The Fitful Flog

Like many folders, I’m a bit touchy about terms like Art and craft. It’s not the pretension that bugs me – hell, I’m all about pretension – it’s the cynical hypothesis that if the idea can be controlled with words, the idea can make money for the right people. Yes, this works, but only by abusing the language and the law. A letter I wrote to the paper recently.

[ Originally published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette on: Friday, October 06, 2006 ]

To the editor: I was delighted to read about the City Council’s decision to allow artists to sell their creations on our sidewalks (Gazette, Sept. 28).

As the Heresy Collective and attorney William Newman demonstrated, this is both good sense and good constitutional law, two things growing increasingly rare in our lives these days.

However, I was greatly troubled to see that the council seeks to make a distinction between the ”fine arts” and ”crafts or decorative arts.” While Robert Reckman of the [Department of Public Works] feels this line can be drawn very easily, the judge in the case cited does not seem to share his optimism. I certainly do not.

”What is art?” is a question for ardent college sophomores, not for elected officials or civil servants. To pretend otherwise is to out-Colbert Colbert and to declare some forms of expressions ”speechier” than other forms. Absurdity. A political body, whether elected, appointed or ordained, has no more moral or constitutional authority to draw such arbitrary lines than it has to evaluate the validity of a sacrament or to determine the weight of angels on the moon.

Let the invisible hand of the market decide what will sell and what will not. Leave the questions about what is art and what is mere ”crafts or decorative arts” to posterity.

Philip Chapman-Bell
Northampton

So, I was after thinking, early one morning, that I had really ought to get back to that chrysanthemum model, being as there’s a big chysanthemum festival going on somewheres, but then I thought, it’s such a pain to make hexakaidecagons. What if I made them from squares and just folded the excess in? Hmm, I reflected, this would make the purists happy.

But you know, I can’t stand to make purists happy. Never could – sheer native cussedness. Melchior, the Oafish Brother^cc of Casper the Friendly Ghost™ floated by around then and suggested that as the hexakaidecagon is almost a circle, I could just use a circle and really annoy the purists. Brilliant! I cried and immediately went on to do something else. (Did I mention my little problem with cussedness? Makes the bedstead psychomachia pale by comparison.)

First, I made pentagons from circles – puzzling at first, but then I remembered that anything that can be done with compass and straightedge can be done with paper. Bing, bang, badada, boom.

But heptagons, that was a challenge. They’re not constructible using traditional methods, though there are ways. Then, in the library, leafing through Miranda Lundy’s Sacred Geometry, I noticed she had a kickass method for estimating the angles. A little work and we were on our way to a seven pointed twist star that I thought very pretty.

Here’s the sequenced crease pattern for making the heptagon and here’s an unimproved CP for making a seven pointed twist star. But just about anything you make out of a heptagon is going to be pretty.

It’s raining in New England today – the remnants of a hurricane that blew in yesterday. So, we’ll make our own sun.

This one has a high wow factor – something that comes home to me on the bus, when strangers interrupt me to ask, what is that? It’s the five pointed thing – people’s eyes are caught by the five pointed star, even when it’s obscured by another one, pointing in the opposite direction. And the frame-breaking action isn’t so bad, either.

You can do this with other polygons, too, though you may need to horse around with the pleat width some. I think I found an answer for this problem, but I’ll refrain from posting it, so that the Teeming Millions may have a whack at it.

Speaking of polygons, nowhere in the instructions does it mention that you start with a regular decagon – I like to think my readership knows me that well, that these small matters go without mention.

No? Okay, newbie – here’s how to make a decagon.

And here’s the Sequenced Crease Pattern – yes, I checked it and it will print on A4 without any issues. At least on our end.

Update: Diagrams for this model now available.

This is a Zhoubi Bowl, a result of some experimental folding I’ve been doing, loosely based on an illustration in the Zhoubi Suanjing, an ancient Chinese mathematics text. I like it, nice swoopy lines and pointy bits.

This is the CP, that is, the crease pattern, but it is very much an unimproved CP, just black lines without indication of direction. I think it you play around with it for five minutes, it will become apparent to you where the mountains and valleys go.

I am aware that the CP contains lines suggestive of a swastika – I’m not wicked happy about it, but with four-fold symmetry, that’s something that’s going to occur. I’m happy to say it does not show up in the finished model. (Plus, it’s pointing the other way around, for those who get superstitious about these things.)

Sure, the Icosahedral Twist Box is great, but a little bland. You could soup it up with some fancy paper, maybe, or you could go with my original conception and make a World Box.

The World Box is in honor of the first international exhibition on origami tessellations, July 29th through August 6th at the Jardim Bot?nico in Bras?lia, Brasil. It’s made from an equilateral triangular grid, which is a tessellator’s bread-and-butter. It’s how they see the world. (I just spent a weekend in New York with a couple of these tessllators and you know, it was hard to walk down the street with them. New York is very orthogonal and my buddies kept heading off at 30° and 60° to everything, frequently wandering into traffic or into buildings. Ooh!)

The map projection is courtesy of Carlos Furuti of São Paulo. I will mention here that although the design of the box is under Creative Commons license, the projection used here is not. It is under copyright and used with permission. If you want to do something similar or even totally different using the projection, you write to Carlos, dig?

You may be thinking, “Well, I print this out, my inkjet will put big honking white margins on it and it will look awful.” Relax, my little pink tomato, simply adjust your printer dialog:

Under Page Handling, you have the option of scaling. If you select Fit to Printer Margins, you can then trim off a few measly millimeters of white edge all the way around and make a pretty model. Do it. Confound the purists and the Puritans. Use the scissors. I won’t tell.

This all said, the files.

This is ambi-epistolary – hey-ho, there’s a nonce-word for the ages! Yes, ambi-epistolary, it can be made with equal facility out of letter paper of either persuasion, A4 or American 8½ ×11″. How’s that for thinking globally?

You make two pieces and one fits into the other. Or the other way around. The male becomes female, the female becomes male…oh, it’s the Rocky Horror Picture Show all over again. This is one reason Republicans won’t read this blog.

I have a cube model of this, too.

Enough blather – the directions are right here.

This came out of one of those conversations you have on flickr.com. A folder named georigami had been modifying one of the octagonal twist boxes discussed earlier and I advised him to try something to get the edges to overlap. After I said this,I realized I had very little idea if it would work. Leaving that mod to him, I tried my advice on a similar, but different grid and got this. It’s fun.

A young man on the bus thought it would make a nice kaleidoscope and I think he’s right. If you used paper that had mylar on one side, you could get a very trippy light show, indeed.

Anyone out there have any experience bonding mylar to paper?

This model is all on a 45° and 22°30′ grid, with horizontal creases that divide the square into sixths. This model benefits from what one of my tessellating buddies (hey, Eric!) calls, “psycho-accuracy.” Please note how the diagonals switch directions when they cross the first and fifth horizontals. I wish I could tell you that it folds together easily and readily. I cannot – something entirely bovine about the grace of this collapse.

But you’ve come to expect that from my work, no?

CP for American Letter Paper

CP for A4

Both Eric and Eduardo were asking, how do you make accurate decagons out of a square?

Well, when I’m after accuracy, I draw a decagon in my creaking, ancient CorelDraw 8 install and print it out. But this lacks…authenticity. I’m way big on authenticity.

The method for making a decagon from a square is not difficult and is easily memorized. It is derived, I believe, from an old Japanese method, developed for a folk art called monkiri or crest-cutting. Monkiri involves folding paper in various ways and then cutting out designs in it. When unfolded, the cut paper reveals a surprising image, like an idealized cherry blossom or waves on water. American children do similar things to create snowflakes and paper dolls. The great folder, Bob Neale, once gave me a fascinating kid’s book on monkiri. It’s around here, somewhere.

Of course, once you have trapped the wily and elusive regular decagon, what do you do with it? Well, you could do something simple, like the above waterbomb – you-all know how to make a waterbomb, don’t you? Or, you could get all jiggy with it and make a Puff Star. Kind of up to you, the faithful reader.

The How to Make a Regular Decagon (or Pentagon, Whatever) from a Square file.

Later on — some more on monkiri —

Whenever I use Google Language Tools on a Japanese site, I sing this Red Housepainters’ song,

it’s not that simple
this dictionary never has a word
for the way i’m feeling
it’s nothing plain for me
of a different god and moral
what if i laid my head down on your stomach
or put my mouth to your hand
i cannot translate
japanese to english
or english to japanese

Don’t get me wrong – Google provides me with that middle voice feeling, that sense of being on the wrong side of my brain, that I’ve come to expect from trying to put Japanese concepts into the American mind. It’s all good. Check it out:

The crest ardently the place

St. Bonaventure, someplace in The Mind’s Journey to God, speaks of the problem of lost meaning. Not that I remember where. Meaning, like mass and unlike my dilettante learning, cannot be lost. What doesn’t get communicated through speech returns to the Godhead.

A comforting thought. But when one doesn’t speak Japanese, one wonders what will happen when one bangs words together, like steel and flint, and waits for sparks of meaning to take place.

Sakura is cherry. Hako is box. Mon is crest, as in family crest. I have a theory that stringing the words together in this fashion will communicate something. Something along the lines of “Box with a Cherry Blossom Crest on Top.” I am more than willing to be set straight. (Hi ho, Silver?)

This is a problem that comes to me at night. Specifically, between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning. Why can’t you twist a pentagonal tube into a nice compass rose shape? Because odd numbers cause an offset. One can live with it, as I did with the Star Vase, or learn to work around it. This is, I think, a rather elegant work-around.

I have no directions, yet, but I do have a crease patterm:

Update: I fixed the mountain/valley issue on the petals, June 18, 2006.

American Letter version

A4 version

The dotted and dashed lines are as they always are – you’re looking at the white side, the blossom side, of the paper. The solid lines show the guidelines you use to find the intersections you need to make the folds. Not intuitive, perhaps, but not entirely dependant on divine inspiration, neither.

My old friend, Payson – the one who lives in Belo Horizonte – when he was a boy, went on a coach tour of some city in Bavaria with his family. The tour had gotten a little behind schedule and the tour guide was terribly agitated. He didn’t want to take the art museum off of the itinerary and he didn’t really have time to let the tourists see it, either. So, as a compromise, he chased his group through the museum, gallery after gallery, bellowing, “Keep moving! Keep moving, no looking! Nothing to see, here!”

This story always cracked me up. Wherever Payson and I went, one of us was sure to start rushing around and shouting, “Keep moving! No looking!” This got us odd looks in a few places, but we couldn’t stop doing it.

There’s nothing to look at, here. Okay, there’s a CP. This model was entirely predictable and could have been folded through extrapolation at any time. But it’s necessary to have out there because someday, I’m going to say something almost interesting about faceting. But not today.

(Note the combination of color and conventional dash-dot lines. Another one of those compromises.)