Accordion-folds are not the only style of book susceptible to a mock-DIY approach, of course. My original interest in these alternative formats was sparked by a visit to an exhibition of Buddhist texts at the British Library back in January, and prominent among these were many examples of the palm-leaf book, in which long narrow "pages" (originally made from processed palm-leaves, but subsequently from other materials shaped to the same format) are strung together like a slatted blind.
So here is a first attempt at a DIY, card-engineered palm-leaf book. If I have another go, I may make more of an effort at some proper 3-D modelling: each "page" could be a six-sided flat box, for example (this is where the lessons learned from my packaging deconstruction hobby will come in handy). But I like the visual impression it gives, anyway; it has a certain Zen presence.
Talking of which, and given you can barely see the detail at this scale (the original is 50cm square) and would have enormous difficulty cutting your screen up to assemble it correctly – no, please don't try – I can reveal that a haiku by Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828) is hidden in there:
On the morning frost
The blacksmith's sparks
splashing
For no reason, really, other than that one of the raw materials was this previous four-bar construct:
Which, in turn, made use of one of the many circular haiku texts I created for the exhibition "The Colour of the Water" (2003) and the subsequent book Downward Skies:
As with the cardboard boxes, I like to recycle stuff, even if it is only made of pixels.
2 comments:
Now I kind of want to make up some fake "cut it out" sheets. Some sort of art, overlaid with faint dotted, dashed, and solid lines for cutting, scoring, folding, gluing, which are nonsensical but convincing looking.
You have seen the previous posts? Actually, my original idea was to make them so that they were impossible to make, but that's actually more difficult than you might think.
Mike
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