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.