Steven Nicholson is a 2yr student at Plymouth university in the United Kingdom studying Graphic communications with typography. And apparently he is a genius with a hole punch? Check out this self portrait using 10 different sized single hole punches on a a1 piece of paper that he just sent over.

For folks interested in the intersection of arts and science, the PBS series Independent Lens is presenting a fascinating in-depth look into origami titled Between the Folds. The film documents "a determined group of theoretical scientists and fine artists who have abandoned their careers and scoffed at their graduate degrees to forge new lives as modern-day paper folders."

Featured in the film are MIT's youngest-ever tenured professor Dr. Erik Demaine; mathematician, sculptor, puzzle maker, and self-taught computer scientist Marty Demaine; master free-style folder Vincent Floderer; pioneering Israeli educator Miri Golan; mathematics professor Dr. Tom Hull; trained artist and instructor Paul Jackson; one of the most technically accomplished folders in the world, Eric Joisel; one of only a few handmade origami papermakers in the world, Michael LaFosse; origami "hyper-realist" and physicist Dr. Robert J. Lang (who was profiled in CRAFT Volume 05); material artist with a masterful understanding of patterns and geometry, Chris K. Palmer; and the father of modern origami, Akira Yoshizawa.

Screenings are part of the Independent Television Service's (ITVS) Community Cinema series, which are free, followed by discussion panels and access to resources.

Between the Folds will be showing in the Bay Area in Oakland on Tuesday, November 17 at 6:00 p.m. at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center and in San Francisco on Wednesday, November 18 at 5:45 p.m. at the San Francisco Main Library. For a list of screenings taking place across the country, check out the film site.

Here are a couple of interesting excerpts from the documentary to get a flavor for it. The following clip features Paul Jackson, an origami artists and art teacher living in Tel Aviv, Israel, speaking of the "one fold":

And this clip shows Michael LaFosse, a master artisan who not only makes origami, but is one of the only handmade origami paper makers in the world, providing a window into his workshop and processes:

You kind of have to see this thing move to get the point. The brand name is RevolveR and, apart from novelty, the "floating spine" binding seems to serve no particular function. Still, it's pretty delightful, and seems to operate on the same principle as the toy commonly known as a "Jacob's Ladder" (Wikipedia). [via Boing Boing]

Eric Testroete, a 3D character artist from Vancouver, sent us this awesome self-portrait costume, an homage to Big Head Mode in videogames.

Papercraft Self Portrait - 2009
Eric's Flickr set

From Etsy seller studiokmo:

four paper panels, each panel measures approximately three feet by four feet (overall dimensions, six feet in width x 8 feet in height) and exposes city blocks of brooklyn, manhattan, queens, and the bronx. the panels fit together like panes of a window and all four pieces must be sold as a set. image one would located in the lower left pane. image two located in the upper left pane. image three in the upper right pane and image four in the lower right pane. image five shows the delicacy of the pieces.

[via Dude Craft]

Grant Thomas, of Making Visual Narratives, pointed us to this free, printable papercraft Zoetrope, featuring the famous motion photos of Eadweard Muybridge.

Free Printable Papercraft Eadweard Muybridge Zoetrope

More:
Laser cut & animated Muybridge horses
Grotesque Menagerie

Geoff at BLDGBLOG writes:

For his student thesis project at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Thomas Hillier produced an immersive narrative world, complete with origami-filled hand-cut book pages and an elaborate model of the story's architectural landscape. Hillier's project was called The Emperor's Castle and it was inspired by the work of Japanese printmaker Hiroshige.

I'm blown away by the intricacy of these models. Hillier's complexity and layering reminds me of the work of Sarah Sze.

Slash: Paper Under the Knife (warning: autoplay video) is the NYC Museum of Arts and Design's third major exhibition, and if it's anywhere near the quality of Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting or Pricked: Extreme Embroidery, it should be fantastic. MAKE favorite Brian Dettmer is involved, as well as many many other incredible paper artists.

Slash: Paper Under the Knife takes the pulse of the international art world's renewed interest in paper as a creative medium and source of artistic inspiration, examining the remarkably diverse use of paper in a range of art forms. Slash is the third exhibition in MAD's Materials and Process series, which examines the renaissance of traditional handcraft materials and techniques in contemporary art and design. The exhibition surveys unusual paper treatments, including works that are burned, torn, cut by lasers, and shredded. A section of the exhibition will focus on artists who modify books to transform them into sculpture, while another will highlight the use of cut paper for film and video animations.

Selected artists will be commissioned to create site-specific or site-referential works, and others will be invited to create work onsite in MAD's three artist studios that will subsequently be installed in the exhibition.

Slash: Paper Under the Knife

October 7, 2009 - April 4, 2010

Museum of Arts and Design

2 Columbus Circle NYC

"Self portrait in a state of fragmentation," is not, in fact, the title of this amazing work by American everyday-object sculptor Tom Friedman. Formally, it's "Untitled." Anyone care to guess what it recently sold for?

There are two tutorials here describing the construction of a Raimi-style Necronomicon prop. The original, by Instructables user onespartan, is pictured uppermost, and a derivative work by Raolin, is pictured at bottom. Nice work, both of you!

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

If you're designing a user interface for an iPhone app the appropriately named NotePod seems like it would be perfect for knocking out a quick sketch. The full-scale die-cut 100pp pad features rounded corners and the familiar minimalist iPhone interface.

[via swiss-miss]

Danish artist Ea Borre created these incredible machines out of paper, cardboard, some Meccano bits, and some junked DC motors.

Ea Borre

Meet Michael Vroegop, aka "Vrogy." He made this set of Halo 3 marine armor for the last Dragoncon. His site doesn't include a lot of details about his process, but I'm pretty sure he starts with digital 3D models, converts them using Pepakura, has them CNC cut, and then folds them up for use either as direct parts or as molds. Vrogy, if you see this, you might take a sec to fill us in down in the comments about how it's done. Also, please consider this a gilded invitation to submit a project to our 2009 Make: Halloween Contest.

Rachel at CRAFT posted up this nifty print-and-fold iPhone dock, easy and functional!

Johan Hybschmann made this amazing work in paper:

One of Johan's student projects, in particular, continues to astound me. What you're looking at in the images reproduced here (alongside Johan's answers to a series of questions I had posed over email) are painstakingly precise laser-cuts made into the pages of a blank sketchbook. As the book is opened and its pages begin to turn, these cuts work together to form a spatial representation of the single, highly choreographed 90-minute shot that is Alexander Sokurov's film Russian Ark. The book's "content" is thus a three-dimensional, perspectivally accurate space.

Find out more on BLDGBLOG. (Thanks, Tatia!)

The Moleskine version of my Thermochromic Maker's Notebook was recently exhibited in Hong Kong at the headquarters of Moleskine Asia. Apparently they think Texas is part of Mexico. Oh well.

Everybody give it up for Papercraft Keyboard Cat! Wooh-ooOOh!

Bonus awesome points to those who keep dancing throughout the assembly process. Grab the pattern over TubbyPaws blog. [via Kitsune Noir]

Robots don't know zines ... Or do they? We're in the midst of celebrating robots this month, with our new issue of MAKE magazine featuring DIY drones, rovers, and bots of all kinds. So imagine our delight when we saw Doctor Popular's robot zine at last weekend's San Francisco Zine Fest.

The graphic zine is actually a 24-page comic book, with each page drawn by a different artist, all in 24 consecutive hours. Doc Pop was even nice enough to sign a copy and then gift it to the office. Thanks much, Doctor Popular!

In MAKE, Volume 19: Robots, Rovers, and Drones, learn how to make a model plane with an autopilot and a built-in robot brain. We'll also show you how to make a comfortable chair and footstool out of a single sheet of plywood, a bicyclist's vest that shows how fast you're going, and projects that introduce you to servomotors. All this, and plenty more, in MAKE, Volume 19! Subscribe to MAKE, or log in to check out the Digital Edition.

Michelle Osmond has posted a thorough step-by-step for this tiny paper Blue Leader by Alex Crosse.

I love this elaborate cardboard dragon posted by Creativeman on Instructables. In fact, upon further inspection you'll see that he's got about 11 cardboard projects uploaded to the DIY site. Fun stuff!

This pizza box is making a clear play at eco-design by calling itself the Green Box, but really, it's just more sensible and convenient than a normal pizza box. All it took was a few extra perforations.

Boring day at the office? Here's a cardboard frisbee to throw around.

Alex Queral does these wonderful heads, carved out of phone books (then painted with
acrylics). In his Artist's Statement, he says:

I carve the faces out of phone books because I like the three-dimensional quality that results and because of the unexpected results that occur working in this medium. The three-dimensional quality enhances the feeling of the pieces as an object as opposed to a picture.

In carving and painting a head from a phone directory, I'm celebrating the individual lost in the anonymous list of thousands of names that describe the size of the community. In addition, I like the idea of creating something that is normally discarded every year into an object of longevity.

Alex Queral

I had a real retro-techno moment seeing this software box from 1986. I remember it well. It's Broderbund's The Toy Shop, a collection of papercraft models you could print out and cut n' fold to create everything from a catapult, to a carousel, to a steam engine (which used a balloon as its power source). Everything worked: cars rolled, catapults shot, zoetropes spun and flickered. Papercraft fanatics Mike and Lacey have put up all of the image files and build instructions for all of the models in the original Toy Shop collection. No C64 needed to access these awesome paper models.

The Toy Shop - 20 Marvelous Mechanical Models that Really Work!

The United States, in collaboration with the United Kingdom and Canada designed and built the first atomic bombs under what was called the Manhattan Project. The scientific research was directed by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The nuclear weapon "Little Boy" was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on Monday, August 6, 1945, followed on August 9 by the detonation of the "Fat Man" nuclear bomb over Nagasaki. These are to date the only attacks with nuclear weapons in the history of warfare.

The paper birds above are for Sadako Sasaki...

Ten years after the bombing, a young Japanese girl called Sadako Sasaki died from leukemia caused by radiation from the blast. Before she died, however, Sadako folded almost a thousand origami paper cranes. Sadako began her project because of a legend that said anyone who folded a thousand paper cranes would be granted a wish. She wished to healthy again so that she could run and play like before, and she pursued her goal with such determination that, although she died of her disease, she succeeded in transforming the paper crane into a symbol of peace for children all over the world. After Sadako's death, children joined together to raise money for a peace park in Hiroshima, and a statue of Sadako holding a crane. Today there is also a small peace park with a statue of Sadako in Seattle, Washington, and children everywhere fold origami paper cranes in her memory and send them to Japan and Seattle threaded on long strings to be draped over the statue. Sadako's story is used to teach children about the consequences of war, and the power of individuals to bring about change.

Also, check out...
Boston.com's photoset.
A review of Dr. Atomic, a opera about building the first nuke.
Hiroshima: Memoir of a Bomb Maker ... "The Gadget"

Well, to laser-etch, anyway. Brooklyn tattoo artist Scott Campbell makes these laser-cut stacks of $1 bills. Recently shown at a gallery in Miami, the stacks are part of a collection called "Make it Rain." Thanks to Billy Baque for the heads-up.

Artist Oscar Diez created this amazing calendar, made of different types of paper and special inks, which is carefully designed to slowly color in the days of the month by capillary action, in real time, over the course of each month. Via Boing Boing.

This video from the awesome British toy store Grand Illusions demonstrates a cool collapsing mechanism, which involves only paper and elastic bands, and allows a rigid display to be set up in about a second and easily folded away again for storage. The French company that makes these is called Marin's. (Beware, their site is flash-based.)

Instructables user piaferre shows us how to slice up a 3D model of an object an recreate it in cardboard and putty. It looks very labor-intensive, but what amazing results!

By way of fellow papercraft enthusiast Cory Doctorow comes images of this incredible castle, posted on Tokyobling. Tokyobling explains:

I had the immense opportunity to see this wonderful paper craft art installation by a genius of the name of Wataru Itou, a young student of a major art university here in Tokyo. The installation is hand made over four years of hard work, complete with electrical lights and a moving train, all made of paper! Clearly, this man must have created one of the most stunning examples of Paper Craft in the world? At the exhibition you will also have the chance to see a video showing Mr. Itou at work in his studio, cutting and folding piece by piece. The exhibition is called Umi no Ue no Oshiro (A Castle On the Ocean ), 海の上のお城. It is exhibited at Uminohotaru, a place which in itself is a major attraction: a service area in the middle of the ocean, right between Tokyo City and Chiba Prefecture.

A Paper Craft Castle On the Ocean [via Boing Boing]