The Art and Craft of Mathematical Expression

This article examines artists’ and designers’ engagements with US legal culture and its pronouncements on the status of code-driven creations as intellectual property. Focusing on a copyright dispute between a computational origami designer and a conceptual artist, it describes the historical circumstances that recast mathematical and computational origami as a creative art form rather than a traditional craft not usually given authorial attribution. Showing how artists’ practices and legal disputes over copyright employed historic and contemporary understandings of code and craft to delineate art, I argue that their resulting interpretations of mathematical and computational origami depended upon reaffirming origami as an Asian subject. Consequently, this article cautions against an ahistorical reliance on code and craft as analytics. It encourages critical engagement with the scalar contexts and racial and historical contingencies from which such analytics operate.