Dr. Jeannine Mosely: Business Card Origami Science

Jun 15 Sat
Lecture
7:00pm @ the IFF
Dr. Jeannine Mosely constructing the Business Card Menger Sponge.

Dr. Jeannine Mosely constructing the Business Card Menger Sponge.

For the past 50 years, modular paper folding has been an increasingly important branch of origami, drawing on techniques often more associated with architecture and structural design. Where traditional origami works are folded from a single sheet, modulars are constructed from hundreds or thousands of folded units fitted together in complex geometric configurations. Dr. Jeannine Mosely, an MIT trained software engineer, has been one of the leading practitioners of this challenging artform. In 1995, Mosely began to explore what could be constructed from the humble module of the business card. Folded into cubes, she discovered that business cards could be linked together into arbitrarily complex shapes, including fractals. Since then she has led major projects to build several giant fractal models, including the famous Business Card Menger Sponge  (66,000 cards, 2005) and the Mosely Snowflake Sponge (49,000 cards, 2012). In addition, she has developed techniques for folding business cards into other prismatically-shaped modules. Dr. Mosely’s work has been a major inspiration for the IFF’s current exhibition Making Space and has ignited the imaginations of folders all over the world.

In this event she will talk about the history of business card origami and discuss the mathematical and engineering challenges of designing and building these large-scale, hand-made forms.

The Mosely Snowflake Fractal project at the USC Libraries, 2012.

The Mosely Snowflake Fractal project at the USC Libraries, 2012.