Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: digital art, video, sculpture
Website: jimcampbell.tv
Jim Campbell was born in 1956 in Chicago, Illinois, and moved to San Francisco in 1978 after receiving dual degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics from MIT. He spent twenty-four years as a design engineer at Faroudja Laboratories in Silicon Valley, holding more than a dozen patents in image processing, while simultaneously developing his art practice in a San Francisco studio on weekends. He is represented by Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco. His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2003–04) and six NEA awards, and was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. His most visible public commission — Day for Night (2017) — blankets the top nine floors of the 1,070-foot Salesforce Tower in San Francisco with 11,136 LEDs displaying silhouettes of Bay Area life, visible for miles.
Campbell works at the intersection of engineering and art, using custom-designed LED arrays, video, film, and electronic sculpture to explore the boundary between abstraction and representation, and between analog experience and digital information. His signature works use extremely low-resolution LED grids — as few as 165 pixels — to depict recognizable subjects: a running figure, a crowd in protest, a flock of birds in flight. At such low resolution, the image becomes ambiguous, requiring the viewer’s perceptual system to complete what the data alone cannot resolve. His point is philosophical as well as aesthetic: the gap between data and meaning, between information and knowledge, is where human consciousness lives. His earlier interactive works responded to viewer presence through cameras and custom electronics. His more recent works — room-scale installations in darkened spaces — are immersive and elegiac, exploring memory, loss, and time.
Ambiguous Icon #1 Running, Falling (2000) — 165 red LEDs depict a barely-discernible running figure; one of his most iconic early works; in the SFMOMA permanent collection; shown at the 2002 Whitney Biennial
Exploded View (2011-12) SFMoMA commission.
Last Day in the Beginning of March 2003 (2003) — oscillating pools of LED light documenting the last day of his brother’s life; one of his most personal and widely discussed works
Day for Night (2017) — 11,136-bulb permanent LED installation on the crown of the Salesforce Tower, San Francisco; the nation’s tallest public artwork; silhouettes of Bay Area life cycle in a continuous loop
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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