Reuben Margolin: Sculpting waves in wood and time

47,903 views ・ 2012-05-02

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Translator: Timothy Covell Reviewer: Morton Bast
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Usually I like working in my shop,
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but when it's raining and the driveway outside turns into a river,
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then I just love it.
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And I'll cut some wood and drill some holes and watch the water,
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and maybe I'll have to walk around and look for washers.
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You have no idea how much time I spend.
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This is the "Double Raindrop."
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Of all my sculptures, it's the most talkative.
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It adds together the interference pattern
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from two raindrops that land near each other.
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Instead of expanding circles, they're expanding hexagons.
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All the sculptures move by mechanical means.
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Do you see how there's three peaks to the yellow sine wave?
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Right here I'm adding a sine wave with four peaks and turning it on.
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Eight hundred two-liter soda bottles --
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oh yea.
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(Laughter)
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Four hundred aluminum cans.
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Tule is a reed that's native to California,
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and the best thing about working with it is that it smells just delicious.
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A single drop of rain
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increasing amplitude.
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The spiral eddy that trails a paddle on a rafting trip.
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This adds together four different waves.
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And here I'm going to pull out the double wavelengths
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and increase the single.
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The mechanism that drives it has nine motors
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and about 3,000 pulleys.
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Four hundred and forty-five strings in a three-dimensional weave.
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Transferred to a larger scale --
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actually a lot larger, with a lot of help --
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14,064 bicycle reflectors --
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a 20-day install.
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"Connected" is a collaboration
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with choreographer Gideon Obarzanek.
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Strings attached to dancers.
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This is very early rehearsal footage,
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but the finished work's on tour
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and is actually coming through L.A. in a couple weeks.
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A pair of helices and 40 wooden slats.
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Take your finger and draw this line.
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Summer, fall, winter, spring,
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noon, dusk, dark, dawn.
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Have you ever seen those stratus clouds
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that go in parallel stripes across the sky?
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Did you know that's a continuous sheet of cloud
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that's dipping in and out of the condensation layer?
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What if every seemingly isolated object
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was actually just where the continuous wave of that object
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poked through into our world?
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The Earth is neither flat nor round.
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It's wavy.
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It sounds good, but I'll bet you know in your gut that it's not the whole truth,
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and I'll tell you why.
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I have a two-year-old daughter who's the best thing ever.
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And I'm just going to come out and say it:
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My daughter is not a wave.
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And you might say, "Surely, Rueben, if you took even just the slightest step back,
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the cycles of hunger and eating,
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waking and sleeping, laughing and crying
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would emerge as pattern."
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But I would say, "If I did that,
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too much would be lost."
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This tension between the need to look deeper
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and the beauty and immediacy of the world,
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where if you even try to look deeper you've already missed what you're looking for,
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this tension is what makes the sculptures move.
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And for me, the path between these two extremes
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takes the shape of a wave.
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Let me show you one more.
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Thank you very much. Thanks.
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(Applause)
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Thanks.
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(Applause)
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June Cohen: Looking at each of your sculptures,
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they evoke so many different images.
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Some of them are like the wind and some are like waves,
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and sometimes they look alive and sometimes they seem like math.
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Is there an actual inspiration behind each one?
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Are you thinking of something physical or somthing tangible as you design it?
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RM: Well some of them definitely have a direct observation --
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like literally two raindrops falling,
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and just watching that pattern is so stunning.
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And then just trying to figure out how to make that using stuff.
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I like working with my hands.
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There's nothing better than cutting a piece of wood
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and trying to make it move.
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JC: And does it ever change?
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Do you think you're designing one thing,
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and then when it's produced it looks like something else?
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RM: The "Double Raindrop" I worked on for nine months,
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and when I finally turned it on,
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I actually hated it.
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The very moment I turned it on, I hated it.
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It was like a really deep-down gut reaction, and I wanted to throw it out.
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And I happened to have a friend who was over,
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and he said, "Why don't you just wait."
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And I waited, and the next day I liked it a bit better,
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the next day I liked it a bit better, and now I really love it.
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And so I guess, one, the gut reactions a little bit wrong sometimes,
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and two, it does not look like as expected.
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JC: The relationship evolves over time.
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Well thank you so much. That was a gorgeous treat for us.
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RM: Thanks. (JC: Thank you, Reuben.)
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(Applause)
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