| Known
for his extremely low-resolution moving images accomplished utilizing
L.E.D. technologies, M.I.T. educated Jim
Campbell presents his first New York
exhibition of installation pieces.
For the past seven years, Campbell has presented pixilated representations
created with so few L.E.D.s (more than a thousand times fewer than
the
number of pixels on your computer screen) that a viewer should not
be able to
comprehend what they are seeing. And yet, because of the brain’s
ability to
interpret abstract data and “fill in” the gaps in the
information needed to create
a complete idea, a viewer recognizes an image.
Campbell’s is a unique and humanistic approach to information
theory. He
explores the distinction between the analogue world and its digital
represen-
tation as a metaphor for the human ability for poetic understanding
or
“knowledge” as opposed to the mathematics of “data.”
In a group of works in this show, Campbell abstracts the data even
further
while manipulating our voyeuristic tendencies by revealing information
and at
the same time obscuring it. The pixilated imagery, at even lower
resolution (one
piece uses only 5 L.E.D.s), is turned away from the viewer, toward
the wall.
There is no longer a visible “image,” only the reflection
of an image.
Jim Campbell was born in Chicago in 1956. He received degrees in
electronic
engineering and mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
His work has been exhibited extensively internationally and is in
the collections
of MoMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum,
the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and many others.
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