Enfolding and Unfolding
An Aesthetics for the Information Age
By Laura Marks
Design by Raegan Kelly

Author's Statement

The concepts presented in this piece are better understood in diagrams than in words, and in moving diagrams than still ones. Thus it had been my dream for years, after drawing endless iterations of Enfolding-Unfolding on whiteboards and chalkboards, to somehow animate the diagram. The result you see here enfolds and unfolds the creative intelligence of designer Raegan Kelly. An audiovisual thinker exquisitely attuned to the expressive capacities of the line, Kelly was able to translate my ideas and descriptions into moving images that capture the qualities of implication and explication: the magnetic pull of one plane on another, the hesitation to unfold, the brutality of selection, the gradual dwindling of an event into stillness; qualities of playfulness, ephemerality, recalcitrance, inexorability. Kelly is a true animator who understands the nonorganic life of the line. As you interact with the piece, you may come across a verbal description of the behavior of the diagram, which will allow you to appreciate Kelly's translation of my ideas and to compare how ideas are unfolded verbally and audiovisually.