| Jim
Campbell has been making innovative technology-based work for almost
20 years. An interest in filmmaking, combined with his engineering
exper-
tise, has resulted in groundbreaking installations and sculptural
works that
have set the standard for new media art.
Campbell continues to explore the limits of perception using both
high- and
low- resolution techniques. Large-scale light boxes present accumulated
high-resolution images of protests at the 2004 Republican convention,
resulting in multidimensional yet surprisingly discernable scenes.
The theme
of the crowd has become a hot topic in recent contemporary art,
from
Andreas Gursky to Paul Pfeiffer to Rirkrit Tiravanija. Media awareness
and
spectacle have become inevitable and intentional aspects of organized
political protests in the internet age. Katy Siegel writes in “All
Together
Now: Crowd Scenes in Contemporary Art,” published in Artforum
January
2005,
The awareness of media representation,
a balance between action and
representation, also conditions all aspects of contemporary demonstrations
and the politics of the crowd. As New Left protestors being beaten
by
police chanted in 1968, mindful of television cameras around them,
“The
whole world is watching.” More recently, marchers against
the latest war
in Iraq and the Republican National Convention in New York often
carried
horizontal signs over their heads—flatbed picture planes meant
to be read
from above by reporters in helicopters and on rooftops, photographed,
and
transmitted to people watching the protest at home. From a Debordian
perspective this is politics as spectacle, and the protest is a
homemade
reality show rather than an effective transformation of reality.
Other works involve LEDs transmitting moving images with extremely
low-resolution, yet again decipherable, results. Voyeurism and time
are
addressed in works that depict watching and waiting under prosaic
circumstances. The manipulation of time in these works - though
a futile
attempt to control the inevitable - nonetheless turns the banal
into a
poetic assertion of life in all its beauty and mystery.
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