. Just what this animation or ensoulment is, in a day and age when we’re not supposed to believe in souls, has never been properly articulated. Maybe it can’t be. Still, ‘soul’ seems about the right word here: the object before us is haunting and absorbs all attention; in a few crisp folds it concisely yields the animal’s essence; and it has a light, delightful, ephemeral presence—all things a soul is supposed to be or to do. --Readers of this Blog will be aware, too, of my prejudice that origami has special abilities in the ensoulment department, gifts not readily accessible to the other arts.

If origami animals can express souls—what about origami humans: can’t they have souls? Strangely, this has proven far more difficult. Some not insubstantial progress for expressiveness has been made of late for human faces, but figures, or heads attached to their bodies, have proven much more recalcitrant to paperfolding—and not, it seems, for technical reasons. Technically, it is no harder to make a stick-figure human being, using the logic on which Lang’s Treemaker software is based, than it is for any other animal. Likewise, box-pleating methods have long been available and indeed have been used for humans too. But artistically—with apologies to the many laborers in this field—very few of the (unclothed) humans made via these methods have come anywhere near to being satisfying.

Consider, for instance, Stefan Weber’s glorious Bulls, the centerpiece of the Red-Bull-sponsored Masters of Origami exhibit last year in Salzburg. One can now go home and sleep comfortably knowing that the Soul of the Bull has been done justice to. It no longer hangs in Origami Purgatory. Can the same be said for any human figure you can think of—even by any of the greats, by those same ‘Origami Masters’?

I have, needless to say, strong suspicions about why this is—about which of the directions people are moving in today are dead-ends, and which lines of attack show real promise. But maybe I ought to keep a few secrets for myself.

2. So this is one category of ‘expressiveness’. Another involves ‘expressing artistic ideas’. This is a little like what Conceptual Art does. Here the aim is less to surround a lone sculpture with a halo of attention or emotion or expressiveness—investing it with objecthood—but instead to convey an idea or a mini-story, usually by relating one part of the image or object to another, perhaps as contrast or irony. A terrific example in paper is the work of Peter Callesen, which has been making the rounds of the Internet lately. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth quickly running through this show to see some of the possibilities and logic of the ‘conceptual’ approach.

This is of course not origami—it is all about cutting paper, so is a kind of opposite to paperfolding. But it is allied to origami in the strictness of its rules, in the economy of the material, and, of course, in its use of paper-folding. The main rules seem to be that what gets to there must come from here, honestly, visibly and meaningfully; and that the cut out part must still be connected to where it came from, usually physically but sometimes just conceptually. (These rules are 'discoverable' rather than spelled out in advance as in origami, but they are always there, and the sense of limits or fate and morbidity is among the themes Callesen plays off so marvelously.)

Much more can be said about this line of art but all I want from it at the moment, is to suggest that to get to a ‘concept’ (especially if irony is involved), maybe you need the object to have several distinct parts which relate — or pose a question of the relation — between them. To get to a ‘story’ you need the parts or the whole to suggest an order in time, something that has happened or is about to happen. In Callesen’s work there are always three parts (counting the background material); there is also always an implied history of how the thing came to be the way it is. These together give a halo of idea and story almost automatically (though before Callesen introduced and relentlessly explored this possibility in paper-cuts, it seems not to have been quite so obvious).

Now origami, which by its nature puts more stress on contiguity and wholeness, tends not to investigate this kind of 'expression' and lingers more on the model-making side of things, the this-is-a-THAT. And in model-making, the artistic possibilities seem to consist of accuracy of representation, or conversely abstraction and minimalism, and sometimes ‘emotion’ or ‘expressiveness’. Yet it does not follow that either the 'story' or the 'concept' side of art-making is ruled out of origami altogether. In my next post I want to discuss two designers who do, in fact, explore this ‘conceptual’ potential in paperfolds.

Lessons from Masters

2006-09-01T01:38:00.000-07:00

This was the image that stopped me dead in my tracks, about two years ago.

It is a stone Buddha, from the 3rd century, made in North India: artist unknown. I don’t remember anywhere having seen such repose, or balance, in a sculpture or a living face; this degree of simultaneous worldliness and withdrawal-from-the-world. (To meet it, be its equal: not to resign from it!). Actually I know nothing of Buddhism, and intend not to learn. But this one head—well it ranks in my book as one of the world’s great sculptures, of which there are very, very few.

Since, at the time, I was beginning to explore methods of making faces in paper, needless to say I tried to copy this head. And needless to say I failed. But the effort did spawn a series of ‘Buddha-like’ origami heads, in which something ancient and Eastern came out, maybe by way of minimalism, simplicity, modesty and humor; and maybe by using properties of paper not available to those who work in stone (a warmth, vulnerability, fragility). Here are two of the things I have in mind from then:

Now emotion, expression, are the most important things in whatever one sees, and the most obvious. But it’s no secret that origami combines its ‘art’ with its ‘science’, its expression with its intellection, more or more manifestly than any visual art I can think of. That’s one reason I’m drawn to it. Without making too much of this, origami, though it’s mostly an addiction, is also a world-view: it has its ‘Zen’. It calls forth and then pits the various human skills against each other: like a boxing match, where half the thrill is wondering which quality will win out, brute force and rage against careful training and intellect; ‘heart’ or stamina against spikes in power; an ability to take punishment against the ability to inflict it. So in origami, there is clearly technical control, engineering skill, representational accuracy, the kind of mastery that can squeeze a flap from any bit of real estate; but these are pitted against the artistic virtues: simplicity, heart, elegance, rhythm, economy, expression. Which will prevail? The contest is not less suspenseful for the square sheet of paper than it is in the square arena of the boxing ring.

Since there is technique and ‘science’ in our worldview, let us look again at that stone Buddha from the 3d century. What can be learned from it about folding technique—specifically, now, about folding curves in paper?

Look closely: you’ll see that all the lines in this sculpture are curved. But more than this: none of the curves intersect! You’ll either see ovals, that is, lines that are continuous and endless, or curves that end by meeting other curves—but at a tangent, at an angle of zero, so that these lines too are continuous. Where curves terminate altogether they die out softly into the plane.

Astonishing, no?

It is clear that the artist has gone out of his way to get this result. I’m no expert on Eastern sculpture, so I don’t know if this was an innovation achieved first in this particular work or if it is part of a wider trend; but there is no doubt that the technique contributes to this sculpture’s sense of repose. And no doubt, either, that it is giving a visual expression to essentially religious ideas about the flow of life, concord rather than discord, continuity, eternity etc.

For paperfolding--why does this matter?

A question that keeps coming up from various quarters, is Whether anything you do with a curved line can’t be done roughly comparably with a straight line (or straight segments). For instance: If your pattern uses a sine curve, couldn’t you just as well have used a zig-zag? Are curved folds special in any way?

Here is a crease-pattern for the famous Huffman Tower, and a folded version. Could all the curved folds and curving surfaces here have been replaced by straight lines and flat planes? (Try it and see.)

This question about straights and curves comes up in part because some of our more technically or computationally-minded origami people seem to regard curved folds or surfaces as essentially bi-products of straight-line folds (instead of what would seem the more natural view—to consider straight lines and flat surfaces as curves with a few extra properties). One wonders, accordingly, whether this is just a fixation on the part of these designers or whether there is any basis to their approach.

The question also comes up because there are all sorts of claims in the air nowadays about the specialness of certain curved folds or their effects; for instance, about locks that are only possible with curved folds, models ‘held in tension’ by them, special surface topologies induced by them, etc. Some of these claims are true and others false; but many, it seems to me, are simply untested. Having straight-line analogs gives a means of testing in a given case whether it’s really the curvature that’s doing the work, and that’s an important reality check.

Anyway—to return to the inspiration from the Buddha—there’s at least one thing you can do with curves that you can’t do with straight-line segments: get two of them to meet at a tangent. A straight-segment’s tangent is itself; the points at its termini have no tangent. Curves, on the other hand, have no problem meeting either straights or other curves at a tangent. This is actually quite significant if you are folding surfaces containing open folds (folds resulting in surfaces that do not lay on each other).

In the drawing shown here (a CP of open-folds and curves), after you’ve made the more ‘horizontal’ open folds and thus have condensed the vertical direction somewhat, you are not free to fold the surface along [A] without making a real mess--lots of new folds in awkward and unpredictable places. (This is the corrugation effect.) However, since all the horizontal lines in this region are straight, you can turn them into fully closed folds—and then line [A] can be folded. Along [B], where the zags zig, you can comfortably fold the surface without introducing any new folds. The corrugation no longer provides a resistance. Folding it here will, however, further condense the height of the surface, as the angles intersecting with [B] give up some of their height for depth.

Along the line of [C], the surface will not fold—just as it couldn’t at [A]; but if the entire region of [C] is turned into a gradually curving corner, that region will behave just as the zig-zag at [B] does (in fact it is a blown-up version of it), and then the height will likewise shrink.

Folding along [D], however, will not affect the height of the surface at all: that’s because the curves meet [D] at a tangent, so they don’t interfere with it. (However, as the material to the left and right of D condenses, it will force D to bend along the point of contact.)

So here you have one difference between curved and straight-segment folding: the non-interference of tangential folds. And this principle happens to affect nearly everything about the possibilities of folding surfaces that have curved folds on them.

This is not a religious insight, or even a profound or novel mathematical one. But it might give a few people who are thinking now about sculpting in paper curves----a certain repose.

Curves vs. Flats

2006-08-28T11:46:00.000-07:00

Origami, like anything with a long history, also has a destiny; by which I mean for instance that folds that were thought to be extremely difficult 100 years ago are child’s play today, and forms that 60 or 70 years ago were thought to be impossible without making cuts—so that a cut here & there was overlooked—are known as perfectly possible today with a little extra effort. Cuts accordingly are more strictly shunned even by non-puritans. The preference for the square has grown firmer, though it’s by no means absolute; and the field has grown enough to allow modulars, multi-part assemblages, though this is frowned upon in animal design (unless the units are sufficiently small to make it an extension of modular origami.) In short, the field has naturally pushed toward a set of ideals or strictures, which on approach have sometimes further split into other ideals and strictures each of which defines a new sub-field. Moreover, one can claim that this ‘destiny’ was present if dimly felt by some practitioners in earlier stages of development, and the very refinement and purification of such standards is part of what drove those pioneers forward.

Curved folding, a subspecies of origami, has not been systematically explored by anything like as many people. (I’d say less than twenty people in the world; maybe less than ten, compared to several hundred systematic explorers with origami.) But I insist that curved folding too has a destiny---and I’ll tell you what it is. If in origami you rule out (or minimize) cutting, painting and gluing, in curvigami you also rule out folding itself. That is: hard folds and straight lines are viewed as necessary evils, acceptable in extremis, in just the way cuts were regarded in the origami of two or three generations ago.

What about the square—another purist ideal that’s been refined (I mean increasingly insisted upon) over the generations? Here there is a more profound difference from straight-line and flat folding. Curvigami deals with surfaces and starts from the interior of the sheet, asking how you can manipulate that interior and what to do with the consequences of this manipulation for the rest of the sheet. This is unlike origami, which deals with edges, or the turning of surface regions into things that have edges, i.e., flaps. With curved folding you are dropped straight into the sea, where what you make are these ripples or waves; there is no shoreline you can depend on, and no “landmarks” either (I can go on some ways with this metaphor). So that the square with its edges and its whole language of 22.5 degree or 30 degree angles really becomes irrelevant. If you’re manipulating the edges and the corners of a square you are still more in origami mode than in curvigami mode.(Though this can be done masterfully too: witness Roman Diaz’ superb Tiger’s Head). I feel regrets about the loss of the square, truly I do, but it must go.

That being said, I can’t quite account for the residual attachment to the rectangle in my own curved folding, and to the right angle at its four corners. –Maybe it’s that one wants to keep it clear that a sheet, and a paper sheet, is the material of origin here, and sheets are rectangular by manufacturing tradition. Or maybe it’s that representation-surfaces in general—for instance paintings, and then movie and TV screens and now computer and cellphone screens—have historically allowed only very occasional lapses into other shapes: ovals, triangles, pentagons etc. It is the rectangle that silently screams today ‘surface’—or ‘surface without shape’, or ‘never mind about the edges or proportions, which within limits we can vary, it’s the interior content that counts’. That ‘surface condition’ exists also for surfaces to be made into curved-folds. A square, or any other regular polygon, draws far too much attention to its own outline and geometry.

Since curved folding is about surfaces, layers, too—the staple and mainstay of origami—also are downgraded. Layers are not mined as in origami for the creation of different entities (usually flaps); instead, multiple layers (which are avoided or minimized to begin with) are often treated as thicker versions of a single layer, and are folded all together.

To me, the great still-unanswered question is what the area of contact is between flat folding and curved folding. You might think, that since curved folding deals with surfaces, you can use curves for placing a surface ornamentation on an elaborate form, in, say, the way Robert Lang does famously with his Koi. But if the curves are put in first they prevent most subsequent manipulation of the familiar kind, so such an elaborate form is ruled out. Nor is it usually easy to put curves in after the fact, unless there is free material that reaches all the way to the cut edge. Roman Diaz’ Tiger’s Head (looks like I’ll have to write a separate essay on this model alone) introduces a few ornamental curves on the ‘leftover’ flat regions as a final step. This is not QUITE an afterthought, what it feels like instead is pedagogy: we’re being taught something about sculptural folding, in the rest of the piece, and here is an important aspect of sculpting that we don’t want to omit or the lesson won’t be complete. Nevertheless, the curves were not strictly necessary, some straight open crimps could almost have served. And the curves would not really have been possible, if the cut edge had not been free. --In some of my own things (e.g. Ernestine [yes, it's time for some new examples]), the ‘combination’ of curving/sculpted regions with flat/origami ones is given as a sort of ‘tease’, with the single-layer-curved head blending into the face (which has a few origami manipulations, I mean layers and flaps) and that in turn blending into the neck and chest, which is even more oriented to the language of straight-line origami. The suggestion--meant as usual to irritate certain people--is that the curves and the sculpting are the main thing, with the flat and straight origami being subservient to it, the raw material that it grows out of, in the way a polished marble sculpture can emerge from unthinking chiseled stone. Something similar about the relationship was suggested more humorously in ‘The Origami Eater’. But I haven’t given up the idea of curves as ornaments either; that’s part of what I was looking at in those ‘jars’, where a curve-pattern is carried around an edge; the n-sided jar-shape being the origami superstructure which supports the curving bas-relief ornament. Here the curved/sculpted regions and the geometric/origami regions are felt to be on more of an equal footing.

Why this fight over primacy, subservience etc? Must the elements of one language always be reduced to those of another? Can’t we all get along?

But looks like I’ve run out of space, or is it time. Let's leave this question open--for the time being.

[Added later: A slightly more formal discussion of curve-folding issues appears in the next article, "Lessons from Masters".]

Aren't We Squares

2006-08-19T11:42:00.000-07:00

Paperfolding types being generally nice, as a group we tend to be inclusive and tolerant about what gets counted as origami so long as scissors are not much in evidence. Nevertheless the question of the limits of origami keeps coming up and even nice people can have strong opinions about this. (So it’s good there are no scissors around.) I don’t want to jump straight into this maelstrom but do want to describe a case that I think points to where the edge, or one edge, of this field is.

Suppose you wanted to make an origami human hand, from say a square or a rectangle. There are already a few simple and nice solutions to this, so there’s little point to actually inventing a new one. But one conceivable way to do it would be to take an indefinitely long strip of paper, roll it out to the first fingertip, fold, roll it back to the palm, fold, out to the next fingertip, fold, back to the palm, and so on. What you get is effectively the same as what you’d get if you drew a hand with a pen on paper, without lifting the pen; only instead of ink you’ve now used a paper strip. The strip can be thick or thin, the principle is the same. This would not be happily called origami, exactly because it is like continuous-pen drawing; it has only the elements of continuity and change-of-direction in common with origami, but does not use the pre-existing two-dimensionality of the paper in any way except as filler.

What this shows, I think, is that there’s a potential problem with paper strips of indefinite length--a medium by the way that I’ve been making a lot of use of lately. You can slip into this easily enough by saying What’s wrong after all with a rectangle; or by thinking, an indefinite strip is just a series of squares joined end to end, and if I treat each unit in the usual origami manner why should anyone complain. But you might be relying on one-dimensionality for the underlying architecture without noticing it, and the more you do this the farther you’re getting from what makes origami distinctive. It’s two-dimensionality in the end that has to be respected, made something of.

Indefinite strips are a gray area.

Rebound

2006-08-14T00:47:00.000-07:00

Well. Events will turn your head right around, like the Devil-child in that movie. And when you finally think you are looking at things straight on you will in fact be seeing them exactly backward.

In a life it may happen that you find yourself in free-fall, with nothing to hope for except the crash you know is coming sooner or later. And then, out from nowhere, from a white mist, comes this hand that locks on to yours in a fore-arm grip, and hoists you back to the flying trapeze. The things you’ve said or done in an earlier existence, in some long-forgotten past, serve you in good stead. Even having done some origami once upon a time, turns out possibly to count.

In the mail the other day there arrived a packet—sent, the handwritten address shows, from a possibly mythical land called “Grenoble”. The sender is decidedly a mythic creature: it is Nicolas Terry, who one recognizes (even without checking behind for the shape of his ears) to be an Elf, with unaccountable powers for work and for granting others their wishes or dreams. And the book—one trembles with excitement while peeling away the cardboard—is that long-awaited text by Roman Diaz, Origami for Interpreters. Ah….

I am not about to write a review of this book. Others will do that, soon enough. In any event I plan to savor this delicacy for as long as possible, weeks or months probably, letting the folds it describes trickle into the folds of my brain. This is not usual with me; I usually try to resist the influence of trends in the world or even of individual figures--retreating into my cocoon if that's what it takes. But in this case--- "resistance is futile."

No doubt, too, some ideas the book stimulates will force their way into the writing of this Blog, disrupting my carefully-laid plans. Oh well, that can't be helped. Here, though, is something I've been wondering about for a long time: it's a thought that an image from Roman's book merely prompts.

The first, then, in a scattered series of reflections on "Origami and 'Expressiveness' ".

* * *

The thing with Diaz’ animals— which is true, just as true of all good animal origami—is that there is no irony in it, just a love of animals (I mean along with the intellect, humor, breeding and the rest that go into these particular designs): and the origami gets better the more real feeling there is for those beasties. Maybe I need to point out how astounding this is, for we in origami are inclined to overlook it. There is no serious art-form among the plastic arts today which allows one to express one’s affection directly for an person, thing or place, let alone for an individual animal or its typical species-form. One’s representing always has to be done with some sort of knowing smirk, with a statement suggesting some cleverness on the part of the artist or stupidity on the part of the audience. This is called “Contempt-orary Art”, and it is basically the only kind of art being shown in galleries and museums today. If it does not have this cleverness or trendiness or irony or hipness or making-of-statements the object automatically gets relegated to the status of kitsch. Or anyway the museum doors will be shut to it, for whatever the reason.

To illustrate the specialness of paper-folding in this regard, take the picture that graces the cover of Roman’s book, of a Crane (or perhaps it is a ‘heron’). Try and imagine a sculpture of a such a bird in any other medium. What it would look like? Where you would come across it? You can imagine it as a lawn ornament, and then it would be the purest kitsch. Or maybe it would have striking colors and something humorous to recommend it, to stop the neighbors dead in their tracks. (Cleverness again. Nothing wrong with that, by the way.) Indoors, you might find a heron or crane carved from wood; and I don’t say it couldn’t be done artistically. But chances are that even then, the artistry would involve a great proportion of stylization, as compared to feeling for the represented animal. It might be for instance an art-deco crane, where the artistic weight would be on the art-deco side and how this merges with the nature of wood: not on the 'Soul of the Crane', the affection for it, the intimacy of one’s knowledge of it--these would be blurred, beaten back. For feeling is not really allowed nowadays. Even in drawing and painting this is largely the case. If you come across a picture of an individual crane done 'with expression' it is likely to be a Japanese brushstroke painting made a century or more ago.

What I'm trying in my stuttering way to say, is that there seems to be something unique about the status that our young-old art now finds itself in. Origami may be in a tough place in terms of its public acceptance as a full form of art, (more on that another time) , but the truth of the matter is that Art in general is in a very awkward place these days. And an emotional honesty and directness is being allowed to us, that is currently denied to most of the world of expression.

I can’t really account for why we are being granted this privilege.

Zoo Life

2006-08-14T00:44:00.000-07:00

This Blog and my schemes for it have carried me more than once now back to the zoo. I spend so much time with my paper animals, fussing endlessly for instance over a detail of this or that bird, that it’s a shock—pleasant on the whole, if humbling—to see the real beasties. Talk all you like about ‘having the touch’ or ‘breathing life into a sheet of paper’: Life still trumps anything you can make with your own two hands.

What a joy animals are. And what a relief, sometimes, from people.

Mirages

2006-07-30T15:24:00.000-07:00

What moods may a Convention unleash. Bad or good I am exhausted by them, need a day for the live currents to work their way through my system. And weeks till the energies have all converted themselves into paperforms.

This one, the third convention run in Israel as an enterprise of the Israeli Origami Center, fell in time with the mixed moods of war. As an activity often laced with the guilt of escapism and childish indulgence, origami had its basic existential qualities stretched here to the limit. Most people were----glad, one way, not to have to watch the news for three days; but guilty at it too, at not using this time to help somehow with all that’s going on (if only by keeping in touch and commiserating), or to care for their families. For the handful of Northerners it was a chance to crawl out of the bomb shelters for a time and rub their eyes. Then there were all the young people—they haven’t been called up yet, but you know they will be soon. (I worry especially for GN; for L.S. They are dear to my heart.) Escaping into paperfolds can feel like a good way of getting out, of gaining some space for perspective. Or maybe not: escaping isn’t always the right thing to do.

The guest that the IOC brought over was John Montroll. What a fine man. What respect for the privacy of the activity of origami, for the one, the one-on-one, and the small-group setting; for pursuit of this activity despite or against a mocking attitude from the larger society, on account of its supposed frivolity or waste-of-time. Nor has the smaller society , that’s given to odd fits of adulation, turned his head. Not from him will you hear this “Master” talk—despite all that he’s done. I imagine that there are real risks an origami professional must run--of pretentiousness, or rank commercialism, delusions about the importance to society of one's enterprises, etc. None of this seems to have tainted John in the slightest. Origami for him stands on its own, without need of outside justification (of the 'social-betterment' or 'scientific-application' varieties). It is what it is: that's quite enough. But it’s not the be-all and end-all either.

The convention was held at Kibbutz Tze'elim, in the southern-desert part of the country near my town. Hence the dromedary motif---a familiar, roving icon of the landscape in which I live.

Eclectica

2006-07-17T08:40:00.000-07:00

An origami blog had better be a goad to productive work—or else it’s mere reporting, and there are plenty of people who can do a better job at that than me. But sometimes events won’t leave you a clear mind or heart for work; and then words aren’t a bad substitute. Words—the right words—something more than the inarticulate ‘Wow’ that a new piece or display elicits for itself (though the wow is crucial). Words that strike home; words that infuriate; or melt hearts; words that can trigger in oneself or another an active investigation—on a sheet of paper, not leaving it to a lazy eye to drift along these sentences—: Is it like this, or is it like that?

I started talking about categories of sculptural origami a few posts ago, but by no means have I done justice to all that’s happening out there in the world—happening now, as I speak, wasting time on this computer that’s probably better spent on a sheet of paper.

So far the ideas have been these. There is a way of folding that highlights the ‘paperiness’ of paper. I noted the fan-shape as an example; but also I think one of the reasons people harbor a secret fondness for origami bats has to do with the flat expanse of paper draped between those thin spans—the paper turning into skin, which in fact it always was; and then the little folds gently marked to indicate a fragile body, just a hint of bone or tendon, doing the evocative-body work that origami does so well.

But you can also fold ‘against the grain’ of paperiness, by shifting the stress to the three-dimensional. Here there is ‘flat’ three-dimensionality, with flat surfaces bounded by straight lines (at the limit, at right-angles to other surfaces); and then there is ‘curved three-dimensionality, when the surfaces are not flat, and especially when the surfaces meet each other along clearly marked curving lines. In the latter the mind gets confused about what it sees, thinks it is looking at a solid object.

Clearly missing from this list is work of the sort pioneered by Giang Dinh. I will speak of its expressive potential some other time; for now let’s just consider the medium, the look of this sort of folding.

This is a kind of hyper-wet-folding; but strangely it does not (to my eye) produce the kind of heightened sense of paper that simple wet-folding does. The paper stays visibly a surface, something thin, but it has lost all of its Will-to-Flatness. Lacking any angularity, it does not look like carved plaster or stone either. It has no edges (except the cut edge, which is extensively used being the only real line). It is everywhere continuous, fluid surface. It begins to look like frozen fabric. Like a cloth napkin, perhaps, that you’ve twisted around your finger in a moment of boredom at a dinner party—into a puppet; now it has a hat, a little head poking out; look there’s its cape, with a nice dramatic swirling motion (and now everyone is staring at you). –Anyway it demonstrates that a ‘feeling of two-dimensionality’ or rather ‘lack of body’ can be achieved in a 3D object without the use of flatness, something I would not have expected. The 2D-3D boundary still holds some surprises, it seems.

As to expression, I’ve looked closely at Giang Dinh’s work for the first time today (excuse me readers while I discover America), and some of it is quite moving. I mean, a way has been found to make expressive, individual, reflective art--that usually means to me good faces--and also to suggest movement, drama, powerful bodily motion. Sometimes there is too much drama in the swirling capes and hooded figures, too much clothing or surface and not enough stuffing (soul, body, individuality) inside--but never mind. It is different; it is not easy; and it is this man’s own style, which he has taken very far. I notice also that in recent work he’s taken up the question of combining different styles in one piece—that is, combining fluid-folding (let’s call it that, instead of hyper-wet-folding) with the more mainline origami technique. Yes: that’s the natural and right thing to do at this stage.

Obviously much more needs to be said about Giang Dinh and expressiveness, but at the present I am just noting categories.

I am itching also to talk about the person who seems to be moving fast and far on all fronts toward an expressive origami—Daniel Naranjo. Actually it is not just expressive paperfolds that he is exploring but the whole idea of origami as a special channel for emotive communication. But the time is not yet ripe for remarks or analysis. Daniel is smack in the middle of a creative surge--he too picking up the idea of combinations--and words from an outsider now would only interfere. Readers will have to content themselves for the time being with what Filipe Moreno has written on his blog and with Daniel Naranjo’s own autobiographical comments there. With all due respect to these authors: those accounts are insufficient.

Saadya
Beersheva, Israel

Phobia?

2006-07-16T05:48:00.000-07:00

Phobic one may be to insect origami, but aren't these Lang Cicadas SIMPLY GLORIOUS? They're made by Herman Mariano, one of the world's really great folders.

(Hooray too for Robert Lang.)

Line, Motion, Form

2006-07-13T06:49:00.000-07:00

Distinctive postures and motions. An animal has not only so to speak its basic anatomical shape, but also often an immediately recognizable way of holding itself or of moving. A rabbit hunches to eat; a horse lowers its long neck and swishes its tail while grazing; a cat stretches in a way no other animal quite does. I’ve tried to capture some of this in origami. Sometimes you can get away with a body that’s not anatomically or representationally accurate, if you manage to nail the motion on the head. This is an old trick that’s been around in traditional sculpture long before it became available to origami; there’s a rich history of twisting, contorted forms or figures in motion, carved in marble and cast in bronze. (Welcome to the Rococo). (Granted, while motion can be interesting in itself it doesn’t have to come at the expense of other artistic virtues.)

A variant of this theme that the real Masters—not the origami so-called ones—knew about was capturing latent motion, a skittish horse for example, or a human whose movement has been arrested by a thought but is about to resume it. This is a bit beyond my present powers in origami. (Let's just wait a few years.) Freud, however, who knew nothing of paperfolding but did have an extensive collection of mantelpiece sculptures and figurines, writes about the theme of latent motion in sculpture very usefully in his essay “Michaelangelo’s Moses”.

What—(free associating now, you’ll have to pardon me, it’s a warm afternoon here in Beersheva and the mind wanders)—is related to this idea about motion and form, on both the origami and the natural history sides?

In origami, long before Brian Chan became BRIAN CHAN or had invented his impossible shrimp, people were trying to squeeze long pointy independent limbs from a square sheet of paper. Some of us (well, me) who could only get so far with this, resorted to a trick. If your limb was long but maybe not long enough, you could always visually continue the line up into the body some ways (with e.g. an outside valley fold) and it will seem longer. My early Cats did this to the greatest effect, but I've used this ploy since to varying degrees in a great many other models too and with my Horse took great pains to carry the lines of the legs all the way up the sides of the body—and to make sure there were body lines in no other place. So, controlling where lines go as well as displaying distinctive motion are ways of sidestepping the problems of limb length and representational anatomy----for those of us who are constitutionally phobic to Insect Origami.

And of Natural History here, what’s there to say? Not much, except to notice that we and other animals seem geared to assessing the potential movement of any given animal just from seeing the shape and position of its limbs and musculature. It’s as if the brain copies out the dimensions and the pivot points of what it sees, performs a model oscillation, and draws quick conclusions as to how fast the thing will go… --Needless to say, as either predator or prey, this sort of figuring is pretty important to just about every creature. In their visual tricks many animals are known to play on this analysis in the way they’re painted: like the origami ploy of carrying a line past its point of independence, the line along the midriff is often drawn in such a way that one's pot-belly is obscured and one's hind-quarter muscles accentuated. Read: (a) not much meat here, and (b) I can run, don’t waste your precious energies on me. It’s too damn hot.