Lecture: Jim Campbell @ UCD

              Last night I had the opportunity of attending an artist lecture at UC Davis, a very new and different experience considering I've only ever attended artist lectures at Sac State. The lecture was given by a contemporary San Francisco based artist named Jim Campbell. Unfortunately I didn't get too many pictures of his lecture because he lectured in the dark, showing video clips of his art. He primarily works with LED light installations, but began his artistic career with film making after receiving his BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978.
            His video Hallucination was produced from1988-90 and was his first piece. He was interested in the theme of personal illness relating to family reasons. His goal was to make people feel like they had a mental illness. When people stepped in front of the rear projection video monitor, their image was transferred onto the screen. Based on a heads or tails coin flip, the person's image would either stay the same or be engulfed in flames. He wanted to make people upset by this, but he was unsuccessful in doing so and began to make the people from the image fade away and disappear instead.

Jim Campbell, Hallucination, 1988-90

              His first public work, Ruins of Light, was on display for ten years at the America West Sports Arena in Phoenix, Arizona. It consisted of Four columns, 6 video cameras, and 20 video monitors. The work incorporated images from six live cameras, 600 still images, and thirty minutes of motion video. By layering these various images on top of each other in real time the work never repeated itself. It functioned as a clock and calendar as well as different imagery came up at different times of  the day or year.

Jim Campbell, Ruins of Light, 1992

               Campbell stated that he worked with tools of randomness to give his work more complexity. He produced many works that were related to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in which nothing exists purely, as you observe something it is affected and there is no way to not affect it. Many of his works including Shadow (for Heisenberg) were interactive in which as people got closer to his works or interacted with them, the image displayed be came unclear.

Jim Campbell, Shadow (For Heisenberg), 1993-94

               He continued to experiment with his work and in 1999 he began thinking about the pixel; he has been obsessed with it ever since. His Running Falling series from 2000-2004 consisted of video loops of figures that run and fall, from the ambiguous individual moving repeatedly through an unknown landscape to breaking apart into noisy abstraction. The legibility of the figure is pushed, in matrices ranging in resolution from 48 to 768 LEDs.

 



 Jim Campbell, Running Falling, 2000-2004

          His work continued with experimenting with different pixel installations and in my opinion has only improved, especially as technology has improved. My favorite piece that he showed and that I think is by far his best and most interesting is Scattered Light, a video installation featuring nearly 2,000 LEDs encased in standard light bulbs. It is suspended within a support structure spanning 80 feet in length and standing 20 feet high and 16 feet wide creating a vibrant light grid across the center of Madison Square Park’s Oval Lawn. It brought his two-dimensional work into a three-dimensional module in which when viewed from the front, produced a clear image of figures interacting, but when viewed from the side became more abstract.

Jim Campbell, Scattered Light, 2010

         After the lecture, discussion was opened up for questions. When asked if he is ever invited to display or revisit old pieces, and if so how does technology influence displaying these pieces, he brought up an exhibit that he is working on right now. He said that he is currently exhibiting work in New York that draws upon his work from the past 30 years. Many times he will pull out his old equipment to see if it still works because he generally shows his original works, unless the piece is no longer working or is on view somewhere else. In this case he will try to recreate the piece using new technology, but  keeping it as similar to the original as possible. Technology and how it is advancing is something that he definitely thinks about when creating and displaying his old and new pieces.

Jim Campbell and audience



            I find the huge improvements and changes in his work throughout the years to be the most interesting part of his lecture. Even by just viewing the images in this blog post, you can see how much technology has improved and how it has changed and improved his work, leading him to where he is today.