The Fitful Flog

This is the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, London, UK. I can’t say I know much about it, but you can read up on it by clicking the photo above — it will take you to the Wikipedia article. I mention it here because someone who works there recently blogged about this blog and it caught my eye. Mainly, because the author mentions me in the same sentence as Robert Lang, which almost never happens. In fact, there is only one other documented occurrence of it ever happening: a year and some back, through a series of improbable accidents, I was having lunch with a group of famous folders in a ramen restaurant in San Francisco’s Japantown. Famous folder, Joseph Wu leaned across the table and stage-whispered, “Philip, your elbow is in Robert’s soup — it’s considered very rude.” And I thought, “Man, the Japanese got rules for everything.” But as the soup was uncomfortably hot, I did move my elbow and quickly made small talk, to cover my étourderie. Well, that aside, the blog entry is on design and how drawing your ideas affects the finished product. Interesting stuff, recommended to your attention.

Speaking of finished product, yesterday, I folded this, the Plausible Box, on the bus, while chatting with an old schoolmate about what we’d been up to the last twenty years or so. Martha said, “I’ve seen you folding on the bus — you keep folding things, then take them all apart and fold them again.” And I said, “Yeah, that’s my design method. Take it apart, reconfigure, recollapse. Eventually, it will work.” This one works for me. Give it a try — it’s based on the 3×3 tato. Here’s a crease pattern.

Our subscribers by email will be seeing a whole lot of nothing, here. But if you click on the title link, it will bring you to this post and some cool video instructions for the Iso-Area Double Masu.

Which is a variation on Toshikazu Kawasaki’s Iso-area Cube from Kasahara’s and Takahama’s Origami for the Connoisseur. Not that this model is in that book or that Kawasaki ever folded it. It is, to my knowledge and belief, a new variation. I deem it sufficiently different, both in shape and in folding method, to qualify for status as its own model. Your mileage may vary.

This is Vincent Floderer demonstrating his crimp method of folding a mushroom. It came to my attention on the that directory of wonderful things, bOING-bOING, where it was posted under the heading, Perfect mushroom origami. I’ve never seen Floderer fold before, though I’ve admired his work for some years. This is brilliant stuff and well worth investigating.

The reason I’m posting it here is that the post was followed by a flurry of comments by people saying, very nice, but it’s not origami — it’s papercraft or paper sculpture or maybe something like papier maché. When it was objected that this kind of folding was widely accepted within the origami community, there were comments about modern origami and how it’s not classical origami and so on.  Classical? We had a classical period? Does he mean the Tokugawa?

What these well-meaning folks meant and could not articulate was that Floderer’s folding did not fit with their concept of origami.  The Internet was made for such opinions — nothing slips through the tubes faster than informal fallacy. I sympathize: I am full of opinion. Half the time, I’m not even aware I have an opinion on something until people ask me and then it just comes out. Once, I was at this bus station and a Nestorian bishop walked up and asked me how I felt about the filioque controversy. So I told him. We went ten rounds before he won on points. Yeah, that’s right, defining terms and kicking ass. But afterwards, I’m on the bus to the next town and I’m thinking, “I have an opinion on this?” I found I did — it was informed and not badly set out. Well, opinions are free and we’re all free to have them. Doesn’t mean they’re right.

There are some things that are origami and some things that are not. I’ll grant you, the border can be fuzzy and I tell you this because I live in the marchlands: oschene knows from fuzzy. Papercraft, for instance, definitely not origami. Why not? Not because it has cuts — a lot of origami involves cuts, particularly that from the Tokugawa period. Not because there’s glue — yes, some origami has glue in it. No, it’s because papercraft, when it refers to this kind of papercraft, finds its shape in cutting and gluing and folding. This is its essence and that’s okay. I understand that people who practice papercraft pay their taxes, mostly, and are kind to their mothers. Relatively few of them are Nestorians.

On the other hand, Floderer’s work seeks its shape in creases and the creases are induced by folding. When he folds, he wears his intention on his sleeve and folds with authority. He maintains a sense of humor while he works. The man’s a genius — what he practices is origami. Yes, that’s my opinion, but I speak it with vatic certainty. As a fuzzy fringe-dweller, I have leapfrogged Time and return to tell you that this is O and that the non-O people will simply have to come to terms with it.

If you are an O person and disagree with me, you should certainly feel free to say so. But I insist that you define your terms and guard your left ear.

Update: It occurs to me that this post is missing something in a major way: a link to Vincent Floderer’s site and in particular, to an excellent article on this kind of origami in art and nature.

This is Wilhelmine, quondam Princess of Prussia and Margravine of Bayreuth, holding one of Kalami’s models — and this works for me in a number of ways. One, the color is dead on, really on. Two, Wilhelmine would have totally dug it — she was a bluestocking, a lady polymath, and the mathematics and beauty of Kalami’s folding would have warmed the cockles of her somewhat complicated heart. And thirdly, putting origami out in the world, out in front of people, is so very cool.

(Cockles, here, are ventricles — that doesn’t show up in most dictionaries and I’d give up looking for it, if I were you.)

It is true that origami is art. But so are so many things. You can place your models in a frame, hang them on the wall, put them in galleries — yes, this is the way we treat art in the world, we curate it. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se: it’s a good way to present the work and a good way to say to the world, “Hey, this is some serious art going on!” But for me, this is to lose an important aspect of origami. A lot of origami is its ephemeral nature and a lot of it is the sharing.

Lately, I’ve been sticking my afternoon commute work in alleyways in my city and watching what happens to it. Some of it disappears, but I can tell from the patterns in the dust, it’s been removed with care, someone is taking it home. So, I replace the model. And it disappears again. This is a conversation of sorts. Not a very intelligent one — reminds me of trading for tin with the red paint people — but a real one, nevertheless.

Mélisande* and I did some guerrilla origami in New York — she writes about it here. It was a hell of a lot of fun. And when I read on Kalami’s blog about how she’s been unleashing her work, I know exactly what she means. There needs to be more of this.

And there can be — want to play? We’ve started a new group on Flickr — because we’re convinced there are simply not enough groups on Flickr — and you can join. Joining Flickr is free (mostly) and the only rule we have (so far) is that you geotag your photo before you add it to the group. This will allow us to see the contributions on a map. We have dreams of seeing little origami installations all over this globe.

Go, dream, fold, install.

You have to compare. So you can get a little distance from things. Like Laika. She really must have seen things in perspective. It’s important to keep a certain distance.

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That’s what Ingemar says in one of my favorite movies, Mitt liv som hund.  It came to mind this past winter when the news reminded me that it was forty years ago, Christmas eve, that Apollo VIII cruised around the moon and sent back photos of our little blue earth. At the time, this seemed perfectly natural to me, that astronauts should be floating around in lunar orbit, reading Bible verses to those of us left crawling on the planet’s face. On the other hand, the clusterfuck in Vietnam also seemed perfectly natural to me — kids normalize things right out of the box and then spend the rest of their lives wondering why the box looks so funny.

It also reminded me of a Christmas eve I spent in København some years back, hanging with this obscure Danish sculptor, Berthel Thorwaldsen. It was crazy cold in Denmark that year, crazy cold and damp in ways that just don’t obtain in the New World and every time one complained about it, one was handed a glass of the medicinal extract of caraway. A dose of that would cause a sensation of warmth for thirty seconds, followed by a couple hours of temporal and spatial distortion and a very vivid delusion that the universe was constructed entirely of stale pumpernickel. Don’t know if one can say this really helps — not in the way, say, that throwing a turf on the fire might.

So, somewhere in the conversation, I said, “Your problem, Berthel, is that you’re Danish and obscure….”

“My problem,” he responded with a snarl, “is that I’m surrounded by barbarians.”  It was just me there in the pub — double vision is another side-effect of the medicinal extract of caraway. I was, to be fair, dressed as a barbarian — just the way I dressed in those days.  I tried again.

“An artist should always challenge his medium….”

Berthel slammed his fist on the table and threw me a malevolent sidewise glance. “You presume to speak to me of medium, yankee Visigoth? Let me tell you about medium: clay is the birth; plaster the death; and marble the resurrection.”

“But I work in paper, ” I said, “a developable surface….”

“Clay, life; plaster, death; marble, immortality! That’s it!”

Then he fell asleep, face down in a plate of sauerkraut and I had a hell of a time getting us back to his studio. Pretty freakin’ cold in there, too. Was there a peat shortage that winter? Certainly, there was no shortage of caraway seeds.

It’s so very easy to lose one’s perspective. Berthel, bless him, he’s dead now and presumably has gotten some of his back, but mine comes and goes with the shocking irregularity of a PVTA commuter bus on a Thursday evening. Whenever Eric Gjerde and I talk, after an hour or so, one of us is always sure to say, “For God’s sake, it’s just a piece of paper!” And we will hold that gnostic flash in our consciousness for a New York minute and then immediately return to our wonted obsessions.

Origami is a damned strange way to create art and one must never forget that. Even the odder of the outsider artists will look at origami models and say, “Pshaw, blood, what’s that about?” Origami is outside the mainstream of the art world and beyond the fringes of the backwaters — that’s okay.

A lot of it is medium — however lovely the paper, it remains an aggressively, heroically ephemeral choice. Every piece you fold is, to some extent, condemned to the slow burn of Time as soon as you put the final shaping to it. You can use the best paper and coat it with resins and polymers and put it beneath a bell jar inside a columbarium in a cathedral close, but still, the clock has started. And that’s okay, too — origami is a viral art and depends as much on the transmission of the idea as it does on the medium. The paper will perish — how should it not? — but the idea can live on in a very real and interesting way, not unlike the barbarian concept of immortality through glory.

Which brings me to ellipses. What, you were thinking it was only my prose style that was elliptical? Folding ellipses is like folding circles, but from a slightly different perspective — they force you to focus on the foci and that can be a little disorienting. But give it a try. I like the silver ellipse, myself– it has a ratio of one to the square root of two, just like A4, and this makes finding the foci particularly easy.

Here is a Rolling Box, which is made from a 2:1 ellipse. This is just a variation of the Box of Rox, which chungdha points out, is not an entirely new shape. (Indeed, shortly after he told me that, I saw an interesting lamp packaging thing, using a similar shape.) I like this one a lot — it’s pretty close to cylindrical, so it rolls nicely, and it also stands up in this slanty way. Here, try it out: a crease pattern.

Photo and hand by Andrew Hudson

Just a note to alert our readers to another publication well worth a visit and a read: Origami Weekly began publication earlier this year and has been warmly received by the greater folding community. It is the ambitious project of two young men out West, Andrew Hudson and Jared Needle, to publish diagrams on a weekly basis. And we’re not talking six-step penguins and duckies — this ain’t Origami for Eejits. In announcing their intention, Jared said:

Why, you say? Short answer: we’ve grown tired of folding the same “classic” models, and thought we’d spice it up a bit. Long answer: we’re looking for exposure, not only for ourselves, but also for the other folders that we’ll be featuring. We’re trying to freshen up the world of the advanced origami folder, while at the same time giving us a challenge and some extra experience. There is a lot of untapped talent in the amateur origami world, and it’s about time someone took notice!

Of course, it is somewhat lacking in grace for us to point at their blog the same week that they publish diagrams from your sometimes less-than-humble narrator, but if we allowed the knowledge of our native bumptiousness to curb our pen, hell, we’d never say anything at all. We will mention that the week before, the intrepid duo published the first ever (to our knowledge) CP of a Joel Cooper mask — go find that in the mainstream origami press!

Readers there may be who remember the Zhoubi Bowl — a CP appeared in these pages, oh, eons ago and some who saw it wished they had some diagrams to it. This week, Origami Weekly speaks to that desire. Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest. Then subscribe — we anticipate good things to come.

That’s my old friend, Catullus, who often wrote in hendecasyllabics, that is, an eleven syllable line. Here, he’s saying, To whom shall I give this pretty little blog entry? To you, gentle reader…

It occurred to me the other day that twist stars, such as the nine- and ten-pointed models I written about before, probably have an Al Gore Rhythmic method to them. So I thought about it a while and decided that there is.

Briefly, choose a regular polygon. Then choose a regular polygram to fold inside it. (There are very sharp ones and very dull ones — I like the middle ones, myself.) Now, fold another polygram inside the smaller polygon you just created, connecting not the corners, but the midpoints. This forms yet a third polygon in the middle. Make a tato from that smallest polygon, fold in and squash the pleats. That’s it.

Can’t quite visualize it? That’s okay, I made a slide show for a hendecagram twist star. (Or the detail view, if you prefer a slower approach.) Before you click over, you might want to print and cut out a hendecagon.

There’s nothing all that profound about these — they’re just pretty and look good in the window when the sun comes through. The method is extensible, but who knows how far? There are lots of regular polygons and a whole lot more polygrams.

Indiscipline

I do remember one thing.
It took hours and hours but…
by the time I was done with it,
I was so involved, I didn’t know what to think.
I carried it around with me for days and days…
playing little games
like not looking at it for a whole day
and then… looking at it.
to see if I still liked it.
I did.

I repeat myself when under stress.
I repeat myself when under stress.
I repeat myself when under stress.
I repeat myself when under stress.
I repeat…
The more I look at it,
the more I like it.
I do think it’s good.
The fact is…
no matter how closely I study it,
no matter how I take it apart,
no matter how I break it down,
It remains consistent.
I wish you were here to see it.

I like it!

(That’s a song by King Crimson which I’m tempted to embed here, but do not, for fear of alienating the uninitiated. It’s on Discipline, if you want to check it out.)

This is a tato that Claudine Pisale handed to me at the CDO convention in Verbania. She said it had been given to her by a Japanese neighbor and that she couldn’t see how it was done. (The version she gave me had pencil marks on it, from where she had copied the landmarks over.) She thought it traditional. The tricky part, said Claudine, is that there were no folds across the central square of the design.

Emma, who teaches math at Milano U., figured out a solution, but unfortunately, I don’t remember what it was — I was more than a little jet-lagged.

In the pocket of my wool waistcoat, I’ve carried the model and pulled it out, odd times, to take a whack at solving it. I came up with several solutions, but after a week or so, I’d trash them and start over. For one thing, I kept going at it with a shell on my head. Convinced that the offset was arbitary, I kept trying to mirror arbitrary angles. Got pretty good at it, too. But it wasn’t right. Eventually, I got out a ruler and a calculator and figured out it was done with fractions. Once I had that, I used Fujimoto’s method to mark the fractions on the edge of a square. Eccolo!

This is kind of crazy sophisticated for traditional. If any of you out there in TV land know anything about this model, I’d love to hear it.

Fold one for yourself — diagrams.

This is Nathan Austin, after a long night of working on a tessellation. We’re sure many of our readers know this feeling. Nathan is a film director, an occasional poet (that is, he writes nonce verse, not poems every so often), and an alumnus of the College where I work. We met a couple years back. (The photo is by Andy Tew, a talented young photographer, an alumnus, who works for the College. He’s also quite tall and has been known to pour milkshakes on people’s heads, so I hope he doesn’t mind my using it.)

What happened was that I had to go over to the Campus Center and drop off something. As I walked by the reception booth, I noticed half of a curved stellated tetrahedron, pinned to the bulletin board.

Further up the wall, I spied Eric Gjerde’s spread hexagons, folded from a stock certificate, and I thought to myself, “Hmm, there is some young person hereabouts of remarkable taste and abilities.” I asked the young woman working the booth and she said Nate, who worked the night shift, had folded them. “It’s really boring at night,” she explained.

I checked my visitor logs and found that, indeed, late at night, this blog was sometimes visited by someone with a Mac notebook and a College IP address.

The next time I walked through the campus center, I saw a young man in the booth, tessellating away, so I introduced myself. Nate was a little surprised. We chatted.

Some months later, Nate called me up and wanted to meet to talk folding. So we met at the Dirty Truth, a marvelous pub downtown, and spoke about a short film Nate had in his head, a movie about a girl and a tessellated dress. What did I know of such things? So, I told him about Eric and Christiane and Joel and Jane and of course, Polly — he knew most of the names already, but was impressed that we all knew each other. He described the plot to me — sounded fascinating.

That was a year ago. Yesterday, I received an email from Nate with this photo.

The actress is Emma Jaster, also an alumna. I met her briefly, when she was working in our Theater department. (All new employees are required to speak with me for thirty minutes — discourages the faint-hearted from applying, I like to think.)

Nate will tell you the rest:

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So, I was on the bus the other day, cheerfully folding away and rocking out to an old Bowie/Eno song and got to thinking about culture. The song was ostensibly about culture, you see — Bowie says:

It’s not as truly hostile about Americans as say “Born in the U.S.A.”: it’s merely sardonic. I was traveling in Java when the first McDonald’s went up: it was like, “for fuck’s sake.” The invasion by any homogenized culture is so depressing, the erection of another Disney World in, say, Umbria, Italy, more so. It strangles the indigenous culture and narrows expression of life.

Really? This seems a rather incongruous expression of outrage for a rock-and-roll musician. Rock-and-roll is not exactly a culturally pure idiom — certainly not the kind Bowie has pursued all these years — nor is it a genre particularly averse to propagation.

One can imagine oneself, sitting in the McD’s in Jakarta, pushing a PaNas Special around the plate with a plastic fork, watching the local students though the glass, protesting something strikingly nongermane, and hearing this song on the radio. Rock-and-roll gets around — that’s what it does. Rock-and-roll is a little, you know, American that way. Perhaps David was dabbling more in the ironic here than the sardonic.

A lot of culture entities have spent too much time in the blender, were you asking me. Musical theater. Ballet. Haute cuisine. Don’t get me started on free verse. But you know, it’s not all that difficult to avoid cultural forces you don’t approve of. Say, someone offers you tickets to the ballet. You reply, sir, ballet is a decadent art form, deleterious to the common good, fostering inhuman ideals in its followers and deforming the feet of its practitioners. Yeah, you will still have to take the tickets and sit there for three hours, but you will definitely be off the list for the cast party. Count it as a victory and move on.

And what has this to do with origami? Well, origami comes with all sorts of cultural baggage: the foreign name, the missionary zeal of its adherents, the Sadako mythology, the seemingly endless number of penguin models…and there’s the internal culture, as well. Modern origami has developed all sorts of cultural norms and squirrelly values in the past few decades, things you don’t find out about until after you’ve been converted by the zealous missionaries: the square thing, the no-cuts/no glue thing, the cult of the creative genius, the antiquarian reverence for diagrams, and most of all, the hegemony of the power of 2. Think about how many models involve dividing by 2 and then by 4 and again by 8…and your angles, there? How many are 90° and 45° and then to 22½° and 11¼°? Why? Sure, it’s simple, but it’s clearly not the only way to go. You can make simple and intermediate models from other numbers, but none or few ever do. Listen up, all you protest kids, 1/2ⁿ is the white bread of paperfolding. You can live on white bread, but why not challenge your palate a bit? Here, try a nice tasty seven.

First, mark the halves on the top and bottom edges.

Then mark the quarters on the upper left and lower right.

Fold from the quarter marks to the corners.

Now, make a diagonal crease and note where it crosses the creases you just made.

Fold horizontals and verticals through those crossings. You’ve found the 3/7 and 4/7 on this square. (This is all from Kazuo Haga, by the way. Did you read his new book, yet?)

Fraught with possibilities, I hear you say? Go for it. It’ll give you something to do with the program at the ballet. Or you can fold up the tray liner at the Jakarta McD’s, while you’re waiting for the students to move on.

Being a boxy kind of guy, I made a box out of it, and yes, I used nothing but 1/2ⁿ angles here. Have a crease pattern.

I’m pretty sure that the Javan and Umbrian cultures are sufficiently vital to put up with a little competition, especially if it’s from something as bland as hamburgers and Mickey Mouse. Me, I’d like to hear this song done by a gamelan, wouldn’t you?