17 March - 28 April

JIM CAMPBELL
Home Movies
M.I.T.-educated Jim Campbell is known for his extremely low-reso-
lution moving images accomplished utilizing L.E.D. technologies. For
the past seven years, Campbell has presented pixilated represen-
tations 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 he is 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, the moving image can be discerned.

Campbell’s is a unique and humanistic approach to information
theory. He explores the distinction between the analogue world
and its digital representation as a metaphor for the human ability
for poetic understanding or “knowledge” as opposed to the
mathematics of “data.”

The source material for the works in this show comes from anony-
mous, vintage, home movies and the artist’s recent video
footage around New York City. Campbell abstracts the data into
an extremely low resolution form, manipulating our voyeuristic
tendencies by revealing information and at the same time obscur-
ing it. The ‘pixilated’ imagery, composed of as little as 7 L.E.D.s, is
turned away from the viewer, toward the wall. There is no longer
a ‘real’ image, only the reflection of one. Yet from a distance, and
by virtue of its motion, the imagery coalesces and becomes
recognizable.

Jim Campbell was born in Chicago in 1956 and lives in San
Francisco. 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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Home Movies, 2006 [click for installation views]
custom electronics, LEDS