Green Balance

ERIK DEMAINE: Hi! I’m Eric Demaine, and I’m both an artist and a scientist. I like to explore curved crease folding both in a mathematical and an artistic perspective. I work a lot with my father. Both my dad and I are glassblowers. This is blown glass enclosing folded paper. It’s been interested here through a little hole here. It’s kind of a ship in a bottle. This is from sheets of dollar bills straight from the US mint.

We start from a circular piece of paper with a circular hole. I like this one, and its folded with concentric circular creases. It’s a very simple folding and principle but it ends up with a very complicated three-dimensional shape. The paper pops itself into this 3D form. This concentric circle model actually goes back to Bauhaus of the late 1920s and we’ve been pushing it farther by combining multiple circles together. And in general, we’re trying to understand what 3D shapes are possible by this kind of self-folding origami. We could imagine building any 3D structure you desire.