As you can tell, I’m rather terrible at titles. Its the first thing you see, and it’s probably the last thing that should be written. But the interface i am working with here would get lost amongst a plethora of UNTITLED DRAFT NO. 453 if I didn’t put something in there and so I do put something in there and sometimes it sticks and sometimes it gets retconned. But that is not this time.
This missive is about the creative process, about how sometimes you start with an idea, and it is terrible, or clunky, but has heart, and so you stick with it and it becomes more of itself, and therefor beautiful.
In this case, it’s about shapes, because this is me, so of course it is.
I am working with a shape I have named “boxohedron” because the twisted triangular antiprism known as Wunderlich’s (or Schoenhardt’s) octahedron is harder to say, takes longer to type, and Schoenhardt has a problematic past.1
I also feel it should probably be called the Karlis Johansons’ Octahedron in official literature, since he, as an artist, put a model of it on display a full seven years before Schoenhardt put it in a maths journal, but what do i know?
I find this particular shape fascinating because it is basically three struts turbining around a common center in compression with nine connecting wires keeping the whole thing together in tension allowing a very minimal material use for filling space. In short, a great lego-brick form geodesic domes.
That said, they are a might tricky in the strut-cable tension technique, requiring a rather high amount of precision to keep crisp edges. Sooooooooo why not make it out of paper, I ask myself. To which i could only reply: “But of course!” thereby scaring the cat and lessening our supply of cardstock.
Wooooooooo here we go. First, you print off a design you think will be gudd.
Then you congratulate yourself for it all coming together but realize it is a bit smol and clunky and uses a lot of glue and is not expandable and really didn’t like being folded up so tight.
So you iterate. Revise. Step back, re-organize, try to get a handle on the feeling of the piece. It’s struts need to be longer, thinner, crisper. Clean lines, yes. There needs to be, no, there must be color.
And then, blammo, all of the sudden you have three gradient-spectrumed wings of the boxohedron in the wild, and it’s kind of staring at you whilst spinning at the same time, wondering what you’re going to do next.
Six iterations isn’t bad. A semi-recently famous novel about a boy in a wizard school had fifteen revisions, and it was really just a riff on star wars, so whatever.
Yes, note the ominous theme in the video…muahahahah
But until next time…https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/TwistedAntiprism/ How this will all come together will be for another post, stay tuned.
PS: This is a fun interactive widget.
fucking nazis