Origami may seem an unlikely medium for understanding and explaining the world. But around the globe, several fine artists and theoretical scientists are abandoning more conventional career paths to forge lives as modern-day paper folders. Through origami, these offbeat and provocative minds are reshaping ideas of creativity and revealing the relationship between art and science. This film chronicles 10 of their stories: three of the world's foremost origami artists, less conventional artists, abstract artists, advanced mathematicians and a remarkable scientist who received a MacArthur Genius Award for his computational origami research. While debates ebb and flow on issues of folding technique, symbolism and purpose, this film shows how closely art and science are intertwined. The medium of paper folding--a simple blank, uncut square--emerges as a metaphor for the creative potential of transformation in all of us.

CIRC # 261.

Introduction -- The artisan -- The artist -- The engineer -- The father -- The bug wars -- The great debate -- The postmodernist -- The choreographer -- Les anarchistes -- Functional form -- Theory of everything. Special features: Featurette: Origametria (8 min.) [short film about a teaching program run by the Israeli Origami Center (IOC)] ; Outtakes (25 min.): Papermaking -- Life as a folder -- Art / Science -- Problem(s) with paper -- Purpose & pattern -- Future ambitions -- Next big thing; Trailer (2 min.).