Origami artist SiestaOrigami set out to fold a manual typewriter from a single sheet of paper. No cuts, no glued-on extras, no second sheet.
The square measured 124 centimeters across, a little over four feet, and the folding took a full 24 hours.
The video follows the whole process, from the first design work to the long stretch of folds that pull a keyboard and all the machine’s structural details out of that one flat square.
In origami, every feature you add borrows paper from every other feature. A typewriter is a lot of features.
Somewhere in the planning, the keys, the frame and the carriage all had to be negotiated out of the same finite sheet before a single crease was made.
And then there’s the subject itself. A typewriter is about the most mechanical thing that ever sat on a desk, all levers and springs and little hammers, and its whole job was to put marks on paper. Here it’s made of nothing but paper. Blank paper, at that. We like that a lot.
We don’t know whether anything on it moves. Probably not. It’s a sculpture, and a patient one. But watch the finished piece and see if you can resist the urge to press a key.
Watch the full fold below, and find more of SiestaOrigami’s work on Instagram at @kss_origami.
Images © Copyright SiestaOrigami. via The Awesomer
