As part of our Yume. Digital Dreams collaboration, Jon Sasaki and I spent the first three months of the project in a creative back and forth exchange, and during that process one day he sent me a couple of audio recordings of origami instructions to try and follow.
I was intrigued by his note “… if you’re into it, just play each recording once and try to follow along, please don’t rewind and review parts.”
So I listened and folded. The forms that I ended up with, may not have been what Jon intended or what either of us thought I’d come up with, but none the less we both felt there was something about these unexpected forms that piqued our interest. Eventually this was the exchange that got us started on our final project, Misconstructions.
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The following are Jon’s initial origami audio recordings, that he sent me on March 20th, 2022 — the first day of spring. They are both followed by two views of the forms that I ended up folding.
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After doing the foldings, I went for brisk neighbourhood walk, then came back and wrote the following audio poem, the play of slippages.
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Below is a text version of the poem.
the play of slippages
(a response to the audio recordings received from Jon
on Sunday, March 20, 2022 —
the first day of spring)
mis-read
misunderstood
miscommunications
mis-heard
misplaced
the miss, of slippages
in recorded tolds
in folds
in this spring’s release
of cold
“do not rewind
and review,” you say
I don’t
I won’t
I didn’t
no redoing of the exercise
no going back
no repeat
no repair
no restoring to what I thought the origami might be
no such thing —
generative play
of what? I wonder.
and that’s the thing —
to wonder
the wondrous
with our endless wondering
it’s true, I’m not that interested in pinning down
or boxing in
to try and make something “fit”
the clearly defined (which seems to me
to never really be
about clarity)
so, Jon
your response, to my response
to your drawing of Improvised Kites —
your audio recorded folding instructions, to my audio response
to your drawing
continues
our generative play
and this brings me back to the folds
the creases
the seams
of our exchanges.
I may not know where all this is leading us
but truly, it doesn’t matter —
I am content to let the “should be”
and “need be” filters
fall to the floor
for there’s something much more intriguing
in simply, our back and forth exchange
of building an unknown
don’t you think?