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Quantizing Effects: The Liminal Art of Jim Campbell
Organized by Site Santa Fe in collaboration with the MATRIX Program of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum
September 22 - December 2, 2006
Opening reception: September 21, 6:30 - 9:00 p.m.
Boxed: November 30th, 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.
The Beall Center for Art and Technology is pleased to present “Quantizing Effects: The Liminal Art of Jim Campbell,” an exhibition of interactive electronic and new media works. The Beall Center, which is free and open to the public, will exhibit the custom-made electronics Jim Campbell uses to create conceptual environments exploring the relationships between perception, information, time, and knowledge
Using low-resolution LED lights in various-sized grids, Campbell creates animated works that explore the limits of the Analog-Digital divide. Campbell uses the computer as a “connection machine” to power works that play on viewers’ perceptual experiences. From the building blocks of numbers, text, sound, still images, moving images, etc., Campbell uses algorithms and other mathematical constructs to create art that intentionally pushes the boundary of sensory perception. Curator Steve Dietz notes in his catalogue essay, “Campbell is interested not in ever greater realism, but precisely in that the threshold at which something besides chaos – or “noise” in information theory – is perceptible.” These “liminal” transformations, between analog and digital, between perception and illegibility, are at the heart of his work.
Born in Chicago in 1956, Campbell lives and works in San Francisco. He holds Bachelor of Science degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering. He has shown internationally and throughout North America in institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Carpenter Center, Harvard University, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Power Plant, Toronto; the International Center for Photography, New York; the Nagoya City Art Museum, Nagoya, Japan; In 1992 he created one of the first permanent and public interactive video artworks in the U.S. in Phoenix, Arizona.
“Having always been fascinated with the philosophical analogies of certain scientific disciplines, my work has been very influenced by science, in particular some of the ideas relating to chaos and quantum mechanics. Using technological tools and scientific models as metaphors for memory and illusion, my work seeks to interpret, represent and mirror psychological states and processes, and their breakdown. Time and memory, individual and collective, electronic and real are the elements of my work.”