Jim Campbell

- Jim Campbell is interested in time. Many of his works are visually similar to futurist pieces (such as Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space). Does the technology which Campbell uses change the meaning of these works at all?

- What role does technology play in Campbell's piece? Does it do anything besides limit the amount of (visual) information we receive? (for example, in his LED pieces)

- Some of Campbell's pieces are also generative in nature. "The End" uses "an algorithm is used to generate all possible video images. Any image you can think of will eventually end up on the screen. The number of possible images is finite with a defined number of pixels. There is a companion piece that generates all possible sounds that are one second long." Is this, then, the same as the other generative pieces we've looked at?






I think it's fairly safe to say that for Jim Campbell, the process through which his work is created (and the processes the pieces use themselves) is more important than the final result. His "Ambiguous Icons" display either blurred images or images constructed by a small grid of LED lights. There's nothing that looks "real" in any of these pieces.

Many of his pieces draw on theories that are psychological in nature. For example, he describes "Ambiguious Icons" as an exploration of the "relationship between information and meaning." At what point, for example, does a shape which we understand as a physical object, lose its meaning? I can see a certain similarity between Campbell's pieces and, say, a Rorschach test. Similarly, many of his other works draw on other psychological themes, such as memory, hallucination, and shock treatment.



Time, another element seen in Campbell's work, plays a similarly important role. One piece, for example, tracks the sun's position in the sky, and displays the percent of the day which is left (for example, at noon, 50% of the day would be left). He also plays with time by creating images which are similar in nature to many futurist or cubist pieces. His "Illuminated Averages" pieces are made up of various pictures taken at different times superimposed over each other. However, again, the process seems more important than the final product.

As he explains it, "Dynamism is a suite of four digital inkjet prints created at Graphicstudio in Tampa, Florida. The artist videotaped movement (his motion) of each object for a specific period of time, then used custom hardware to average the multiple frames into one single image. The result is a blurring effect that gives the appearance of motion." However, the same sort of image could be manufactured in ten minutes in photoshop.

Technology & Art

I have always been interested in new technology and the way it allows us to communicate. When I was in third grade, our school had two computers that were hooked up to the "world wide web," and one of the teachers thought it would be good to invite students who might be interested in learning about it to join a club that would teach them how to use it. Most of the students didn't really care, however myself and two other kids joined, and we spent the next few weeks learning about "web crawlers" (search engines) and how one might find a site of interest on the internet (using a phone book type thing that listed [literally] every site on the internet).

Fairly soon after that my family got internet access, and I spent a lot of time searching out new sites, discovering the internet's more interactive features, etc. Even now, I do graphic design work which eventually finds its way onto the web, adding to that massive phonebook that I used in third grade.

The projects I've worked on in the past and am working on now have all drawn in one way or another from this interest in technology. A past project related to video games and their ability and/or inability to be classified as art.

My current project will focus on communication and the ability of many individuals to work together to create something greater than themselves (drawing on the ideas of swarm technology, the Wiki revolution, etc).

Eno, Fischinger & Whitney - Visual Music

Eno

Interview with Brian Eno (pt 1)


Interview with Brian Eno (pt 2)

- According to Eno, religion says, "You're not in control," whereas the rest of your life is all about "taking control." "Freedom is the ability to take control." We should be prepared to say, "I'm not in control, and I like it."
- Where is the control in this piece? Does the artist, (Brian Eno) have control? Does the piece itself and the code which makes it run have control? Does the viewer have control?

- "If you wanted to be sure of seeing a repeat(ed image), you'd have to watch for about 450 years."
- According to Eno, we could sit in front of his piece, watch for 450 years and never see the same image twice. If this is true, have we "seen" the piece? Have we "understood" it? Or are we perhaps just seeing a part of a whole? (sort of like looking at a 3 inch square of a massive mural)
- Furthermore, is this a work of art (period)? Or is it a theoretical example? (such as "Every Icon")

- Time is extremely important in this piece. And since the images on the screen are apparently displayed at random, could one say that time itself is more important than the images? If this is true, do the images even matter?

- Without accompanying music, is this piece truly "visual music," as Eno suggests?

Fischinger

Study #7


- Is this piece about music, movement, or the interaction between them? We can see by his work with the Lumigraph that he was interested in the interaction between music and light, so perhaps this interaction is more important than the music or the imagery.

- However, we see from other work that he eschewed music and even sound all together. "Radio Dynamics," has no sound at all, but through its "slow pulsating rhythms and astonishing single-frame flickers of painterly images," seems to reference music. Even its name references sonic content. So perhaps the interaction is STILL important?

Whitney

Arabesque


- Whitney's allusion to the linguist tradition reveals a lot about his work. One of the most important "rules" in linguistics is that words in a language are abstract. When I say the word "dog," everyone knows what I mean. But the word itself does not resemble a dog in any way. It doesn't sound like a dog, nor does it look like a dog. However, our brain understands that "dog" means a four legged canine with fur, teeth, ears, a personality, and is sometimes tame, sometimes feral, etc.
- So is Whitney's work really a sort of visual-musical language? Could we watch one of his films silently and still understand the music? Or, like language, do we have to have prior knowledge to understand it? If I had never seen a dog, never heard someone talk of a dog, never heard a dog, (despite the fact that the word "dog" is abstract), would I know what "dog" meant? Whitney's work is clearly abstract, but do we understand it as visual-music?