Curves vs. Flats

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

Contrasts

I’ve said a few things---maybe too much---about this on the Origami Forum, but maybe it’s time to think again about the whole subject in the more leisurely manner that a blog makes available.

Folded paper has different basic expressive tones or potentials---I mean ones that exist quite apart from the choice among various paper types. Manifestly a wet-folded model has a different look than a hard-folded one, regardless of the paper used; and it is this sort of distinction I’m interested in. In an earlier post I discussed the excessive paperiness and vulnerability that comes from leaving the cut-edge exposed—something most origami avoids, or tries to overcome. Its opposite, curved-line folding, tends to impart a greater look of solidity to paper---a clean plaster look, in the case of designers like David Huffman and Richard Sweeney; a stone or ceramic or even wooden look, in my own messier experiments. These are in a certain sense anti-paper qualities. Interestingly when Jeanine Mosely (e.g., in her Bowl) uses modular curving forms rather than continuous ones, and even alternates the colors, much of the ‘feeling of paper’ is recovered, though not all of it.

It occurs to me that the main language of origami being two-dimensional, departures from it in the direction of three-dimensionality seem startling in a positive sense, and in the direction of one-dimensionality (through exposure and reminder of the cut edge) startling in mostly a negative sense. If so, maybe modular curve-folding like Mosely’s stays closer to the ‘language of ‘2’’ by alternating its ‘3’s with ‘1’s.

Three-dimensionality is most convincingly attained through wet-folding (curving planes) or curved-line-folding; but there is also folding that leaves the planes flat in various orientations, each surface bounded by straight lines. (Origami cars come first to mind but there are ever-larger numbers of origami animals too that answer this description). This gives a model a more mechanical, less organic look, that still contrasts with a two-dimensional language but less so than curved lines or surfaces do. In this sense such work is more continuous with two-dimensional origami and so gives a feeling of being more ‘origami-correct’.

Now correctness, I hasten to mention, has never been my strong suit. (I’m invariably subversive; origami for me is fundamentally subversive—of time, to begin with, but that’s already saying a lot). But I am interested in understanding qualities from top to bottom, and one of the ways you can tease out qualities and understand their nature better is by combining opposites within a single piece. This is not strictly necessary: Komatsu’s Lion in so many ways sets a new aesthetic standard (one by the way that Komatsu himself mostly can’t live up to), combining and sharpening recent developments and styles in a way that seems to me perfectly ‘origami-correct’, but to see what his advance consists in you need to hold in mind the forms of animals that preceded it and still surround it in the history of origami. I like to see combinations or even tensions within an actual work, as that adds subversive spice rather than palatability. And subversion—life pushing out—is key.

So that it mattered to me, among all the accolades that Joel Cooper’s work is rightly garnering for itself, that it is also an achievement in contrasts. Obviously the flat forms and straight lines are being contrasted with the rounded ones, but more than this—and more subversively—a repeatable, indeed repeated, and in principle teachable, set of mind-numbing folds is contrasted here with an unrepeatable, unteachable shape: a human face, that will come out differently every time it is made and in the hands of anyone less than an artist will come out deformed, grotesque or just goofy: in the polite parlance of origami, a ‘mask’. This work makes what I like to think as the statement: that mind, calculation, and endless precise labor has its place, and ornament even more so, but art, or heart, rises over or out of these, literally protrudes, a transcendence that keeps its material roots completely in view. This is subversive specifically of origami, because part of the social compact that sustains public origami is the idea that art is reduceable to mechanism, and if only you are able to repeat a sequence of folds on your sheet, however laboriously, you’ll be in the position of the artist or creator—you’ll be inside the thought. --There is of course truth enough in this illusion to keep the compact going; but it only goes so far.

To be continued---needless to say.

Eggs Came First

For very many bird species, you can see pretty clearly that the egg-shape of the body is important to them—is part of what the bird looks for in choosing a well-shaped mate, in the same way that an hourglass female figure seems to matter terribly to us Modern Humans. You can see this in the way the eggy line on the bird is tightly defined: it’s not just a matter of us viewers reducing what we see to groups of abstract egg-shapes (though of course we do that too).

If you ask why this is, there's a standard explanation for how well-defined forms like tails, body shapes, or striking colors develop: The females want them. Here presumably, in some species, some females had at first a slight predisposition to egg shapes (maybe this helped them care better for their brood). Males who could capitalize on this susceptibility by being a bit egg-like themselves did better with the females. The offspring of such unions then would have inherited both the eggier shape (in males) and the greater susceptibility to that shape (in females). This goes round and round, generation after generation, till you end up with a well-defined form like the one above. Or anyway that’s how the ‘Darwin-Fisher hypothesis of ‘runaway sexual selection’ --the most venerable of the theories on how fancy features evolve--would work, if applied to this case.

For a fleeting moment you might think the reason for the egg shape is ‘developmental’ or ‘functional’. That is: birds come from eggs, so maybe it is simpler to grow in a way that retains the original shape while adding the minimum number of relevant appendages. Unfortunately for this ‘functionalist’ idea, its not just birds that come from eggs--and not even just turtles and lizards and dinosaurs and such. We all do; and the egg shape is by no means as equally pronounced in us all. No, this seems to me an aesthetically-driven phenomenon: the curvature that we see is playing a role in its own selection. (I concede there is one ‘developmental’ explanation that’s remotely plausible: small birds that lay very large eggs will have their outer shape determined by what they’re carrying inside.)

Now, how would you go about proving any of this—even the observation itself, which is an Obvious Visual Fact for me but may not be so for everyone, or anyone, else? But the advantage of a blog like this, is you can raise suggestions, make observations and not worry if they’re testable, or are already established scientific facts, or will be hooted down by academics (who won’t sully their reputations by admitting to be reading this). That’s the advantage too of not being owned by a University and obligated to publish in research journals (I admit, there are disadvantages). And it’s the advantage of dabbling in origami which is inherently an outsider’s occupation, and is inherently free, and is inherently inconsequential. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong (at first). You are free to conjecture—exactly as free as you are to flex the paper this way or that. Nobody is going to get hurt.

>Added October 2009:

The idea of a bird retaining in its body-shape the basic form of the egg it came from (with just a head-blob and some tail feathers glued on) I have not seen anywhere, certainly not in the respectable biological literature which would never go out on a limb with this sort of observation. Which is a shame: fearlessly noting the basic features of the natural world as one sees them is left to others, to marginal types. But here there is a wonderful poem I came across recently by the ever sure-footed Richard Wilbur, whose job it is to observe and record. He speaks similarly of “the oval form of sleep”—not in reference to the egginess of bird outlines, but of the shape of the first pseudo-leaf of the cotyledon as it emerges from the earth:

http://tisiwoota.blogsome.com/2006/01/01/seed-leaves-by-richard-wilbur/

* * *

Having talked myself into it, here is another conjecture: still in the general realm of bird-shapes, but no longer now about egg-forms.



This one is about Owls. They always have these strange, haunting faces. I suggest we pay attention to this fact, as it’s universal among all owl species. Those faces will strike fear into the likes of us, who used to be small tasty foot-high morsels until quite recently.

Now if you look more closely, a lot of owls don’t just have strangely haunting faces, but faces that look specifically un-bird-like. In fact—their faces are strangely mammalian. Go ahead, take a minute to confirm this assertion (or challenge it if you dare) by Google-imaging pictures of owls.



hm hum hoom hm hmm hm hmm


--Good, you’re back.

My favorite example of a mammal-like owl is also the most extreme case that I’ve seen. It’s the owl that’s in my zoo here in Beersheva: a Bubo bubo.




What’s extreme about this particular owl is that it isn’t just going after a mammalian look in general; you actually can name the genus it is trying to mimic: it is---the CATS.

Actually there are plenty of owls that are called ‘cat-owls’ because of their appearance —the mottled ‘fur’, the flattened oval-triangular face, the tufts at the top of the head that are mimicking ears (the owl's actual ears are lower, on the rim of the oval), the yellow eyes, the small hooked nose.

But this owl in my zoo, though in English it is called an ‘Eagle Owl’, goes a step further in the direction specifically of cat-hood: it sometimes sits on the ground rather than in a tree, and when it does, it slouches its body to one side casually in the way that’s absolutely typical of a cat but quite unusual for a bird. You don’t quite know what you’re looking at until you're looking VERY closely.

[A picture here would help, but needless to say--the owls kept to the trees and wouldn’t slouch on the ground for me when I returned to the zoo for a snapshot. And on the Web too it’s hard to find the effect I wanted… But here at least are a few pictures where you can see how these owls are turning into cats.]

http://www.jeremyp.net/scotland/Pages/Image12.html
http://www.birdwatchingtours.co.uk/gallery/pix/Morroco/Pharoah%20Eagle%20Owl_L%20copy.jpg
http://www.britishwildlifecentre.co.uk/animals/eagleowl.htm

[The last of these gives the standard, and perfectly blind, Textbook Explanation of the pseudo-ears.]

Now, there are LOTS of reasons why an animal would want look like another more dangerous animal or one that’s higher on the food chain. Most of these have to do with safety from predation, and sometimes with gaining an edge in the sexual or social arenas by appearing fierce in certain specific ways. Always in cases of such so-called mimicry, the question asked about what’s guiding the evolution of the mimicry is: Who is being fooled--and how does that help the deceiver?

I have an idea of this, for Bubo bubo and the other cat-seeming owls. (It goes well beyond convergent evolution, the adaptation of two species to similar conditions in the environment.) The idea is prompted by noticing that cats and owls have exactly one thing in common: they hunt the same prey. --Voles, field mice, small nocturnal animals, other smaller birds… I suggest that what’s driving the development of these haunting features, often ‘mammalian’ and sometimes specifically ‘catlike’—is not mainly the owl’s predators but rather it’s prey.

How might this work? Why should what prey thinks of its predator have any effect on how the latter looks? (Usually its only the consumer, and not the consumed, that has any say in matters of appearance.)

My answer is this: a prey animal on noticing a predator has two basic and very different response options: freeze or flee. It’s a crucial, life-deciding choice, it has to be made instantly, and there is no in-between: if you’re doing one thing you are manifestly not doing the other. Now, the ‘right’ response to the quick first perception depends on what kind of predator it is. Basically if it’s a bird, you’ll want to flee to any near bush cover; if a cat, to freeze (or if there's a tree nearby to run up it). The specific details always depend on the local situation, but crucial information in the decision What To Do is what type of predator it is. Remember that Vervet monkeys have even developed different calls to warn troupe-mates when it is a flying vs. a stalking predator that’s been sighted! So, sitting in the bole of a tree in the dark, an owl that can confuse the issue even slightly gains an edge at the crucial moment. And an owl that can confuse the issue a lot gains a significant edge: the perfect graded path for evolution to move on.

That’s my hypothesis, anyway. And perhaps it’s even a testable one. (You real Natural Historians out there, with tenure, time, and access to research grants, could you go out and check this one for me?)

For some reason I seem to have developed a yen tonight to go fold some owls.

Fans

The paper fan shape. I’m only just discovering it—laggard as usual—and there are some beautiful possibilities. Have our historians, has David Lister or Joan Sallas, written yet a history of the Fan? Surely it goes back a long, long ways; it must be one of origami’s most primitive forms.

For me there’s a joyful simplicity and symmetry to the Fan that stands for some of origami’s fundamental, natural qualities. The strong lines that soften as they widen, the hard folds turning into curves, leading finally at the extremity to the cut-edge, normally fragile and still reminiscent of fragility but now held taut, at attention. Rapt.

The joy here is something of a child’s joy—the sunburst form—but also that of adult, robust sexuality. Birds with their fan tails were there first and have claimed the field. Women—geishas, courtiers and coquettes, hiding glances behind the fan, or adding a bird-like ornament behind a head’s careful coiffure—were quickly catching up from the rear, while the fashion lasted. That a fan can be angrily snapped shut, the show closed in an instant and you left gaping & wondering--well that’s part of the deal. Timing is everything. Act now on the allure—or live forever in regret.

Since it suggests paperiness and primal joy, as usual I’m thinking how the Fan can be combined and contrasted with techniques and materials that have an opposite quality (those that suggest stoniness, mass). Let’s wait a little though on results.

Paper Feathers

Paper is visibly thin, flimsy; but it’s interesting that without anyone ordering that it be this way, the vast majority of origami models do not leave the cut edge of the paper exposed in the final model—which would make the model look flimsier still. It’s almost as if origami were ashamed of its material origins. A noted exception among well-known pieces is Herman Van Goubergen’s Cat. --Here and there no doubt, in a bi-plane or maybe a bird, the cut edge puts in an appearance, but on the whole this part of the square’s anatomy is kept firmly out of view, as the family embarrassment.

Paper fans are a famous exception to this rule. Partly this is because the visible structure is dominated by those long, strong, widening spans. But look at the difference between these two fans--the second of which hides the cut edge in a mountain fold. It is manifestly less alive, less free. One wants the end of those firm spans to have something that opens into, is as gentle as----the air.



I’ve noticed, following this line of thought, that featheriness (and not just in fan tails) is nicely expressed in paper by a cut edge, the paper’s flimsiness evidently serving as a nice stand-in for a feather’s quasi-substantiality.



And here’s an old model, the Flitting Bird, where(as my young friend Yuval Atlas once observed) if you don’t look straight at them, the wing-tips with their cut edge seem to be in motion.



So: are there any other rightful uses out there for the Cut Edge?





FIRST POST

This blog has to start someplace; so it will start here. Don’t worry, pretty soon it will seem like I've been around forever.

For those who absolutely need them--links to previous scribblings on origami, all pretty much covering the same ground, are here:


ARTICLES



Folding Female Faces (also in: The Origami Forum, 2005)

Taxonomy of Curved Folding (Letter to David Lister, 2005)

Versatility of Origami (2005)

Sculptural Origami Exhibit at the Holon Design Gallery (BOS article, 2005)

An Origami Minimalism (2004) ; written for the 1st Israeli Origami Convention Book


EXHIBITS

2005: Masters of Origami
2004: Holon Exhibit of Sculptural Origami