JIM CAMPBELL

JIM CAMPBELL

LOW RESOLUTION // WORK

BIO

Tracing his work through the last 15 years, Jim Campbell will address some of the more general issues that have come up with computer mediated art. Starting with Interactivity and ending with what could maybe be called Data Aestheticsization, he suggests how some of the current directions of computer based art making practices are heading towards a formulaic approach.

Campbell’s work has gone through a progression from film to video to interactive installation to electronic sculpture. Thematically the work has been about human memory and its relationship to time and movement from both psychological and scientific perspectives. His earlier interactive works often are structured as psychological mirrors, where the viewer’s response to a work becomes part of the work itself, as in a feedback system. More recent works explore perception at the threshold of recognition of moving images, and postulate what kinds of meaning can be expressed with extremely small amounts of information?

Having spent the last 3 years looking at “the pixel” as one example of an atomic structure of a digital representation, Campbell will discuss how he’s come to the conclusion that the pixel as a visual element doesn’t really exist except as a media and art based contrivance to give us something to grasp onto (or to see) as “digital”. And finally he’ll discuss why these “Art by Number” methods that are being used have evolved naturally out of the structure of the computer.

MATERIALS

video installation : custom electronics, 775 LEDs

14 x 9 feet x 14 inches.

EFFECT

Low resolution work, the video footage for this work was shot from inside a taxi cab.
It is the full length of the trip from Manhattan, down the Westside Highway, across Chambers and the Brooklyn Bridge to Sarah Bostwick’s studio.