Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Between the Folds

The piece in question
Just yesterday I was playing around with a piece of paper, folding it, watching it, seeing how it could move.  I showed it to a friend and said, "I guess what I'm doing is improvisational origami."

Just today I mentioned the same thing to a different friend.  She said, "Have you seen Between the Folds?  You have to..."

Here's the trailer for the movie -- it's on hold at the library.  Hopefully I'll get to watch it soon.  Can't wait, can't wait, can't wait...

Every day I am finding more and more of the pieces that connect math, art, dance, rhythm, science, expression and creative practice.  I think the reason I'm so excited is that I recently found my way back from a wrong turn I took with this inquiry. But, that's part of the process, too, no matter what the medium. After determining what I don't want or need to do right now, the missing pieces seem to be falling into place.

[Edit: This post seems to be getting a lot of traffic, for some reason. If you're interested, here is the follow up post I wrote after viewing the documentary.]

5 comments:

  1. >I recently found my way back from a wrong turn I took recently with this inquiry.

    I would love to hear more about the wrong turn.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, I got a bunch of books from the IUB library about embodied cognition, metaphoric thinking, and that book by Lakoff & Nunez about 'how the embodied mind brings mathematics into being' (which I may give a second chance)and also a bunch of journal articles -- in a nut shell I turned down a path that looked interesting but turned out to be way more complex and abstract than I wanted or needed.

    You'll laugh, but I actually missed Math while I was on my little detour. It's a little ironic that, in the process of exploring embodied knowing I ended up feeling detached/disconnected from any real meaning in my life. It's really too hard to explain well, but when I think about and read about math through the lense of all the smart, hands-on, narrative-experiential-based math-ed folks out there, I feel like I'm learning and doing something *real*.

    Cognitive science and discussions on semantics, not so much. I get a little dizzy and somewhat queasy when I was focusing too hard on multiple interpretations of words that are just abstractions of concepts that can't be physically manipulated or experienced or even seen (as in images, pictures, etc.) I don't want to sound over-judgemental it's just that the level at which I was trying to understand that work was just too many steps removed from what I really want to be doing.

    But I didn't know it until I tried and now I am much clearer about where to put my energies.

    How's that, Sue? :-)

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  3. I got a big grin on my face reading this! I so agree. Big words are the bane of real communication sometimes. I'm glad you found your way back to the good stuff.

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  4. We participate in a world of structure, relations, order. What we call mathematics gives us, in a way, the best language for talking about it.

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Thanks for reading. I would love to hear your thoughts and comments!

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