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Reuben Margolin Reuben Heyday Margolin was raised in Berkeley, California. In high school he thrived on math and began studying physics at Harvard, until the allure of the arts won him over. After graduating in 1993, he built a round table with wheels instead of legs, and drove it around the country. Partly funded with a grant from the Institute of Natural and Cultural Resources, he hosted spontaneous conversations about the meaning of Utopia where ever he stopped. He then spent two intense years of study in Florence, Italy and St. Petersburg, Russia, where he learned the Renaissance notion that great art comes from the study of nature. During an artist residency at Orchardton House, Scotland, he began thinking about how caterpillars propel themselves forward. In an effort to understand their motion he relearned calculus and made three versions of the caterpillar which walked in a wave-like fashion. For each he explored a different technology — analog, digital, and mechanical — and it is these technologies that form the backbone of his kinetic art. He spent the summers of 2002 and 2003 at an artist residency in southern Spain where he became utterly enchanted by the wind in a wheat field. It represented some buoyancy and lightness that he felt was missing from the caterpillars. He also began to find the surface of the ocean increasingly captivating. Somehow it was both abstract, and mathematical, and also wild and sensuous. Caterpillars, math, wind, and water . . . in the summer of 2004, moving into a large, airy warehouse, he began work on the first wave installation.
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