Artist Gallery
Artist Analysis
Aldo Tolino was born in Vienna, Austria in 1979. He achieved his Master of Arts at The University for Applied Arts from 2000-2005, and then his Ph.D. in media theory on computer games and user generated content also at The University of Applied Arts from 2005-2008. He describes his work as 'transdigital' and works in folding photographs to distort faces and other images. He also creates 3D models out of the paper.
The work to the right is an example of the type of work I am going to try and complete based off of Aldo Tolino. The material he used here is paper, as with many of his other works. Typically, Tolino uses photographs he has taken and then printed in order to work with them physically (be it by folding, stapling, or sewing). However, a few of his other works did involve working with pressed leaves and then sewing them down. He goes further than this in his media exploration too as he also works with fabric, and with Boron (the fifth element in the periodic table).
Aldo takes portraits of peoples' faces and folds them to distort their look. As seen to the right, he folded the paper into strips horizontally and diagonally to create triangles and then refolded these in an alternating pattern to create the edit we see here. He then placed this on a white
background and took a photo of it. The effect of this folding is a thoroughly distorted face. This can been seen as the photograph of one of his pieces is not immediately clearly a face. When it comes to how he presents his work he positions it in the centre of the frame so that it takes up the centre third and so that our eyes are immediately drawn to it and not distracted by the negative space (which he keeps completely empty for this same reason). Tolino also uses good lighting so which means his work is well lit and doesn't have too many shadows after each fold, only along the edits. I imagine Tolino used low f-stops to get a clear photograph, as well as fast shutter speed and aperture. He also had a high ISO seeing as his photographs aren't grainy at all.
When I first saw Tolino's work it took me a minute to make sense of it. Initially, all of the folds and creases really made it difficult to identify the face in front of me. After this subsided, I was amazed that something like this was even possible, as it would never have occurred to me to try something similar. I really wanted to figure out the folding pattern Tolino used to create this, as I knew that it would have to be intricate in order to create all of the little triangles that he appears to have folded to create guidelines. By noticing this, I knew I would have to pre-fold creases into the paper I wanted to use so that I too had certain lines to follow when making my own edits.
I think Tolino's work is really inspiring. I would never have imagined trying to fold paper in this way for this outcome, which makes me really excited to try replicating and building on his work. I have a few ideas of how I might incorporate some of the other artists' work too as I would like to use abnormal colours (like the coloured strips I used during my work on Caro Mantke) and try making a cube out of the folded paper. Overall, my opinion of this work is that it is really impressive and I can't wait to try my hand at emulating it.
Photoshoot Plan
Here is a photoshoot plan I made for this part of the project. It focuses on the original photographs I want to take and how I'm going to set up the camera to take them. I once again kept the colour scheme cohesive to Tolino's work, and included an edit of what I want the outcome to look like.
Contact Sheets
These are my contact sheets for the first photoshoot I did. Like I wrote in my photoshoot plan, I was mainly focused on capturing the face, so I tried to make sure the face was centred and that there wasn't too much negative space (although there is in quite a few so I plan to crop my photographs before I print them to fold). I have circled the images which I think are most successful (in this case that means ones which are either clear, close up shots or images that capture the whole face), and crossed out ones which are less so. However, I may still use them in my edits.
Cropped Photographs
These are the cropped edits I made of my photoshoot. I made them to try and eliminate as much of the negative space (background) as possible and to make sure that I'm only distorting the face, not neck and shoulders too. Overall, I am happy with how they came out as now I have photographs that I'm ready to work with.
Highlighting Success
These are my most successful crops as the faces are all centred and not obscured. The features are also clear, which is beneficial as it means they should still be recognisable even after I distort them. As well as this, all of these photographs have minimal negative space, as it is generally confined to the two top corners.
Folded Edits
These are my basic folded edits inspired by Aldo Tolino. For the first five I tried to create small folds to emulate a pixelated affect. For the last ones, I made random folds and sewed over top of them using a sewing machine to keep the folds down and to further distort the face. Overall I am pleased with these edits, and I plan to do some close up photos of the stitching to capture their detail. I would also like to make some with distorted colours using LEDs lights in a different photoshoot.
These are my basic folded edits inspired by Aldo Tolino. For the first five I tried to create small folds to emulate a pixelated affect. For the last ones, I made random folds and sewed over top of them using a sewing machine to keep the folds down and to further distort the face. Overall I am pleased with these edits, and I plan to do some close up photos of the stitching to capture their detail. I would also like to make some with distorted colours using LEDs lights in a different photoshoot.
Highlighting Success
These are my most successful edits of the folded and stitched set (I have included two of each). The first was successful as I was really pleased with how the left eye was kept mostly in-tact whilst the rest looked pixelated thanks to the perpendicular folding. The second edit was successful for a similar reason; I was really pleased with the square of mini-squares the folds created at the base of the face. I did this by folding once vertically, once horizontally, and then alternating between the two. The final two are successful as the stitching really stands out on them, and I like how it fits with the folds. I really think these two edits distorted the face well.
The Cube
This is on of my edits that I'm most proud of. I manages to make a cube from the folded paper edits inspired by Aldo Tolino. To make this, I first used each of the square sides (as shown at the end of the gallery above), and used masking tape to fasten each of the edges together. I did this until I only had one side left, at which point it became a bit harder to attach the last face, as I had to put making tape on each of the four sides and then lower the fifth onto them. Overall, I am really pleased with how this cube turned out, and I'll continue this idea but in colour for my developments. I would also like to try using tracing paper and playing lights inside. When I do this, I will have to find a new way to build the cube that doesn't include using masking tape, seeing as it isn't transparent.
Photoshoot Two
This is my second photoshoot for Aldo Tolino. I also used LEDs to colour the lighting here. I thought it would be interesting to experiment with folding coloured faces, and how if the skin is an abnormal colour the image of a person will become even more distorted and unrecognisable. I also had the idea to try making a box out of coloured edits printed on tracing paper and putting lights in them to make a display. This is why I took this second photoshoot.
Colour Edits
These are the coloured edits I did for Aldo Tolino using my second photoshoot. I printed out ten coloured photographs and cut them up. After that, I selected different cut out shapes and overlapped them so I could stick them together. After that, I folded up the stuck-together edits. Then, using a sewing machine I sewed along the top of the folds I made. This resulted in the edits above. These relate to Aldo Tolino's work as they mimic his folded and sewn edits except these are using abnormal colours. I think the use of these colours further adds to the distorted element of hidden identity as you wouldn't expect a face to be purple or blue, for example. In this way these edits further make the faces more unrecognisable.
Close Up Photographs
These are the close-up photographs I took of the coloured edits. I did this to show the texture in the photographs and how the stitching and folds created depth. Overall I am pleased with these images as I think they clearly show the sewing and folding that went into assembling these edits.
Highlighting Success
These are the most successful of the close up photographs. I'm overall really pleased with the vibrancy of the colours, and how the thread clearly stands out. These are some of the most successful photographs of this Identity project yet, just because I really like how they appear really clean and finished. If I were to redo them, I would probably try and finish off my lines of thread properly, as they sometimes turned out a bit messy or damaged the paper.
The Gradient Cube
As a final development I made another cube. However, with this one, I decided to create a gra gradient. To do this, I coloured four sides of the cube in a purple-pink gradient (colours insired by Mantke's bright use of colour), and made one entirely pink and one entirely purple side. I kept two sides plain colour in order for the top and bottom halfs of the cubes to have a finished gradient on them. After this, I printed out the coloured images and folded them using the same technique I did for the previous cube (folding the paper in half diagonally and then folding the corners to meet the centre half to create perfectly even folds). Once I had folded all the sides, I attached them together using coloured paper to hide the gaps between the sides. Then I took photographs of the cube on an infinity background.
Faces Book
As a final development, I made a small fold-out book of some developed folded faces. These faces showcase how I learnt to fold paper to create geometric shapes similar to the ones made by Tolino. HEre there is both vertical-horizontal folding, as well as diagonal folding. I also incorporated some of the gradients I've been experimenting with through the orange-pink folded pieces. To make these, I first cut images of faces into squares before folding them in half (either diagonally or straight), and then bringing the edges to meet that fold to halve the folded sections. I did this several times in both directions to make squares out of the perpendicular folds. After that, it was simply a matter of refolding along whichever line I needed to create smaller, pixelated-looking squares. The result is these five edits.
Here are photographs of each of the individual faces inside the booklet.
I decorated the back of the booklet with this triangular mosaic. I used scraps from the bits of photographs I had to cut off in order to make squares. I wanted to keep with Tolino's trigonometric theme, so I cut the scraps into triangles, and sticking the larger ones down first, made this collage to decorate the other side of the book. I am really pleased with how this turned out as I really think that it fits with the theme but also works well as a stand-alone extra piece of work. It just shows another way to manipulate photographs, which is what this project is about, after all. I think it really finished the booklet off well.