Between the Folds

I watched this today in my fibers class with eyed peeled, mouth open (granted, I saw a life-size origami Hachiko at the cherry blossom festival this weekend and thought that was pretty neat). I thought it was cool that many of the artists featured had or had had careers in the science and mathematical fields. Anyway, it's available on Netflix instant play.

One of the people in the video (I forget his name but he apparently started university at age 12, got his phd at 20, and was the youngest professor at MIT) talked about how the act of folding paper changes the memory of that piece of paper. I really like this idea, of a fiber's memory, which is something I started thinking about when I was researching shibori dyeing for my last project. I used a book called Memory on Cloth: Shibori Now by Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada as my primary source and found this quote to be especially useful:

Shibori recognizes and explores the pliancy of the textile and its potential for creating a multitude of shaped-and-resisted designs. When the cloth is returned to its 2D form, the design that emerges is the result of the 3D shape, the type of resist, and the amount of pressure extended by the thread or clamp that secured the shape during the cloth's exposure to the dye. The cloth sensitively records both the shape and the pressure; it is the "memory" of the shape that remains imprinted in the cloth. This is the essence of shibori.