Another OUSA Convention has come and gone. This one was extra special for me because I was one of the special guests. The others were Jannie van Schuylenburg from the Netherlands and Himanshu Agrawal from India. It was a great honor and great fun. Lots of people treating me special all weekend.
There were lots of changes this year. The biggest one is that the convention now runs Friday to Sunday rather than Saturday to Monday. This also means that registration and hospitality open Thursday evening. Jeannie is running the registration desk for the second year, and is on the convention committee, and is alot more confident and taking charge of things now that she knows what’s going on. Similarly, Eric and Emma, the convention co-chairs, seem to be really hitting their stride and leveling things up in alot ways. Attendance was up above five hundred people for the first time since the pandemic.
I actually showed up on Wednesday for a dinner for the special guests. The other two had flown in from overseas that day. I was a bit early and Jeannie, Emma, Eric and Wendy were all there setting things up, so I pitched in. At dinner I met Jannie, and she’s very nice, and taught us a model of hers, a horse paperclip. Himanshu apparently had a very long and kinda rough and retired to his room as soon as he arrived.
Thursday I spent the day at home preparing for my classes and my exhibit, and gathering supplies. I drove into the city in the afternoon, and picked up Michelle from her job in The Bronx on the way. First thing I did when I arrived was set up my exhibit. It was there I met Himanshu, and right at that moment John Montroll appeared. John and Himanshu were old friends and it was great to see them catch up.
I didn’t know quite what to bring for my exhibit, so I brought a bunch of the best of everything, figuring I’d sort it out when I saw the space they gave me. It turns out that as a special guest I get two tables worth of space, so I was able to display most everything. I made several groups. One was of all the spaceships and airplanes, featuring my U.F.O. surrounded by the others in a ring. The U.F.O. was sort of the mascot of the convention, being featured on the cover of the annual collection. Another group was of my single-sheet polyhedra and related models such as domes. A third group was flat geometric models, that is to say tessellations. In between these was a group of large animals, elephants and my moose, and smaller animals, foxes, loons, my platypus and armadillo, and finally a group of insects, my inchworm, butterfly and spider. There were a few others but that was the main layout. All in all very impressive, and I was glad to have all that space.
Friday morning was a new event, a folding event featuring the special guests teaching a model for the whole convention, and getting a chance to say something about our work and approach to origami as an art fold. I went first and taught my Retro Rocket. It’s at intermediate to hight intermediate level, but most people in the audience got it with no problem, and I think most of those that needed help got it. It’s actually one of my simpler models, and can be folded in ten or twenty minutes, it’s a cool, good looking model with lots of appeal. It’s an interesting challenge teaching a group of several hundred people.
I taught lots of regular class sessions over the course of the convention. In fact I taught five, one in each block, which is about twice my usual level. I’ve really been focusing on trying to level up my teaching skills, so this was a good opportunity. I decided to teach two classes each from three of my main areas of work: spaceships, animals, and geometric, split between intermediate and complex courses.
My first class was my Foxy Fox, from my book Origami Animal Sculptures. It’s one my oldest models, and starts with a stretched bird base. It features a cute, stylized body with fluffy tail and color changes for the ears and the tip of the tail.
Saturday morning my first class was my presentation on folding with fivefold symmetry. I first gave this talk at CFC in Ann Arbor in May, but I updated a few slides with images of new models I’d created since then, including some domes and my level-3 Penfractal tessellation. The talk drew a full audience and went over well, and afterwards a good handful of people came up to the front and we hung around and talked pentagons for a while. I related this to Jeannie later and she said, “you found your people.”
Lunchtime Saturday was the paper airplane contest, which I run with the help of Michelle. Every year it seems we have to make up some rules. For example this year we explicitly banned tape, glue, cutting, paperclips and wights. Although of these were understood to be illegal before, we had a few contestants last you whose planes had to be banned.
This year we had an interesting situation. One of the contests was for maximum time aloft. Most people use glider-style planes. However, the person who won used a simple unfolded sheet of paper as her airplane, and let it float to the ground. Several other people copied her, but none of them came close to winning; it’s a risky strategy because there’s no control over how the paper falls. Another completion was for coming close to a target. Someone uses a crumpled up ball of paper as their entry, but didn’t come close since it kept on rolling right pass the target area.
Although there’s no rule explicitly prohibiting a no-crease plane, or a crumpled ball, these seem to violate the spirit of the competition, so I want to make a new rule for next year. But what rule exactly? What exactly defines an origami paper airplane? What kind of rule would be clear, fair and enforceable. Ideally we wouldn’t want to ban entires of a nontraditional form, but make the contest such that they won’t win.
Anyway, after lunch I taught my Dimpled Dodecahedron Dome, a new model based on my experiments with folding fivefold geometry. This class was quite full too, and the model went over quite well. Kathy, a volunteer who provided pre-cut sheets of pentagon paper, gave me quite a few, so I was able to give several to everyone in the class. We had a little extra time at the end so I had them fold a simple flower as a bonus model.
Saturday night was the giant folding competition. This one was extra fun for a few reasons. One was Michelle was on a team, and so was John Montroll. Michelle’s team folded Richard Ellison’s Eagle, which is a very cool model John folded one of his Horse models. Someone tried to fold my U.F.O. but ripped the paper halfway thru.
Sunday morning I taught my U.F.O. This is a complex model and the class was two periods. In a special moment, someone pulled out a pack of Star Dream paper at the start of class and shared it with everybody. This is perfect paper for this model, being thicker than regular kami, with a beautiful sparkly luster, and also 12″ instead of 10″. Most people finished the model and did a great job.
Sunday lunchtime they asked me to do a book signing session. The idea was to help promote the books of mine that are carried by the Source, but I ended up signing more copies of the Annual Collection than my own book. However, I signed quite a few copies of both my books at my classes in evening and late-night folding.
The last class I taught was my Loon, another classic from Animal Sculptures. This was a very popular class and I must say the model remains on of my favorites today.
In the course of the weekend I created a new model, a squirrel with a big bushy pose-able tail. I was inspired by Emma telling about research she did studying squirrel vocalizations in college, and how they communicate largely with their tails. And my talking with John Montroll broadly about different approaches to designing animals.
Of course over weekend there was alot hanging out with old and new friends. We went out to dinner every night, to Thai, Chinese, Pizza and Sushi. The last night we had to hurry back for giant folding, so afterwards a bunch of use made our way down to the hotel bar. At various times I talked to Emma, Jason, Zander and Robert about the web site. Robert is looking to hand of the programming to someone else, and my feeling is that it could use some major work, including migrating to a whole new technology stack, re-styling the whole thing staring with the home page, and making the use admin workflows for things like convention registration more streamlined some other stuff. So I’m thinking of substantially increasing my level commitment. Next step is to pitch this to the board, since the scope of the work is way to big to do wholly on a volunteer basis.
The Monday night dinner is now on Sunday. I ended up talking with Himanshu for a long time about teaching.