Tomoko Fuse once wrote some words about origami fate and how she sometimes burns origami that has proven “unsuccessful.” I’ve had a couple of unsuccessful encounters with unit origami myself, but most of those unfinished pieces ended in the paper trash, putting a little color into it after being crushed by my frustrated hands. But this piece was different. I was proud to have started to venture myself in the world of equilateral triangles, which are not easy units to fold. I had some difficulties at the beginning, but after figuring out how to fold them I constructed a piece with them. A cuboctahedoron, which looked pretty well but resulted very unstable. I started to replace some of the faulty pieces and ended replacing the entire set of triangles. But even then my cube wasn’t stable enough.
I forgot about it for some time, but today I started to join the pieces again while my code was compiling.
In the hope that a smaller and more compact geometry would be more stable, this time I just constructed an octahedron. But once again the units did not hold together stably. It would be difficult to find a better example of a truly “unsuccessful” origami and so just throwing it into the garbage would be somehow undignifying.
I went to the kitchen and got the matches, ready to enjoy the color flames promised by my book and remembering nostalgically my first inorganic chemistry practical course and the flame-tests bright colors.
However…my origami refused to go in flames the first time…and the second…and the third.
It even started to look more interesting, gaining some personality of its own by loosing its geometrical perfection (its apparent perfection of course…the lack of it was what started this whole thing on the first place).
After a while, the smoke was starting to kill me instead of the origami and I decided to stop and take the smoking octahedron to the balcony.
There it will rest and hopefully the rain or the snow will end with it soon, before I take it back and surrender to its imperfection and willingness to survive.
I forgot about it for some time, but today I started to join the pieces again while my code was compiling.
In the hope that a smaller and more compact geometry would be more stable, this time I just constructed an octahedron. But once again the units did not hold together stably. It would be difficult to find a better example of a truly “unsuccessful” origami and so just throwing it into the garbage would be somehow undignifying.
I went to the kitchen and got the matches, ready to enjoy the color flames promised by my book and remembering nostalgically my first inorganic chemistry practical course and the flame-tests bright colors.
However…my origami refused to go in flames the first time…and the second…and the third.
It even started to look more interesting, gaining some personality of its own by loosing its geometrical perfection (its apparent perfection of course…the lack of it was what started this whole thing on the first place).
After a while, the smoke was starting to kill me instead of the origami and I decided to stop and take the smoking octahedron to the balcony.
There it will rest and hopefully the rain or the snow will end with it soon, before I take it back and surrender to its imperfection and willingness to survive.
1 comment:
It looks pretty cool all burnt. I've never done any oragami, I had a mate who could make cool swans.
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