During the last couple of days, my eyes have been peeled for any inspiration pertaining to the Art Now idea I could perhaps blog about. When I had resulted to nothing, I tried to think back a couple weeks to maybe remember anything I could comment on but as usual, nothing was clicking. It wasn’t until I accessed the front page of my laptop, the Apple Startpage, did I think EUREKA!
It’s Mac to save the day, hence the title.
The Startpage had an article on it dating January 24, 2008 and titled “Folding the Mac into Origami”. The article deals with an Origami Master, Robert J. Lang who creates some of the most astonishing Origami creations with the sole use of a MacBook Pro. The artist himself created two freeware programs: TreeMaker and ReferenceFinder, and along with another program, Mathematica, conceptually plots out his creations and maps them out for a rendition on paper. The point he’s trying to make doesn’t have as much to do with his origami, as much as it does with the Mac itself.
Lang states that on a Mac he can “shift effortlessly and seamlessly from program to program, whether he’s designing a figure, analyzing its underlying mathematics, creating folding instructions of a book or documenting it on a website, the Mac simply becomes an extension of his hands and mind.” The Mac is the true art piece in this instance; its versatility of programs and compatibility is what has made the Apple product a state of the art machine. Lang summarizes that the biggest reason he’s stayed with the Mac is that in his origami work, he uses a lot of programs and since there’s no giant origami program, he uses bits and pieces of a lot of programs. “The Mac programs just cooperate with each other.” At the end of the day, we can look back on the past couple decades and realize the advancement of electronics and technology. I know I wasn’t alive back when computers were the size of a room, but I’ve heard the phrase used a million plus one times by teachers or grandparents, which leads me to believe that we’ve come a pretty long way.
Lang uses his MacBook Pro to keep all of his origami work, book manuscripts and illustrations in one place, he says “I take it with me and I live off the laptop. I love that wherever I am, I can have my life with me.” Isn’t it amazing that you can have absolutely everything you need, within reason of course, in one compact 17″ piece of equipment? As for me, I tend to agree, my life would not be the same without my MacBaby. 🙂
Here are a couple examples of Lang’s Origami..
Edyta Kuciapa's Weblog for Art and Electronic Media 
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