Kirigami is the cool and lazy cousin of origami - where you use cutting and rejoining as well as folding to create a 3D structure from a flat 2D sheet. It’s cooler than origami because the cutting and gluing allows new structures that origami can’t match; and it’s lazy because that extra bit of freedom can save you a *lot* of intricate folding. Origami techniques are so fiddly that origami often becomes *about* the folding, whereas kirigami is outcome oriented - making the final structure in the simplest and sleekest way. The ideas of kirigami can be used on different scales from the micro-meter to building-sized.
Toen will give a hands-on lesson in the theory of kirigami with examples of seaweed, balloons, soccer balls and tiling patterns, and you will put the ideas into practice with your own cutting and folding. You’ll learn to identify and create the different kinds of curvature that a surface can have. Along the way you’ll accidentally learn some mathematics in a tactile way, hopefully without realising it. There will be no formulas, unless you ask for them.
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
Toen is a mathematician and physicist who has worked on designing porous glass (a teaspoon of this glass powder has a surface area of a football field), investigating how strands and networks can tangle together, and he is now researching kirigami. He was raised in Australia, so has a background in wrestling kangaroos and being blasé about dangerous snakes.