Untitled - EMAF

AUSSTELLUNG // EXHIBITION
Larger screens and high-resolution visual techniques promise more information, greater entertainment, intense emotions and the
immediate inclusion of the audience. Supposedly, the intensity of the media ›experience‹, the reality and truth grows with the size and
denseness of the technical matrix that renders the images visible to us. Jim Campbell formulates a contrary tendency of resolution and
transitoriness of the information. With an illuminated area, he copies photographic portraits of Harry Nyquist and Claude Shannon: 192
LEDs reproduce the faces of the two pioneers behind the information theory, like rough pixels of an image grid. Alternating luminosity
and the irregular flickering of the light spots blur the features of the men in the portraits, who seem to change in perpetual motion
between abstraction and figurativeness. In his work entitled ›Untitled‹, J. Campbell also assumes that meaning can be expressed with less
concrete information; that we can develop representations from small clues, construct images and imagine them in greater contexts. He
isolates an arbitrary street scene from its physical and individual attributes and filters them through a sheet of plexiglass. In direct reference
to Shannon and Nyquist's research into noise suppression, Campbell manages to create intensive image poetry and a powerful commentary
on the media by not resisting the temptation to produce a simulation of reality with intensifying images. (Hermann Nöring)
Instead of trying to make technology invisible ... Campbell looks to the liminal point between clarity and confusion - that point of
›flicker fusion‹ where our eyes grab legible images out of pure static. (Alex Galloway)
Jim Campbell, *1956 in Chicago (USA). He received 2 Bachelor of Science Degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from MIT in
1978. His electronic art work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American
Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the University Art Museum at Berkeley. In 1992 he created
one of the first permanent public interactive video artworks in the United States in Phoenix, Arizona. He has lectured on interactive
media art at many institutions throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in NY. He has received many grants and
awards including a Rockefeller Grant in Multimedia, three Langlois Foundation Grants, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. As an engineer he
holds almost twenty patents in the field of video image processing. He lives in San Francisco (USA). His work has been shown internationally
and throughout North America in institutions such as the Whitney Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Carpenter
Center, Harvard University; The International Center for Photography, New York, and the Intercommunication Center in Tokyo.
Solo Exhibitions (Selected)
2006 Quantizing Effects, Knoxville (USA);
2005 Site Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA); Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York (USA);
2004 ZKM, Karlsruhe (D); Cultural Center, Los Angeles (USA); Salina Art Center, Salina (USA); VAE8, Lima (Peru); Catherine
Clark Gallery, San Francisco (USA);
2003 Berkeley Art Museum (USA); Exploratorium, San Francisco, (USA);
2002 Nagoya City Art Museum, Nagoya (J); Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco (USA); Gallery 2211, Los Angeles (USA);
2001 Wood Street Gallery, Pittsburgh (USA); Virginia Commonwealth University , Richmond (USA);
2000 Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco (USA); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (USA);
1999 Nelson Art Museum, Arizona State University, Tempe (USA);
1998 San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose (USA); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (USA);
Selected Group Exhibitions
2006 Berkeley Art Museum (USA); NGBK, Berlin (D); ›Spots‹ Light- and Media Façade Potsdamer Platz, Berlin (D);
2005 CU Art Museum, Boulder (USA); Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (USA); Mois Multi, Quebec City (CDN);
2004 Sculpture Guild Group, New York (USA);
2003 Experimenta, Melbourne (Aus); ZKM, Karlsruhe (D); Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (Taiwan); Busan Metropolitan
Art Museum, Busan (South Korea); Artificial Emotion, Sao Paulo (Br);
2001 Interaction 01, Gifu (J); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (USA);
2000 Ars Electronica , Linz (A); Vision Ruhr, Dortmund (D);
1999 National Museum, Kwachon (S. Korea);
1998 enalle , ICC Center, Tokyo (J); Barbican Gallery, London (GB); Auckland City Art Gallery, Auckland (NZ);
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