Week 12, Relational Aesthetics: Folds in the Paper

   

     A funny thing happened today.  My daughter came home from school barely able to control her excitement, as she wanted to show me “something special and cool.”  She unzipped her backpack and pulled out a rudimentary origami fortune-teller, made by the hands of a seven-year old, it’s already worn down folds revealing many attempts at folding and hinting of the frustration to get it right.  I immediately recognized what the object was.  The fortune-teller was a means of social status and bragging rights on the playground during my grade school experience since the “reveal flaps” usually entailed who you were going to marry, how many kids you were going to have, what kind of house you were going to live in, and even the locale of that house—be it a mansion or a shack in Paris.  She shared her version of a fortune-teller, prompting me with “pick a number, Mommy,” and after my response she would methodically count out the moves, opening and closing the folded-paper orifice.  “Okay, now pick another one” she said giddily.  At the final turn, my reveal was “you are my B.F.F.”  I admit, the flashback to my youth made me smile, as did the idea that the tradition had persevered into Generation Z (of course her version was much less class and heteronormative bound than what I remembered of my 1980’s framed edition). 

"How the time passes" photo by Faustine Cornette de Saint Cyr

http://whatart33.blogspot.com/2013/01/faustine-god-and-words-visual-oulipo.html

     What the exchange also 

reminded me was just how constrained this fortune-telling device was.  Her version had eight possible outer choices, the outer ring determined the number of moves to the inner ring, and the choice made at that point determined the number of moves to the final reveal.  To her it seemed there were limitless possibilities—an afternoon of fun—and while I did not bother to estimate the total number of combinations, the fact that there were copious combinations to be made struck me as resonant of Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes. Now while the origami fortune-teller would not amount to a hundred thousand billion reveals—although in seven-year old terms it just might—it does hold the promise of infinite outcomes based on a set amount of coordinates.  Such possibility in which “those few pages [folds] already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust” are wholly reminiscent of Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler (254).   What strikes me as also hauntingly Oulipian about the origami fortune-teller is both its playful quality and its attention to alternatives.  Much like for Calvino’s traveler, there are stories that never quite finish (for you can always change the script) and traps of doubling await every turn.  In the origami fortune-teller, a choice of eight on one round leads to a different number, but to choose eight again on the second round leads to a completely different outcome so the eights are always already not the same.  The desire to see what will happen on the next go drives the whole idea of a fortune in the fold.  Such a concept reflects Queneau’s allusion to Heraclitus: “One cannot wash one’s feet twice in the same water” (Arnaud xi).  But, you can still play in the water and, qua Noël Arnaud, you can quench that thirst for the what-ifs, the many iterations of potentielle fortunes. 

"Abstract Comics" by Ibn al Rabin

Works Cited

Arnaud, Noël. “Foreward: Prolegomena to a Fourth Oulipo Manifesto—or Not.”

Calvino, Italo.  If on a a winter's night a traveler.  New York: Harcourt, Inc, 1981.  Print.