Jim Campbell: Wandering

For nearly three decades, Jim Campbell has designed and built custom electronics, hijacking tech developed for information transfer and storage and repurposing it to make artworks that explore the limits of human perception.

The pieces in this show of new work should, in theory, defy comprehension. They are either so low resolution (too little information) or so high resolution (too much information) that the viewer should be completely confounded.  But Campbell plumbs our primal ability to subconsciously interpret sensory data, either "filling in the gaps" or sorting through extraneous noise in order to identify objects and formulate a coherent concept.  His exploration of the distinction between the analogue world and its digital representation is a metaphor for the difference between poetic understanding or "knowledge" versus the mathematics of "data." 

In a mesmerizing new series he calls Moving Average, Campbell explores these ideas in works that are essentially the opposite of his LED pieces.  Using video and movie footage, he constructs between 5 and 18 layers of moving imagery which are overlaid and played simultaneously.  If his low-resolution LED works are about the minimum threshold of information necessary to create meaning, his Moving Average works are about the maximum - how much he can pile on before we're unable to make sense of anything at all.

Through constantly-evolving experimentation, Campbell parses one of the most fundamental questions about the human mind: what enables us to interpret and understand the world around us?

Jim Campbell's work has been exhibited worldwide at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The International Center for Photography, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Chronus Art Center, Shanghai; Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia.  His work is in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Berkeley Art Museum. Honors include a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship Award in Multimedia, three Langlois Foundation Grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship Award. He has two Bachelor of Science Degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from MIT and as an engineer holds nearly twenty patents in the field of video image processing. His 2018 piece, Day for Night, is a permanent LED installation that comprises the top nine floors of the 61-story Salesforce Tower in San Francisco.