I had a fabulous time teaching at the International Summer School Bernau, at the famous Bauhaus Denkmal Bundesschule Bernau in (wait for it) Bernau, Germany. It was an eye-opening experience and a real joy to teach something new to both the attendees and to people from the local public. More on this to come, but here’s some photos of the experience, compliments of the talented photographer Victoria Tomaschko.
I am teaching a Preliminary Course for the next two weeks at the International Summer School at the Bauhaus Denkmal Bundesschule Bernau, in Bernau bei Berlin, Germany. Very excited to be doing a specific program focusing on the teachings and instruction of Josef Albers (pre-eminent teacher at the Bauhaus, and later the Black Mountain College in N.C. and then Yale). I’ve been studying his works and historical materials for several years now, and it intersects nicely with my origami work. Most of my classes and instructional sessions over the last few years have centered around the work of Albers, so actually teaching his material in a Bauhaus-built school feels like everything coming full circle. Here are more details on my Preliminary Course program; I will post images from the event later on and share the booklet I have created for the course as well. My morning sessions are open to the public, from my understanding, so if you are in the Berlin area and have an interest in folding some Bauhaus creations, please do come …
http://news.mit.edu/2017/algorithm-origami-patterns-any-3-D-structure-0622 Some amazing work from the extremely talented Tomohiro Tachi, together with Erik Demaine, our origami community’s resident origami genius. While we’ve long watched and admired Tomohiro’s work with Origamizer (rendering 3D models as crease patterns using some complex mathematics) it appears they have taken this further to help simplify the process as much as mathematically possible. That’s a pretty huge step and has lots of ramifications for the future. Tomohiro’s work uses Voronoi tessellations in it’s calculation of things – that’s one of the underlying principles behind topological manipulation of polygons on a single surface, when calculating pleats and folding – so as an aficionado of this process, I’m happy to see this coming to real fruition.
My new work, Specimens, is one of three pieces on show at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts as part of the 2016 Jerome Foundation Book Arts Fellowship. The opening for the exhibition is on November 11th, starting at 6 PM. The pages will be displayed in sandwiched plexiglass frames, to allow light to pass through and permit the audience to see them floating in space – very much the way the paper looks and feels when handled. Here’s my artist statement from the exhibition: Specimens is the first of its kind: a book created with a new bio-paper medium made entirely from bacterial cellulose. Its pages were once alive. The quality of this new paper, which I developed over the past seven years, is its unparalleled strength and transparency. Each sheet is grown in a vat and harvested after several weeks. After processing, many layers – five or more – are laid on top of one another with the text block carefully placed within. Then the entire stack is pressed. The act of pressing …
A fantastic tidbit that popped up in my facebook feed today: http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-to-make-almost-any-shape-out-of-a-flat-sheet-of-paper This comes partially from Tomohiro Tachi, an origami friend, and one of the top people worldwide working with computational/mathematical origami tessellations and corrugations. If you look further at his Flickr page you can find beautiful examples of 3D constructs and controlled folding mechanisms. It’s very exciting work!
