Details

Thinking about the paper as a document, as an archive. It is money, it is a deed, it is a contract. The Bible, the ticket, the diary, the bill. Paper is binding, meant to document the absolute or archive the important. And yet it's one of the most fragile things we handle on a frequent basis. It rips with ease, it dissolves when wet, and it takes just a little bit of force to fold and crumple, creating permanent marks and waves.

A therapist once told me that I need to think about change like a wave. From an individualistic lens, when we see a powerful wave crashing through, we think about the water molecule traveling the distance of the wave. When in actuality, the molecules don't actually travel the length of the visible wave, they mostly vibrate in place, setting off adjacent molecules to vibrate, which then set up more adjacent molecules to vibrate, thus creating a wave. Like a stadium wave, one doesn't have to try to imagine themself traversing the entire stadium to make movement, but rather just focus on their own role standing up and down and getting their pals to do the same.

Pilot, the stationery brand, has a series of really cute planner stamps, and I picked up one of a swimmer (Naturally, since I can't swim). I was never going to use it for my planner, but I was enamored with the idea of a swimmer traversing the great sea of stationery where the paper itself is the landscape.

In this case, it is swimming in the choppy waters of folds and creases. I don't think the folds here were intentional, a sheet of origami paper that might have just been caught in the bottom of a thick stack of papers. But instead of it being useless, it still serves the purpose of a piece of paper, as a document—an archive of what the paper itself has gone through.

This is what the swimmer is traveling across: waves of folded memory. The interesting thing about looking at crumpled paper is that while there are the obvious, deep folds and marks, maybe where pressure is directly applied, there is also this entire web of more shallow valleys and mountains that emerge. The details is what gives the crumpled page a texture, a texture so appealing that now we seek to add these effects to digital art. When we think about change less from a top-down view of architecting every move, and more from this messy web of creases, it gives us room to see the beautiful ocean in a sea of crumpled trash.