FoldFest Spring 2021

I had the opportunity to join FoldFest Spring 2021, which was hosted by Origami USA in online. We had to pay $40, but looking at the content and opportunity to meet people, I think it was worth it. Through this post I will share my experience on attending it.

Prior to this, I had only one origami conference experience which was on Indonesia back in 2014. I felt so good when I met people with same hobby and we can discuss and share knowledge. In FoldFest, I had the same feeling. Even though we can't walk around and meet people in person, the committee of FoldFest used a platform called gather.town, which allowed us to create our avatar and explore the premade map. When we walked across someone, within certain proximity, a video call screen will pop up and we can see/talk to each other. To some extent that substitutes the feeling of meeting in person during conference.

Once gather.town was open, I walked and joined random conversation. Finally meeting the people in Origami-dan. The other moment that I was waiting for is to talk with origami designers that I admired. I will get into that later.

When FoldFest officially starts, we have two tracks of classes that happened in parallel. Usually it is lecture vs folding class. I attended all of the lectures because I don't really like video tutorial for origami. There were some lectures that blew my mind, and here are the parts that makes me think so:

1. Robby Kraft's alternative design method where you try to wrap the imaginary object of your model with paper, and form legal (a.k.a non-mush) folds around it. It was unlike the method of allocating flaps and rivers that I was accustomed with.
2. The twist and bend of geometric objects by Rebecca Gieseking. I have never heard of her and her works because I was strictly folding figurative origami. However her explanation on how she constructed her models shocked me for every piece of information. The basic idea is imagining a cylinder being intersected with a plane, and then unwrapped. The intersection area formed a sine-wave-live pattern and you can do some cool stuff about it by shifting and composing it with something else. This gave me some idea to incorporate her techniques on figurative origami design.

We had about 15 minutes break after every lecture. I roamed in gather.town hoping to meet someone I can talk with. I spotted 2 soft targets, namely Michelle Fung and Winston Lee. They share similar feature to me: both uses highly complicated 22.5 design method and I can't read their CPs. So I wanted to ask them how do they design their models.

I didn't have success on connecting with Winston Lee. Even though I was near his avatar, his video and audio is always off. However I was able to talk with Michelle Fung. She kindly explained to me that her design method started with flap arrangement, and then folded here and there using multiples of 22.5 degree folds to the desired shape. Each shape can be reused on another model which reminded me of various models by Syn, where any corner/edge 22.5 flap can be color changed and formed into Syn face. Also her design might start with one feature, like a face, then incrementally expanded to form body. Intuition in folding was important factor in 22.5 design, where you need to get creative in how to bisect, swivel, squash, etc to form what you imagined. This is unlike the circle/river packing that I usually used, where eventually we just sink in and out to thin flap, and shape it. It was great to talk with her.

Once all of the lectures were done, the remaining tracks are filled with folding classes. I can either attend Satoshi Kamiya's class for 4 hours or attend Jun Maekawa's for 2 hours + Yoo Tae Yong's class for another 2 hours. I am highly not confident that I can follow 4 hours of folding, so I choose the latter option.

I followed Maekawa's class to fold scarab beetle. The pace was slightly slower that I expected, but we still have extra time. He explained that this scarab was actually made by blintzing another of his model, which is a turtle (he taught that too given the extra time). Until this day of writing this post I still don't know what does blintz mean, but basically we put the whole square of a base inside a larger square, but rotated 45 degree and made to fit the initial base. The corners of initial base now become the edges in new base, located in the mid-point of each boundaries. I actually used his technique for my poison dart frog.

After the class, Maekawa briefly online in gather.town. I asked him a question about how does he figure out his 22.5 degree molecules. His answer was he used theory similar to Treemaker's universal molecule but inside his brain. Again this align with what Michelle Fung told me before, it was intuition. Possibly experience too. Lastly the idea that 22.5 models are designed by folding intuition was more supported when I watched Kamiya's class recording. One of the attendee asked what is the design process of his models, and his answer was more or less "imagine how it will look like, then reverse engineer it". 

Next come Tae Yong's class. He wasn't confident in speaking English so there was interpreter during the class. However, Jason Ku perfectly narrate every single steps shown by Tae Yong in great details. Something like "now we swivel this edge, and align it with the edge we squashed on previous steps". The pace was fast, and his narration along with beautiful folding sequence made it very doable.

As before, we had opportunity to talk with Tae Yong in gather.town after class. I asked him a question that I had been asking myself for a long time. At some point he posted a funny model in his instagram story but I don't know what it is. Apparently it is a Korean cartoon character. There was no mention of the name but later I found out it is Dooly the dinosaur.

Dooly by Yoo Tae Yong.

The end of Tae Yong's class also mean the end of Kamiya's class. I read several cool comments by people in Origami-dan about his class. One of which was his comment "unlikely" for the question "will ryujin 3.5 be the final form?". He also showed some models that he was working on, namely "elbow crab".

It was around 02.00 in the morning for me. There was still two sessions left, but I don't think I will stay any longer. Broken biological clock is hard to fix when I am in this age, and there will be video recording for all the sessions anyway.

I woke up the next morning at 7, and attended the closing. Overall it was awesome and satisfying experience, where I spent the whole day listening/talking to people who share the same hobby, and hanging out with people with Origami-dan. I have never felt so alive in the past 3 years or so. I will be looking forward to attend future origami convention so long I have the chance to do so.

Dragon by Yoo Tae Yong and scarab and turtle by Jun Maekawa.