Where were we? Ah yes, Thursday morning, the start of the CFC6 conference. Breakfast in the conference room at 7:30. Ilan has a background as an officer in the Israeli army and likes things to start early and stay on schedule. Not exactly my general vibe, but no big problem either. Bacon and eggs and all kinds of good stuff, lots more time to mingle. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The conference itself was a series of panels, presentations and discussions around various origami topics. One of the things I like about CFC is that it’s an international conference and a good fraction of the attendees were from Europe. It was four days long, so already things that happened on different days run together in my mind. I must say the level of the presentations was very high, and the topics very cool. Brandon Wong in particular demoed some base CP-generating software he’s working on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The panels were interesting and covered topics like origami art and science, book publishing, exhibiting in galleries, teaching, leveraging social media, and ways to broaden the origami community. I’m looking to do more of all these things, but the TLDR is there’s no magic shortcuts, and all of it is alot of hard work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I gave a presentation on folding with fivefold symmetry. It gave some background information and theory, showed a few ways to fold a pentagon from a square, and then dove into a bunch of my own models in various categories including flowers, mandala tilings, fractal\/recursive tilings, Penrose tilings, domes and bowls, several of my single-sheet polyhedra, and models that combined more than one these ideas. I ended with some new work in representational figures, namely a human figure base and experiments with masks and faces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the evening the first night, I wound up playing pool with Brian Webb. Neither of us had played in a long time, but Brian used to be a professional pool shark back in the day, and I wasn’t as rusty as I expected, so it was alot of fun. He gave me a bunch of pointers along the way for bank shots, spin, and that kind of thing, and I actually learned a few things. Last game we played was all bank shots, and we discussed each shot before taking it. In the end the hotel wanted to close the game room because it was late. I sunk the final shot, so now I get to brag that I beat Brian at pool. Friday night the whole convention went out to a group dinner at a place that had indoor bocce, so I played a bunch a bocce games. Brian bought me a beer since that was our bet from the night before. I’d never really played bocce but it was alot of fun. Playing pool the night before was a good warm up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Saturday morning there was an origami exhibit. It was only one day because the hotel was using the other conference rooms for other events such as weddings. It was a small exhibition but totally amazing because it was thirty or so of the world’s top folders. David Brill ran a session in which he called upon every exhibitor to explain one or more of their models. This was really interesting for me, especially to hear the newer folders or those whose wore I was less familiar with. Also interesting to hear how people develop their ideas, and how everyone has to work thru design and technical challenges, gets stuck and tends to put things down and come back to them later with fresh insight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Buffalo Sabres were in the NHL playoffs the whole time, in the quarter finals against the Montreal Canadiens. We watched three games while were out there, two of them at the hotel bar. Saturday night was game six, and the Sabres came from behind to win big and bring the series to t 3-3 tie, forcing game seven back in Buffalo. Unfortunately, they lost that game in overtime, but it was an extremely well-played series. And, the Sabres went from being in dead last place in December, to a long winning streak culminating in their first playoff run in seventeen years. Lots of fun. Hockey was my main sport growing up, and although I haven’t followed hockey in many years, Michelle got into it after the Olympics and I started bandwagoning when it looked like the Sabres were going to make the playoffs. Lots of fun. Here’s looking forward to next season, eh!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meanwhile, no one in the conference thought to look for us at the bar that night, but when the game was over I found where people were doing late-night folding and hung out there a while. Some people were actually wet-folding in the hotel pool!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Listening to several days of origami-oriented talks meant there was lots of time to quietly fold.\u00a0 I explored several ideas from my prezzy, where I thought I could use a better example for the picture on the slide.\u00a0 First one I folded was a new level-2 pentagon fractal just for practice.\u00a0 I gave this to Beth as thank-you at the end of the conference.\u00a0 Next was a new variation, embedding the inner subdivision in a semi-sunken dodecahedron pattern.\u00a0 This one had six big faces, half the full form, so I made this one into a dome.\u00a0 Very cool and effective.\u00a0 I’m going refold it out of different paper for the OUSA convention in July.\u00a0 I had thought that this might make a good study to refine my long-fallow flowerball idea, but it’s good as is.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The last one was a level-3 recursive pentagon fractal.\u00a0 Madonna Yoder gave me a 12″ sheet of skytone paper, so I told her if it worked I’d dedicate the model to her.\u00a0 I figured if I was going thru all the effort, I might as well make it count.\u00a0 The figure is basically a pentagon divided into six smaller pentagons, and each of those divided into six smaller ones, and each of those divided into six smaller ones still!\u00a0 It took me basically a whole day to do the prefolding, and another half day to collapse it.\u00a0 Fortunately, it worked on the first try, and it came out awesome!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The trip home Sunday night was uneventful, except that we came back home into a heat wave. I had to put in the air conditioners first thing Monday morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now I feel all charged up again to do origami, and there’s a bunch of new ideas I want to work on before the convention. I’ve also dusted off my web site and started looking at a long overdue update and redesign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Where were we? Ah yes, Thursday morning, the start of the CFC6 conference. Breakfast in the conference room at 7:30. Ilan has a background as an officer in the Israeli army and likes things to start early and stay on schedule. Not exactly my general vibe, but no big problem either. Bacon and eggs and … Continue reading “Midwest Adventure, Part 2 \u2013 Art and Origami”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,16,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-origami","category-people","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6732"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6740,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6732\/revisions\/6740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}