The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

'Bela', by Saadya Sternberg
at the "Paper Creatures" exhibit, Jaffa Museum

I'm just back from the opening of "Paper Creatures" at the Jaffa Museum.  Many magnificent works there (about half origami) and much to think about--it will take me several days to ponder it all.  For the time being here is an unsorted preview of the few things I have decent photos of.

Meanwhile--I have pieces in this exhibition too, which if they do not lower the average level, certainly do not lead the works in it. As a place-keeper I'll just post here the text I wrote a few months ago that's meant to go with my display.

Horse Heads

 


Update July 2018: 
Horse Head origami sculptures like these have been shown at the BETA International Fair in Birmingham (for the equestrian crowd there), at the Chi Mei Museum in Taiwan, and in art exhibits at the Beit Meirov and the Hankin Design Galleries in the city of Holon, Israel. I am pleased for all the attention via Pinterest.

Enjoy the pictures! Horse lovers who wish to own the actual objects should contact me at saadyaorigami@gmail.com.  


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This turns out to be a very popular sculpture, with an appeal to horse lovers everywhere, both inside and outside the origami world.


I'm often asked often how I came up with it. The answer is basically what you would expect. I have several ‘full horse’ models that I'm still tinkering with (have been since 1989....). On one,  the ears were unsatisfactory; so, in 2004 while out at a fast-food shop I did a blow-up-study focusing only on the head.  That left excess paper, which got folded out of the way in overlapping flaps.  The results—a little like barn or stable doors with the head peeking out—pleased me; and so, a New Model.  Recently (2011), prompted by a fan who was enthused by just this shape, I picked the  model up again and put much improved eyes & ears on it.
 
Now, the above is easy enough to say. But it also happens that during those seven years of gestation, the thinking in origami has progressed, and mine has along with it.

1. For instance: one of the obsessions now in origami design is the color change. Paper has two sides; if they each have a different solid color the folded model can have a single contrast of colors between them.  A lot of design effort is presently invested in putting the color changes exactly and only where it is right for an animal.  The pioneer of this sort of thinking is Neal Elias in the mid-20th century, whom I've written about before; its leading modern exponent is probably Quentin Trollip.

But I would like to ask an even more primitive question. Is the limit here really only one contrast, for a sheet that has two colors on each side?

Notice that when a paper surface is curved (conically or cylindrically), the light reflects off it as a graduated shadow, which alters the hue in an eye-catching way. Then there’s another kind of shadow, created by pockets that drink up the light: these increase the contrast right at the lip of the pocket. So it is possible to design a model that takes advantage also of these variations to a hue. For each initial color, instead of just its hue-as-flat, you have now also the hue-as-curved and the hue-as-pocket-shaded; so six hues in total, or 14 possible contrasts.

Look again at these Horse-Heads and count how many I have used.





2.  I’d been thinking about the role of the closed back in origami. What makes it preferable for an origami animal to have a smooth, unbroken layer of paper at its back—rather than a seam of folded layers which come together along the spine? Is that something about how we see an animal, or how we relate to an origami representation of one? I believe it was Yoshizawa who was first—as in so many other things—to notice this about origami animals; at any rate, many of his famous models take care to avoid the open backs used by many current designers (notably John Montroll), which are generally much easier to come up with.

Since the horse model I was studying had a closed back but still an ‘open head’, rather than a smooth surface across the ridge of its nose—this aesthetic fact was especially irksome for me, and I tried to deal with it in various ways.

Now, a join of layers along a central ridge, can usually be pulled apart to expose the smooth surface underneath. If this process is continued an ‘open back’ gives way eventually to a ‘closed back with folded ornaments alongside it’. How “eventually”? At what point does ‘open’ turn into ‘closed’? A series of experiments ensued.

The ‘exposed’ light-colored ridge of the Horse Head here, is one result. And my more recent work in Animal Heads takes even fuller advantage of these ideas.


2. Simplicity.  There are so many meanings of this term in origami.  The champion of one kind of simplicity is—again—Yoshizawa, in his iconic Butterfly (of course not all his models are exemplars of this quality). And there the term just means, that in a very few steps, you get a change of form, a metamorphosis from a simple square into the distinctive shape of Lepidoptera, with the parts all in the right place.  Nowadays there are much fancier Butterflies flittering about—Michael LaFosse’s, and a nice antennaed variation by Robert Lang—but none come close to Yoshizawa in Value for Money: results for the number and ease of moves involved.

How to bring this idea up to date?

My model is not nearly so simple, coming in at just under 20 moves.  But it is still simple for the striking results. The relatively minimal manipulation of the paper, is apparent in the smoothness of the resultant sculpture.

But I achieved the economy by a different method than Yoshizawa’s.  The number of steps were minimized by trying to have each accomplish several things at once.   The following won’t mean much to those who haven’t made this model (and I’ve taught it so far only to a few groups and individuals), but:

• The same 2 folds that form the dip of the nose, also directly create the nostrils
• Just one rabbit-ear makes both the (incipient) eyes and (the incipient) ears
• The move that bends the head off the neck, narrows the ears too
• There’s a ‘triple-ripple’ on the mane, but it’s actually made by adding a single crimp to what’s already there
• The move to form the “stable doors” also creates the curve at the nape of the neck

and so on.






4.  Representation vs. Signaling. Technical folding, while we’re at it, strives for increasing accuracy via an increasing amount of detail.  This gets you the ‘wow effect’, but at the expense of the viewer not being able to follow the folds with his mind’s eye: a pretty big loss. And there are other costs. Here I wanted, in a relatively followable piece, to obtain the striking appearance not from fancy footwork and not from micro-representation, but from labor of a different kind: the labor of looking.  Look at an animal and see what about it makes it most striking, most distinctively itself,  most winsome to us, and capture that. A horse sticking its head out of a stall, almost asking to be stroked on the head—that is an animal signal, evolved among other things also in the relation that’s developed between equine and human. It is what works for us; it is designed to appeal.  If you pay attention to these "g-spots", you can get your wow without having to go technical at all.

5.  How a Paperfold is Read. Finally—this is a subject that Herman van Goubergen has made pretty much his own—some folds in a paper animal look like a head, others like eyes (sometimes when you don’t want them to), some like legs, etc. In short each bit stands for something else.  You are always reading the model as...,  seeing-it as....  --Can this be played with?

Of course the above description holds true no less for a bit of charcoal rubbed on paper or on a cave wall; or a bit of stone chipped this way or that. Art that represents has been with us at least 30,000 years.  But somehow with origami the whole subject seems to be getting brought up for discussion again; maybe because of the ease with which you can flip a fold or move it slightly and have its significance change; but I suspect also because of the speed with which the mind is willing to hover over a model and read and then differently reread the tiniest indications.

Here it is perfectly clear that the light part of the paper is supposed to be the white patch which a horse sometimes has on its forehead; continuing in the same light color it becomes the mane, then wraps around and becomes the pillar, or the doors of the ‘stall’ out of which the horse is poking its neck. You see that the sheet is continuous, and you know that you are reading the two ends of it differently, and yet this doesn’t in the least obstruct your enjoyment of the work. On the contrary!

Not quite an optical illusion, but maybe an optical teaser.








Known Influences / Nice Images

A classic--the Selene Horse (here and here)
Great shot of ponies  swimming and struggling to keep heads above water
Sculpture by Nic Fiddian Green, toiling out there in his studio in England
And in a more abstract and modernist vein--equally great--Deborah Butterfield

Exhibition History
This model has been displayed at the 2012 Beta International Fair (a Horse-themed trade show), in Birmingham, England, and at the Italian and Spanish origami conventions in 2011 and 2012. Versions are currently on display at the Jerusalem gallery that represents me.  If you're in Israel, please stop in at:

Rakia Gallery
18 Shlomzion Ha-Malka Street
JERUSALEM
02-502-3450

The Minimal Flower

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?

Horse

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".

"Expression" and "Idea" in Origami

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.