Reuben Margolin: On Kinetic Art

Thanks great so yesterday I was walking around Camden and I had this idea that I would go to the hardware store by the base is a really bad idea I had enough sense not to follow through with it but go to the hardware store buy some pulleys and some nuts and bolts a few pieces of two-by-fours and bolt the pulleys you know to the 2x4 and then strapped the two-by-fours to my feet so while I was giving the presentation I could just kind of glide around there's a couple of bad ideas at work they don't know how to roller-skate into there's a rug up here and rugs and the friction and pulleys are probably mechanically not so great um I've been I'm from Berkeley California and let's see if and I've been making things that have moved in one form or another for long as I could remember this is a pair of stilts may have two by twos and two by fours and and made out of wood olive wood and in high school I really really loved all kinds of math but particularly constructions and particularly what you can make with a straight edge and a compass and all the wonderful sort of shapes and also just the hands-on aspect of that kind of math and I went to college and start a study math and then change majors to geology because I wanted to go camping and then I changed majors again to anthropology because I wanted to go traveling and then my senior year I change majors again and graduated in English because I wanted to be a poet which is part of the for me one of the worst ideas I ever tried and I set off after college with this typewriter strapped to the back of my motorcycle and and I had an idea that if I if every stop I wrote a poem by the time I got cross country I'd have my first book of poetry so I stopped shortly out of town for gas and there's a picnic table and put some paper in the machine and sat down and you know I maybe decided that every other stop might be a little bit of a better better strategy I became every third stop and pretty soon he knows all the way back to California and I was like alright this is not working so well so I thought what I need is a table to write on at this table instead of having table legs what if it had wheels and also a motor and I could drive it around the country having conversations about utopian and meaning your life so I built this this is the travelling Commons and it's got a sort of a cut-down and welded together VW chassis and I've loaded it up with the two typewriters and no spare tire and the middle part of it folded down to make a flat tabletop and this is the this is the view looking backwards it was a pretty it wasn't a really great trip I lasted about five months I did not make it around the world made it to sort of the middle of Texas and it was a very big state so I did well but it's it it's that it's there was really hot like all this time you know what bounced off the whole perimeter of the table and I was quite happy to get off of it in 1994 I got a very interested in this caterpillar that I saw and while I talked about the caterpillar I'd like to bring up this sculpture over here please and if anyone's debating right now between sculpture and painting you're going to see why payday is a little bit easier that sculpture has he's like logistic although it's a good segue this is so the caterpillar that I saw in 94 I started Utah and believe it or not it was transparent and I could see how it moved and it and I decided I was going to make a mechanical version of it and the first thing I did is spend two months working on the math and I got the mouth completely upside down and backwards and eventually I got it right but for this the first caterpillar I didn't and so I worked in the math and then I decided I needed some motors and got a Ford Escort windshield wiper motors and kind of you know jerry-rigged everything together and made a switch using like lots of pieces of a tape measure and made the caterpillar and gave the like the final performance for it hey it's awesome cool right on thanks gave a final performance of it and this is a video of de caterpillar it's very short now you don't have to say anything cause it's kind of disappointing right it's I I mean I was kind of hoping for a totally fluid you know what I had in my mind was this is totally thing in 17 minutes it went you know two feet and it was just complete mess so what about that time I had an artist residency in Spain and I was thinking you know about still making a caterpillar and I was also spending a lot of time outside and occasionally and it doesn't happen as often as I wish it did but occasionally the world is just incredibly beautiful and it's just and sometimes the light is just right and there's just some sort of movement and you're in it and it's just the miracle that were you know on we're alive and on Earth and there's always things you'll understand and the trees are moving and it's just so wonderful and there's a sort of buoyancy and lightness that I really wanted and the caterpillar despite the fact it really worked it was also just a little bit too jointed into two sort of robotic and I was finite there's something else I was trying to go for and part of the problem with the caterpillar is that it it's like it's a sine wave but it's sort of cut in half by the ground and I kept thinking if it could go through the ground to be a lot easier to make so this right here is a it's a circle and it's got a bunch of strings and the strings go you know to various sections and right now this all the strings are tied in a knot and they're right in the center of this circle and if you move them to one side you get a wave and if you roll around you get a sine wave now there's a couple different languages we can we can talk about this with about one is that the one is that the wave has an amplitude right and that too is just the distance between the peak and the valley in other words has a frequency and the frequency is how fast the wave is moving and another one is that it has a wavelength in the wavelength is the distance between you know what where it starts to repeat it if you know repeated it on keep going with this wave until we got to Canada another way to talk about it is that and I probably think more about it this sense is that it has a high point and it has a low point and maybe most importantly it can always be moving it can always be changing and yeah it's always kind of the same and it's that sort of it's that sort of thing I mean what what is it what what else in life has highs and lows and is always changing but it's always the same I'll remember what isn't you know every everything is kind of like that and we see like ways absolutely everywhere we see them in water we see them in wind and because it's based on a circle we see them at anything that cycles and so things like the you know the earth going around the Sun the seasons the moon going around the earth the tides all these are expressed as waves so I end up back in California and this is the call to square wave and up overhead there's two camshafts that work in effect similar to this principle is an array of pulleys overhead and this is made out of a hundred and I was going to say a hundred and forty-four yeah pieces of wood and this is a plane wave so if you took that wave and you extended it into a plane this is what you would get and now if you add a wave that's perpendicular to it star to give this is about 10 feet by 10 feet and it's super low-tech I mean there's really I mean it's quite similar to this in construction just there's more pulleys just a couple more motors but there's no computer there's nothing digital about it and let me show you another one this is the round wave similar idea mechanics above rings below and right here it's beginning at a zero amplitude so as if this point we're in the center and now it's just sort of this is inspired by a drop of water the way you know the drop of rain would hit water and just these circles that kind of flow outwards and so I'm often inspired by you know just by taking a walk in nature and one time I was on a rafting trip and we were you know paddling and your paddle goes through the water and have you ever seen that swirl that comes off at the back of the paddle that's sort of Eddie was on the Green River and it's a really slow trip and so I got sort of you know I just had a lot of time to look at those whirls in that pattern and think about how I was going to make it and so how would it look if you made a pattern like that and let's just say that you made the top part out of aluminum arms and let's say you made the bottom part out of you know reflective faceted beads like a lot of them you know like 12,000 but boy what would that look like and I like to show you so this has a so this is slowly descending so it'll come down for a nap not much lower but you'll get a slightly better view of it it has 241 strings Dacron strings and about yeah about 12,000 beads that are on little bits of stainless wire that are all articulated it has three motors one of which is run just controls this sort of all up and down and one of them the the wave that's moving around it one of them the rotation and I mean is it just a huge thanks to you know this is thanks for pop tech for you know making this piece happen and a huge thanks to a the opera house for working with me trying to figure out how to get it up the stairs and installed you're all awesome well thanks so um this is a one of the one of the great secrets of making something has lots of small parts is the work party it so it you know it's a little bit of to get a big pot of chili and some beers or you call up all your friends and it's amazing how many little bees you can get strung in a day and so big thanks to those folks this is a this is a wave that and that's right now in technirama Switzerland but I think I like to do is I'll show you well let me show you another quick video of another piece those are all pulleys and this is a piece that's in my shop that you know has some some very acts for controlling the speed and those are all dowels and this one's based actually on two different raindrops so that sort of intersection of that pattern this one and this you know the structure above is extremely similar it's quite a bunch of strings going to one place and then they'll go down to these cardboard tubes and that it makes a five-pointed sort of star so it's called the pentagonal wave so I didn't go to I never went to art school but I did go to a painting school I went to to painting schools one of them was in Italy and is called the Charles S Lowe studios and and we studied portrait painting and the and this is a painting I did there in its oil and the sense of reality at the school was the sense of light and if you manage to capture the sense of light right then you had gotten it and the way that this this technique works you know if I was going to paint your portrait you would sit right here in the chair and I would have a canvas right here and I would stand back and I will just transfer visually all of the information over and you could stand back and sort of squint and blur your eyes and see if you got it right or not it was a way of separating the visual world from everything else that we know about the world and then I got an opportunity to study in the Saint Petersburg Academy of Russia and I was you know I went there in January it was just like terrified about freezing and so I put my long underwear on before I got in the airplane and airplane was really hot but how I got out there played I was drenched with sweat it did freeze practically to death and I and I went to this um the studio there called master sky ammonia menthol and this is a it was in a large room and that maybe well maybe twice as big as a stage and there's three big volumes with them you know male models and underwear and bare light bulbs above them and there's maybe 20 students in this program were just incredible draftsman and and so um you know I start drawing and I'm drawing as it's a Pia on paper and have a plan shed which is a way of taking paper and gluing it to a board I started drawing I start doing what I've been doing in Italy which is you know massing in the shadows and working on it and the instructor is coming around he's giving for teeth and he comes to me and he just starts yelling and being Russian just yelling and I've been trying to learn Russian I had the Berlitz language tapes but it everybody was saying and so somebody into some another student translated and the translation was either you're a coward or there's something wrong with your soul if you're drawing like that I've ever kind of figured that all I want to be back in California I don't know about this but there I was I was like okay well you know bring it on but what I'm here what's going on and he said either you're a coward or there's something wrong with your soil if you're drawing like that because you're drawing what you see okay okay you know what what what he's like you can't draw what you see you can't just copy what you see you have to construct the figure you have to draw from what you know to be true about it you have to draw the volume of it you have to draw the mass of it and he took my easel and you put it here's a podium here's the model put my easel right there right next to them he said now draw and make that drawing I look as heavy as he is so there's two different there's two different ways to approach art and they're both true and one of them is that the world is a beautiful place and it's full of highlights and it's full of sparkles and it's full of you know I have Dawn's and Dusk's and mystery and beauty and the other one is that it has a structure behind it and is this structure behind it is it mathematical is it is it does it have to assign waves and waves I don't know it's um does and and to me that the difference between the two ways of sort of looking at the world is sort of the difference between whether you are reaching out to touch the world or whether you're letting the world touch you and in a way that the visual the sort of beauty the mystery is a way where you're kind of sitting back in the world is touching you and then when you're looking for this structure you're sort of throwing your net out onto the world to see if it fits mathematically and so um yeah I guess I would like to close with that that there's these that both the structure and the beauty or you know or something that we can like gather together and try to use to make a works of art thank you

Channel: poptech

Views: 2,529,335

Rating: 4.747273 out of 5

Keywords: Design, Kinetic, Sculpture, Art, Physics, Nature, PopTech, 2009

Id: D2HF-1xjpP8

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2010

Reddit Comments

[u/treedemon]

This takes you right to the part of the video where (what i think) the coolest machine is.

Someone more talented than me please make it happen <3