MODERN PAPERFOLDING MAY BE LOOKED UPON AS A STRUGGLE TO BREAK OUT OF THE TYRRANY OF THE SQUARE
Today I took a writing test, as part of the interview process for becoming a full time course developer, instead of a contract media developer (“pullin triggas fo tha scrilla”). The test was to write an instruction guide for making a paper airplane.
The story of modern paperfolding technique begins with Spanish philosopher Miguel Unamuno (1864-1936). Unamuno’s writing was influential on later existentialist thought and he is often compared to Kierkegaard. Like the Danish philosopher, he interrogated the boundaries of reason and faith and his aim was to understand life in its complex emotional and intellectual dimensions. He was skeptical of rationality and resisted systematic philosophizing, preferring fiction as the medium of his ideas.
In 1902, Unamuno produced a supposedly humorous exegesis on the subject of an origami called “pajarita,” which is Spanish for “female bird.” (The Japanese refer to the same shape as a dog.) In doing so, he altered the course of European paperfolding away from the square and towards bird-based designs. I say “supposedly” because it’s hard to imagine the author of a line like
“There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. Man is the more man – that is, the more divine – the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.”
would be likely to create a sentimental treatise about a paper bird.
Is how my instructions would have begun if I’d been able to do some research first.