JIM CAMPBELL
 
Jim Campbell was born in Chicago in 1956 and lives in San Francisco.
He received degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from MIT in 1978.
He transitioned from filmmaking to interactive video installations in the
mid 1980s. His custom electronic sculptures and installations have made
him a leading figure in the use of computer technology as an art form.

Excerpt from the essay "Jim Campbell: Working in the Open Sphere"
by Marilyn A. Zeitlin from the catalog Jim Campbell: Transforming Time,
Electronic Works 1990-99, published by Arizona State University Art
Museum:
By joining physics and metaphysics in a mutual safari into epistemology
from assorted scientific, artistic, and spiritual positions, while remaining
acutely aware of the limitations to our ability to know, Campbell's work
reinforces the skepticism characteristic of the body of theoretical writing
loosely collected under the rubric "postmodern." The perennial human
desire to know is paired with a need to know how we know. Campbell's
genius, if I may use such a word, is in his skill at bringing us back to that
state of relative innocence in which we again ask not only what reality
might be but how we can know it when we sense it...

Campbell combines more traditional media, such a s video, with his own
inventions. He is expanding video in particular as a medium, using it to
posit questions about time, memory, and perceived reality in the vocabu-
lary of the electronic age or perhaps, more accurately, the post-electronic
age. He welcomes viewers for whom the silent, static work of art is often
no longer engaging, employing media of communication familiar to people
who grew up not only on television, but on Nintendo and the Internet.
He is on the forefront of interactive work. Yet Campbell does not limit his
viewership to the children of cyberspace. His work has a timeless quality
in its ideas, its conceptual concision, and its apparent simplicity.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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website exhibitions press
 
 

2006

2005

2002

2000

 

  
Reconstruction 3, 2005
Political Protest New York 2004, 2005
 
Home Movie 1, 2006
click to see movie

Hong Kong Bird Market, 2005
 
Dynamism of an Observer (in the Weeds) , 2002
 
Dynamism of an Automobile, 2001
 
Home Movies, 2006
click for installation views