We start this year with a great display of faces, with
eyes, ears, nose and mouth in many combinations. Use the face
builder to generate the face you like best, and try to make more variants. It's easy!
Background
The faces are a result of a cooperation in the Danish folding school. They were first displayed
at Brønderslev public library by Simon in the autumn 2008 with 72 systematic variants distributed over
13 sheets. And now mechanized as a facebuilder here, and next time exhibited at Herlev public library in
week 7, 2009, by me (in a new set).
Each maske is pretty simple, they take at most 5 minutes to fold. Thus it can be expected that some of
them have been folded by other people through the time. The new aspect is the generative systematics
which spawns a creative multitude of new models.
The systematic framework is: A simple base with directions on where to place ears, eyes, and nose/mouth.
Within that framework an in practice unlimited set of possibilities exist where anybody can find their
own models. In that respect there is a relationship to Friedrich Fröbel's "Folds of beauty" which in the
first half of the 19th century ín Germany was applied in the pedagogical inspiration of children in his
newly invented kindergartens. The "Folds of beauty" defines a multitude of symmetrical patterns within a
systematic framework of blintz and double blintz folds. The Fröbelian school put most weight on these
"Folds of beauty" which unfortunately implied that other branches of origami, such as "Folds of life"
(small animals and birds), were suppressed. In the long term an otherwise great idea of creativity thus
ended up limiting the creativity.
Hopefully the faces here will become a modern example of the creative generativity there no doubt was
(and is) in Fröbel's "Folds of beauty", without missing the real multitude that is inherent in origami.
Maybe we even can come up with other examples lateron. We (not the least Simon and Anthon) have worked
much with other simple forms of folds, such as "kvader folds" (being small animals from small squares,
e.g. the young bird) and proto folds (pieces of folds put
together in larger models, see weekly fold 2008-49 about
cardboard folding).
PS: "The Danish folding school" is a direct translation of "Den danske foldeskole" which is a word play on
"Den danske folkeskole" which means "The Danish Public School". If anybody has a good equivalent in the
English, I would love to hear it.