Month: January 2012

How To: More on the Turkish Map Fold

map-fold-5.jpgAfter making my first prompt challenge book using the turkish map fold, I kept thinking about the fold and how I might use it in other books. I tried making a book with multiple folded pages, glued together, but the result was unsatisfying. The folds from the last couple of steps seemed to be in the way, making the pages difficult to open. So I tried stopping at the 5th step, where the page or sheet looks like the figure on the left.
I glued a few of these pages together but didn’t much like the results of that either. After more fiddling around, I tried gluing 2 folds together, turning the result 90 degrees, and gluing them to one half of a piece of card stock (with the point at the outer edge). The card stock is the same size as the original sheet of paper. When I glued another pair of folds to the other side of the card stock, I had a structure that opened quite wonderfully! And a place in the center for some text. (The 2 rectangles at either end make a cover that opens from the center.)

Opening the book reminded me of a flower blooming. Here’s a model I made, with one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems, Bee! I am expecting you!
map-fold-1.jpg
map-fold-2.jpg
map-fold-3.jpg

Mix and Match Books

mix-match-pres.jpgAs I embark on my prompt challenge, I’ve been taking note of interesting book structures that I can use. I’m not sure if this one has a name, other than “mix and match.” Each page is cut into 3 parts, horizontally, so that new pages can be composed by the reader. Most examples I’ve seen build new creatures from a head, torso and legs/feet.
The one to the left is called Build Your Own President and they say “Let your fingers do the voting. Flip the panels of this mix-and-match book to create your own presidential candidate from the smoldering wreckage of the current field. Combine Perry’s great hair with Newt’s humility and Bachmann’s progressive social policies. 1,000 possibilities in total. Just don’t expect to find a good one.”
There’s also an online version {first seen on boing-boing}

Prompt Challenge: Heterotelic

heterotelic, adj. Having the purpose of its existence apart from itself

Here it is only the second of my weekly prompt challenges and I got a word that isn’t visual and its definition is, to say the least, opaque! The usage examples that dictionary.com gave didn’t shed much light on the meaning and a Google search wasn’t much help either. I eventually found the dictionary of difficult words which had this definition: adj. not autotelic. Then, from Wikipedia:

A thing which is autotelic is described as “having a purpose in and not apart from itself”. It is a broad term that can be applied to missionaries, scientists, systems, and so forth…. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes people who are internally driven, and as such may exhibit a sense of purpose and curiosity as autotelic. This determination is an exclusive difference from being externally driven, where things such as comfort, money, power, or fame are the motivating force.

My friend Lisa came to my rescue and we had a long conversation over lunch, puzzling out both words and the examples I had found. After more research, it seems that heterotelic/autotelic always go together, much like yin and yang. And while they are opposites, one is neither all good or all bad. Heterotelic is about external forces or pressures, autotelic is the internal ones. One looks outward, one looks inward. And as I thought about what sort of visual representation I would make, I kept coming back to the idea of balance between opposites. I found this quote from Euripides:

The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us.

That balance is often hard to achieve, and my response to this week’s word is to express the struggle for balance with an animation encapsulated in a flipbook. Here’s a video of what I came up with:


[youtube fV2QrfdxZqU]

The word for this week is, happily, less obscure: perspicacious, adj; Having keen mental perception and understanding; discerning.