Video as multidimensional representation Reuben Margolin creates totally singular techno-kinetic wave sculptures.
Video is a language I have acquired slowly with much effort. In the last 17 years I have shot and edited over 100 videos. I learned as I worked. This will be a compilation of my thinking about this work as told through video and web site examples.
Today I put a new video on my YouTube channel. It is called Sheller. In shows a farmer who lives up the road from me. He interprets footage of a working 1939 John Deer 7 corn sheller. He is 75 years old. His father and grandfather were corn shellers. Local farmers hired them to shell corn after it had cured over the winter. It is typical of my work in many ways.
1. It is a video record of something that happened, and luckily was recorded. I live in a rental house on a working farm. All day my landlord comes and goes through the barnyard feeding his cows and horses, removing and returning farm machinery from barns, storing or selling hay. All winter I drove by two full corn cribs across the road. One day in spring some men came and set up machinery next to the corn cribs. When they started up the complicated contraption it was deafening. Clouds of dust surrounded the operation. I drove by it two days on my errands until I ran into my cousin Sharon. "You really should go and video that corn sheller." I thought about it on the way home, and passed it very slowly before turning into the driveway. She was right. I went for my little Sony camcorder.
2. It is a study of something complicated. As I approached the sheller, I paused to get some distant shots from the road. I wanted to try to get a shot of the whole thing, 80 feet end to end. I had to shoot into the mid-afternoon sun. I found the shadow of the semi-truck where the kernels were being loaded to get the shot. Where to start? I would try to get the sequence from start to finish. I would also compass the whole scene, getting shots from every perspective. I paused and looked at all the stations I would need to cover. The crib. The conveyor belts into the main machine. The main body of the sheller. The appendages. One for cobs. One for shucks. One for kernels. I really had no idea how this contraption was working. Systematically and automatically I made the circle from crib to sheller to appendages to crib. Hand held, I steadied the camera with my arms and elbows, opening the LCD screen and adjusting it to get shots from high and low. A few shots into the sun revealed the choking dust. I didn't notice that Roy was catching mice. That would have been a good shot. I didn't really see the ropes of steel chain that drove the drag. I didn't see the drag, really, only the moving corn. Neither did I see the coiling screw of the auger lifting kernels into the semi-truck. Only later, during editing, reviewing the footage with Merle, did I learn. I have faced this so many times. Having no idea. Following a strategy to make a good record, step by step.
3. Viewing the video is different than shooting the video. I find things I do not remember shooting. I make a list of things I do not understand. I feel myself separating from the images, even though I remember how I felt when it was all happening around me. I try to get ready for meeting Merle. Merle is the owner of the sheller. He is the only audience that matters. Will he see the images as correct, or did I get it all wrong? Will the images support his verbal description of this shelling machine? Will he be able to use the images to interpret them for someone like me who knows nothing? I am nervous, waiting for him to come and view the raw footage. Then I am relieved as he tells me that it is right, it is exactly like is was all those years.
4. Working with Merle adds new perspective. First he looks at the whole set of footage on a large screen. Then we sit at my kitchen table, looking at my lap top, watching and stopping so that he can explain scene by scene. He is excited, and eager to share what he knows. I watch the way he gestures as he talks. He seems to be seeing a 3-D model of the sheller. He seems to be seeing it from the inside, in his mind's eye. I know this way of talking. It is how someone talks about something they know inside and out. It is the way someone talks who knows intimately some dimension of the material world. I want to keep these gestures in the video. I want the viewer to have the experience of sitting here, quietly, with someone who really knows something. Listening as scene after scene releases this knowing and brings it alive with width, height and depth.
5. Little by little, as we go over the footage, we begin to share something. I wait, hoping that Merle will say something about this. Finally, he does. "This video, it is so much more than a photograph." He is astonished.
"Why do you think that is?" I ask.
He responds instantly, "It's whole."
"Yes," I answer. A photograph is 2 dimensional. It has little depth of field. A painting can use technique and perspective to create the illusion of depth of field. Video is multi-dimensional. It has the illusion of depth of field because it combines shots of the same thing from 360°, high and low perspectives. And it has another dimension, time. You see the same thing moment to moment to moment, instead of the photo's frozen moment. It has sound, which can be layers of stimulation and information. It is multi-dimensional representation. When I realized this, back at the beginning, I thought it was the answer. I imagined it as the missing piece for describing what we know to one another.
Click Sheller if the video viewing box below does not fill.
1. It is a video record of something that happened, and luckily was recorded. I live in a rental house on a working farm. All day my landlord comes and goes through the barnyard feeding his cows and horses, removing and returning farm machinery from barns, storing or selling hay. All winter I drove by two full corn cribs across the road. One day in spring some men came and set up machinery next to the corn cribs. When they started up the complicated contraption it was deafening. Clouds of dust surrounded the operation. I drove by it two days on my errands until I ran into my cousin Sharon. "You really should go and video that corn sheller." I thought about it on the way home, and passed it very slowly before turning into the driveway. She was right. I went for my little Sony camcorder.