modern art of the day: yoshimoto's cubes

[kaberett]

Yoshimoto's Cube, a series of three Excellent Foldy Fiddle Toys featured at MoMA available to view on YouTube.

There's also, and these I do not pretend to understand, a wide variety of origami guides, which I think are mostly for Cube #1?

This came up because I was, during a chat with simont, fidgeting with one of my toys -- which, as previously mentioned, I first encountered in the gift shop at the Tate Modern. Simon brought out some of his foldy fiddly paper bits with no idea what they were called, we shook the internet, and ta-da! Modern art fell out.

(I am put in mind also of Calder's mobiles -- yes, like nursery mobiles, and I don't think it's just because I went to the Calder exhibition at the Tate Modern a few years back.)

Comments

[mdlbear]

Those are fascinating! It probably isn't a coincidence that YouTube was suggesting a video on the Banach-Tarski Theorem as a follower to the one I found about the cube...

[petrea_mitchell]

I vaguely remember one of those lying around the house when I was a little kid. I never had any idea what it was called. TIL, thanks!

[kaberett]

That was pretty much word-for-word me_and's reaction!

[simont]

I must admit that I still haven't quite managed to work out what Cube #3 (aka "the one I haven't got") actually is.

I understand #1 and #2 well enough that I could at least in principle write down a specification of each one detailed enough to build a working model from (even if actually building it in practice would be an engineering challenge). But #3 is only shown briefly in that video and my polyhedral intuition hasn't so far been good enough to fill in the blanks.

[simont]

... but this video is focused specifically on #3 and probably ought to show enough detail to figure it out. Eventually.

[simont]

Right, got it now! I've made a prototype out of cardboard and sellotape to prove it, and it does all the same things as that video. :-)

[kaberett]

this is entirely delightful, and I am delighted :D