we have Jason Ku guest lecturing.

And he's the president of OrigaMIT, which you should all

check out Sunday afternoons, origami club at MIT.

He's an origami designer and a grad student

in mechanical engineering, and he's

going to talk about the more artistic perspective on how

origami design works, in particular

in the representational and tree method of origami design world.

So take it away, Jason.

JASON KU: Hi.

I'm Jason.

Eric gave a bit of an introduction.

I've been folding origami instance maybe

I was five years old, and I've been designing

origami for maybe the past 10 years.

I'm a PhD student in mechanical engineering,

working in folding things on the micro and nano scale.

So that's how this is applying to my research.

I'm here to talk a little bit about origami art

and how the concepts we've been talking about in class

apply to origami in actually designing and folding

artwork out of paper.

These are all the websites that I'm

going to be pulling pictures from.

So if we can't use these pictures

in future versions of this lecture,

then you can still see some of the media.

I want first make the analogy of origami art to music.

Many, many people make this analogy,

and it's actually very apt analogy.

In music you have composers, you have

people who produce a work of music, design the structure,

design what the main aspects of the piece

are, in terms of a structural sense,

but aren't necessarily performers themselves.

Now in origami, the performer and the composer

are usually one and the same.

But hopefully in the future, that won't always be the case.

In music the composer usually makes

a piece for multiple instruments or multiple voices or things

like that, so most the time can't do all that performance.

And some people are more gifted in the performance side.

Some people are more gifted in the composition side.

And I think it's a fairly apt analogy.

There's tons of mathematics in music.

There's tons of mathematics in origami.

But there's also this level of artistic complexity, which

we'll see later in this lecture.

I'm going to concentrate mostly on representational origami.

Representational origami is traditionally

representing living things in our world,

but it's pretty much, you see something not necessarily

living, but you see something and you

want to make that form for the form's sake,

to represent that form.

And this is different than, say, patterning

to create artistic patterns on a sheet of paper,

tessellating, making geometric polyhedra,

or making more abstract art that doesn't necessarily

have a relation to a real world object.

So I'm going to start with a little bit about origami art.

We've heard this.

Eric mentioned this particular individual, Akira Yoshizawa.

He is widely understood to be the father of modern origami.

He was born in 1911.

He was around for a very long time.

Unfortunately, passed away in 2005.

I was lucky enough to get to meet Akira Yoshizawa when

he attended a convention in North Carolina

when I was maybe around 10.

He was very powerful and influential

in the world of origami, because he was one of the first people

to start creating new models, be able to look at an object

and create that object just from folding.

He was one of the first people to actually try

to make a large number of new models,

as opposed to the past many centuries

when only a few traditional models were known or pursued.

This is a picture of Yoshizawa right here.

He's fairly happy in this picture.

But he's holding the logo of the US organization

in origami, OrigamiUSA, which is this sailboat.

But as you can see, different than the traditional origami

crane or the frog or things like that, you

see a lot of curves in his work, a lot of shaping.

He uses a technique called wet-folding, in which he

weakens the paper to some degree,

weakens the paper fibers by applying water, shaping

the paper, and letting it dry so that it holds that form.

And you can see in this sparrow-- this is particularly

one of my favorite works by Yoshizawa--

it really has the essence of this little bird,

but is actually very simple and elegant.

Origami design isn't all about making

the most complex thing in the world.

It's really trying to represent a subject elegantly.

And I think this model does a very good job with that.

But you can see here, very clean surfaces, not a lot

of extra creases that you can see.

Traditionally, wet-folding uses thicker paper

and is slightly more substantial.

So here are some of his other works.

And I want to start out with Yoshizawa

because he was represented as the father and the master,

and many, many of the origami designers,

if not all of the origami designers that I'm

going to continue to talk about were heavily

influenced by Yoshizawa.

So I'm going to first talk about the traditional style.

And I'm going to compare it to, say, the crane or the frog.

These types of models are characterized by straight,

well-defined, polygons in the final form,

typically folded flat.

Little shaping is traditionally needed

to go from the base of the model to the final form.

It's very geometric, these models,

characterized by very straight, precise creases.

So here is, I think, a very good example

of this traditional style.

While there are some curves here,

everything is very well-defined, maybe

just a slight shaping here.

But even that is fairly well-defined.

But you can see Komatsu, Hideo Komatsu, a Japanese folder,

uses really clean, large polygons of open paper

without creases on them to represent polygons

on the model.

The folded form.

His design process isn't really using tree theory.

I mean, all origami design is subjected to the condition

that no two points on the unfolded square

can increase in distance in the folded form.

That's a property called developability of the paper.

The paper's not going to stretch, basically.

So all origami design is subject to that condition,

but you don't have to deal with necessarily these things called

uniaxial bases.

Pretty much all of these models are non-uniaxial.

His design process is kind of a trial and error

process of folding along different 22.5 degree grids.

22.5 degrees is, I guess, 1/8 of pi.

1/16 of 360 degrees.

And it's a particularly nice and useful discretization

of angles in origami design.

All the traditional bases are based on this 22.5 degree grid

system.

And there's a certain elegance of that.

Actually I think, the mouse is based on a 30 degree grid

system, but is kind of an exception,

but follows the same principles.

He keeps folding a piece of paper

and tries to get these geometric shapes that really

are able to by themselves capture the model.

And I'm going to use some of that design technique

later in a design example.

He has a small but very distinguished

repertoire because his process is less algorithmic-- I mean,

he has algorithms, I'm sure, that are difficult to describe,

but his process is actually very artistic.

And while it's very exact, I think

it's one of the most elegant examples of origami design.

Here's another example of the traditional style.

As you can see, there's slightly more curves and things in it,

but it's fairly well characterized

by these straight creases.

Heavier paper for wet-folding.

This model on the left here is box pleated.

So as opposed to the 22.5 degrees structure,

box pleating is characterized by only multiples of 45 degrees.

So pi over 4.

And so you see the grid here, this model

is based on a fairly large grid, so you

can get the detail that it needs.

These are not uniaxial bases, again,

but they're still limited by this stretch ability

constraint.

And those were styles that stemmed

from the traditional crisp folding of say

the crane and the crab and the frog and all

these traditional designs.

The non-traditional style is more

an extension of Yoshizawa's work and shaping and curved folding

and things like wet-folding.

There is much shape that needs to be

done to create the essence of the model.

The model is encapsulated by not necessarily the structure

as much, but of the final shaping, the undefined shaping

that you kind of put into the model.

Here's an example of an English folder

named David Brill, who is an investment banker,

if my memory serves me.

He now lives on a golf course.

And I think he's retired now, but he likes to fold paper.

But you can see here, a good example

of this style, thick paper.

The character of the model is really

defined by these curved tension folds, which

is slightly different than at least the traditional style.

And oftentimes, it's very, very difficult

to replicate to any of these types of models,

because it has so much to do with subjectivity as opposed

to objectivity, as in the traditional style.

Here's another good example, Michael LaFosse.

He's a paper folder who actually resides here in Massachusetts.

He's in Haverhill, "Have-er-ill,"

something like that, Massachusetts.

He is unique in origami designers in the fact

that he is also an avid paper maker.

So he actually makes a lot of the media which he folds.

And that gives this intimate relationship

between the life cycle of the paper.

He's able to make specialty paper that's

really necessary to make some of the most complex works

out there.

He's gone to culinary school.

He was a chef for a while.

And he was also a marine biologist for a while.

So these origami artists have come

from many different walks of life.

This next folder, Eric Joisel, he's a Frenchman,

lives in Paris.

He was a former clay sculptor.

And actually, I think you can really see that in his work,

the kind of solidness and really cohesiveness

of his composition.

All the detail and texturing are very well

thought out in terms of the subject as a complete piece.

Heavily influenced by Yoshizawa.

A lot of this use of texture, incorporating texture

into his models, he was a big pioneer in that area.

This texturing is fairly obviously non-uniaxial.

He doesn't go through a tree method

and represent each one of these points

as a stick in a stick figure.

These flaps don't lie along an axis.

They don't hinge perpendicular to that axis.

Yet he's able to create these amazing forms in paper.

He has stopped doing clay sculpture

and does origami full time now.

He's very well known for his depiction of the human form.

This is taken from a collection of masks.

He's done numerous, numerous masks

that are really very expressive.

He was one of the first people to really, for me at least,

evoke emotion and convey emotion in his work.

But you can see here, the structural crease pattern

for this face is actually very, very simple.