Jim Campbell Tiempo Estatico

Tiempo esttico.
Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico
Jim Campbell
20 aos de arte electrnico
Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico
Fundacin
Telefnica
Espacio
Fundacin Telefnica
Luis Blasco Bosqued
Alejandrina D'Ela
Agradecimientos Catlogo
Jos Luis Rodrguez Zarco
Marcelo Marzoni
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Bryce Wolkowitz
Sarah Christianson
Presidente
Gerente
Contenido
Secretario general
Jefe de Montaje
Mario E. Vzquez
Julia Zurueta
Juan Waehner
Javier Nadal Ario
Francisco Serrano Martnez
Carmen Grillo
Federico Rava
Manuel A. lvarez Trong
Silvana Spadaccini
Tesorero
Vocales
Carmen Grillo
Directora Fundacin Telefnica
Bibiana Ottones
Alejandrina D'Ela
Agustina Catone
Gerentes
Presidente del Consejo de Admnistracin de Telefnica de Argentina
Asistente de Curadura
Extensin Cultural
Mirar para ver mirando, Richard Shiff
27
Obras en exhibicin
28
Biografa del artista
Federico Demateis
Asistente tcnico
59
Montaje de la exhibicin
Nadia Chazarreta
69
English texts
Educacin
Christian Funes
Montaje
Asistente general
Recepcin
Carolina Gregui
Emilia Salgado
Mediateca
Jos Trejo
Jefe de Seguridad
Organizacin y produccin
de la exposicin
Coordinacin general
Alejandrina D'Ela
Coordinacin general EFT
Marcelo Marzoni
Produccin EFT
Percepciones fugitivas, Eduardo A. Russo
15
Josefina Pasman
Cecilia Pitrola
Mariana Martnez
Victoria Rodrguez Aragn
Jim Campbell
Presentacin, Luis Blasco Bosqued
Jazmn Adler
Asistente de produccin EFT
Marcelo Marzoni
Diseo de montaje EFT
Ricardo Sern
Christian Funes
Marcela Galardi
Ezequiel Verona
Beto Paladinno
Montaje EFT
Federico Demateis
Estudio Bccar Varela
Asistente tcnico EFT
Asesoramiento legal
Craig Lawrence Dorety

Asistente tcnico
Tiempo esttico : Jim Campbell 20 aos de arte electrnico / con

colaboracin de Eduardo Russo y Richard Shiff. - 1a ed. - Buenos Aires :
Fundacin Telefnica, 2011.
100 p. ; 23x17 cm.
ISBN 978-987-23281-6-0
Con el apoyo de
1. Arte. I. Russo, Eduardo, colab. II. Shiff, Richard, colab.

CDD 708
Fecha de catalogacin: 1/11/2011
La exposicin Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico presenta por primera vez en Latinoamrica
la obra de uno de los referentes internacionales ms relevantes de los ltimos tiempos en ese campo.
El proyecto fue producto de la labor en conjunto entre nuestra institucin y el artista, a travs de la cual fueron
seleccionados los trabajos ms representativos de su prolfica obra. La produccin exhibida acerca al pblico un
conjunto de ms de veinte piezas tecnolgicas realizadas por el pionero en el uso de la tecnologa lumnica de los
LED entre los inicios de la dcada del 90 y la actualidad.
La presencia de Campbell en Buenos Aires hizo posible compartir con estudiantes y artistas del medio local
una serie de visitas guiadas y entrevistas que permitieron un abordaje ms exhaustivo de su produccin y su
calidad como artista y favorecieron el intercambio de experiencias y la formacin en los temas de arte y nuevas
tecnologas.
Como es habitual en los proyectos que lleva adelante el Espacio Fundacin Telefnica, esperamos que la exposicin sea un hito en Buenos Aires y una experiencia innovadora, de la mano de uno de los referentes ms
significativos de este campo.
Luis Blasco Bosqued

Presidente del Consejo de Administracin de
Telefnica de Argentina
Percepciones fugitivas
Eduardo A. Russo
Durante los ltimos diez aos he estado tratando
de crear imgenes que no pueden ser representadas, realizando arte visual que no puede ser
visto, pero que en lugar de ello puede existir de
modo invisible, ms all de los mecanismos perceptivos analticos de la visin. No hay tal cosa
como una imagen digital, slo hay imgenes que
son digitales hasta cierto punto.
Jim Campbell1
Umbrales de lo visible
Scattered Light, 2010
Letter to a Suicide, 1985
Shock Treatment, 1988
Eduardo A. Russo
Crtico, docente e investigador de cine y artes audiovisuales. Doctor en Psicologa Social. Dirige el doctorado en
Artes de la Facultad de Bellas Artes, Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP), Argentina. Profesor de Teora, Anlisis y Crtica de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales en carreras de grado y posgrado de la Argentina (UNLP, Universidad
de Buenos Aires, Universidad Nacional de Crdoba, Universidad Nacional de Tucumn) y del exterior. Integra el
Observatorio Latinoamericano de Teora e Historia del Cine de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia y el Comit
Cientfico del doctorado en Diseo y Creacin de la Universidad de Caldas, Colombia. Es autor de El cine clsico.
Itinerarios, variaciones y replanteos de una idea (Manantial, 2008) y Diccionario de cine (Paids, 1998) y compilador de The Film Edge: Contemporary Filmmaking in Latin America (Teseo, 2010), Hacer cine: produccin audiovisual en Amrica Latina (Paids, 2008) e Interrogaciones sobre Hitchcock (Simurg, 2001). Ha escrito ms de 180
artculos en publicaciones acadmicas y especializadas nacionales y extranjeras.
Hallucination, 1990
1
2
3
10
Proponemos aqu un recorrido por Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte
electrnico no necesariamente cronolgico, aunque s atento al decurso del itinerario de vida y trabajo con el que se halla ntimamente ligado. Ms que un anlisis pieza
por pieza, nuestro acercamiento indagar aquello que Gregory Bateson denomin
como la pauta que conecta (the pattern which connects) lo aqu presentado.2
La produccin de este artista, graduado en matemticas e ingeniera en el Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hacia 1978, se instala en la encrucijada del
arte contemporneo con la ciencia, la tecnologa y, segn sus propias consideraciones sobre sus obras en espacios pblicos, como la reciente Scattered Light (Madison
Square Park, Nueva York, 2010), tambin con el diseo. Esta mltiple pertenencia
desafa fronteras convencionales y hace resonar particularmente el trmino works:
sus piezas participan a la vez de la condicin de trabajo y obra, siendo incluso ms
signos de una construccin en curso que obra concluida. No hay trabajo resuelto,
indic cierta vez el artista en un revelador dilogo con Richard Whittaker.3 Cada obra
est dispuesta a operar ante su observador; su forma cambia ante una percepcin
inestable, lejos de ofrecerse como objeto acabado. Pero as como adquiere una configuracin y un sentido posible, cada trabajo puede perder sus contornos o incluso
desvanecerse, como si su consistencia estuviera sostenida por cierto arreglo provisorio de quien la percibe. Imgenes fugitivas, siempre en riesgo de perderse.
La fantasmagora insiste en la produccin de Campbell, tensionada por fuerzas
en conflicto. Por una parte, lo percibido se advierte impulsado a la coalescencia, a lo
continuo. Por otra, tiende a estallar en multitud de pulsantes puntos luminosos que
interpelan a un espectador afectado. Parecen dirigirse a quien las observa, atento
o sorprendido por su irrupcin, no como presencias objetualizadas, sino como una
presentificacin en curso, asumiendo una figuracin trabajosamente conquistada.
Durante sus tiempos de estudiante en el MIT, Campbell estudi cine con el documentalista Richard Leacock. Letter to a Suicide (1985), su primer trabajo, que define
como documental personal experimental, interrogaba la memoria de su hermano
muerto por propia voluntad y el esfuerzo de sus padres por superar el trauma. Luego
pas a las instalaciones: Interactive Hallucination (1988), Shock Treatment (1988) y
Hallucination (1990) prosiguieron indagando una prdida. Su observador partcipe
ya no era espectador de una pieza audiovisual, sino integrante de un dispositivo en
el que resultaba parte activa. En ellas, el artista experimentaba sobre la alteracin
del sujeto ante una dislocacin espaciotemporal, producto de una imbricacin entre
percepcin del presente y efectos de memoria.
Campbell, Jim, The Beginning, en Dietz, Steve, Jim Campbell. Material Light, New York, Hatje Cantz - Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, 2010, p. 34 (nuestra traduccin).
Bateson, Gregory, Mind and Nature, New York, Dutton, 1979, pp. 8-9 (edicin en espaol: Bateson, Gregory, Espritu y naturaleza, Buenos Aires, Amorrortu, 1980).
Whittaker, Richard, Jim Campbell. Frames of Reference, en Works and Conversations, n 2, 1999, pp. 20-31 (disponible en www.conversations.org/story.php?sid=30).
11
Fantasmas del tiempo que pasa
Entre las instalaciones montadas en Tiempo esttico, Digital Watch (1991) no tematiza la discapacidad que padecieron sus padres, afectados por sendas afecciones motrices, sino que evoca la disociacin entre percepcin
del propio cuerpo del observador y la dificultad de conducirse en el mundo material, trasladando la impresin de
ese obstculo en el movimiento. Entre lo que en trminos musicales sera un staccato y en trminos fsicos algo
espasmdico, el hiato entre presente y pasado inmediato que impone el dispositivo de retardo temporal de Digital
Watch instala a su observador en una inestabilidad constitutiva, donde la fragilidad de toda localizacin y direccionamiento del cuerpo irrumpe en la situacin. Campbell apela a una interaccin entre estados (psquicos y fsicos)
en conflicto mucho ms efectiva que las presuntas interactividades humano-mquina celebradas por tanto arte
electrnico que juguetea al borde de los gadgets. El artista basa su produccin en un fundamentado rechazo de
ese sentido banal de lo interactivo aunque no rehse la nocin, sino que lo desplaza hacia un interjuego entre
instancias de cierta simetra, una dimensin mutua que juzga necesaria para convocarla de modo cabal. De lo
contrario, slo habr relaciones de control.4
Campbell no opera tanto en los lenguajes como en los materiales y las maquinaciones de la visin y el odo. Su campo de operaciones recuerda aquella otra conocida proposicin de Bateson en Mind and Nature: los procesos de
formacin de imagen son inconscientes. Si Digital Watch participa a su observador de una esquizia temporal que lo
hace, ms que interrogarse intelectualmente, vivir en acto el trabajo de la memoria inmediata y de habitar un lapso
signado por lo discontinuo, Frames of Reference (1996-1998) hace lo propio con la percepcin del espacio. El artefacto
ideado por Campbell, al borde del experimento perceptual, cuestiona su localizacin por medio del movimiento. Se
trata no slo de ver, sino de verse, aunque quebrando la especularidad, difiriendo el lugar por el borramiento de los
marcos referenciales con los que uno puede localizarse. En ambos trabajos el artista trasciende los recursos propios
del arte conceptual, haciendo de lo vivido en plena accin de la obra el elemento de impacto fundamental sobre sus
observadores. Ya desde ese entonces la produccin de Campbell se instala en un lugar de extrema singularidad, no
dejndose inscribir en tendencias del mundo artstico, sino poniendo a punto una compleja y propia maquinaria para
sentir y pensar, solitariamente, un mundo afectado por la prdida.
Recuerdos de una luz hecha cuerpo
No nos extenderemos aqu en las Obras de memoria con la exhaustividad analtica que despliega Robert Riley en
su ensayo para el libro colectivo Jim Campbell. Material Light,5 aunque nos permitiremos apuntar algunas notas
sobre el conjunto.
Las Memory Works surgen de un dramtico giro en el itinerario de Campbell. En el perodo 1995-1996, un replanteo de su trayecto lo condujo a desarrollar en forma conjunta y ms explcita las tareas de ingeniero y artista.
Rehusndose a la remisin intertextual o la irona que, aunadas con cierto desapego, insistan en la actitud posmoderna de tanto artista contemporneo, ahond su condicin de elaborador de artefactos de procesamiento
que designaramos como introspectivos, si no fuera porque su operacin se establece, ms que en una interioridad, entre instancias que entremezclan adentro y afuera, mente y cuerpo, uno mismo y alteridades, despertando
similares tensiones en el artista y en los partcipes de sus works (aqu, ms que nunca, trabajo, al aludir a aquel
propio de la memoria). Por lo tanto, estas experiencias no remiten a lo sustantivo sino a un verbo y una imagen
en accin.
El artista ha evitado rigurosamente las estratagemas de contenido que podran llevar a una lectura en clave
de sus obras, del todo ajenas a una lgica de la representacin simblica. Su exigencia de trabajo impacta, adems, en la medida en que las piezas operan como artefactos, se ponen en funcionamiento ante un observador
que se ve llevado a adoptar tambin otro rgimen perceptivo y emotivo, y slo despus se desplaza a una posible
elaboracin del concepto. En Portrait of My Father (1994-1995) y Photo of My Mother (1996), como en los relojesmedidores de Cyclical Meter Base y Cyclical Counter Base (1996), lo artefactual es tan importante como las imgenes que cobran forma y desaparecen, o los datos que acumulan los distintos visores o cuadrantes. Los elementos
que sostienen desde la energa o el procesamiento sus funciones aportan con igual eficacia al sentido. De ese
modo, los cables y las austeras cajas de aluminio que regulan el ritmo de la respiracin en Photo of My Mother o los
latidos de Portrait of My Father son tan decisivos como las imgenes que laten o respiran en las placas superiores.
Por otra parte, la habitual designacin de Campbell como custom electronics a los componentes que permiten el
comando de esos objetos complejos alude a la dimensin artesanal y personalizada de una invencin en la cual las
manos son tan importantes como el concepto. El artista recordaba, en la citada entrevista con Whittaker, cmo
luego de su graduacin en el MIT, ya ingeniero y matemtico, pas tres aos reparando televisores. Su condicin
Campbell, Jim, Delusions of Dialog: Control and Choice in Interactive Art, Leonardo, vol. 33, n 2, pp. 133-136, 2000 (disponible en http://interactive.usc.edu/membersmedia/dtucker/002409400552397.pdf).
5
Riley, Robert R., The Memory Works, en Dietz, Steve, op. cit., pp. 50-57.
4
12
de artista no lo distancia de las materialidades del trato con aparatos en el que intervienen la bsqueda, el diseo,
y una nada desdeable dimensin de arreglo y hasta reparacin.
Contrapesando el rango ntimo de los Memory Works citados, en I Have Never Read the Bible (1995) o Typing
Paper (1995) otra memoria, de carcter colectivo, apela a la funcin formadora de la lengua y los discursos configuradores de subjetividades, creencias y proyectos, mediante dos estados de la oralidad y lo escrito, y de la voz
procesada por tecnologas automatizadas. Entre mquina y humano, el aparato revela, y devuelve, algo de ese
lazo conector antes referido, sean pasajes bblicos o un recordado discurso de Martin Luther King.
Night Lights (1995-1998), en su estrategia de sntesis temporal, promediada, de todos los sonidos de Psicosis traducidos a variaciones lumnicas, evoca las continuidades entre visto y odo. Cuesta imaginar en el cine de
Hollywood, desde los mismos ttulos diseados por Saul Bass, un film ms propenso a seguir patterns formales que
Psicosis. Ms bien est en las antpodas de las pelculas hogareas que son el insumo primero de las Home Movies.
Slo que, en estas ltimas, el dispositivo de formacin de imagen es parte misma, en el armado de su grilla, de la
experiencia visible por el espectador. Ver 560 microproyectores y la imagen resultante a la vez provoca la fascinacin primigenia por una imagen mvil, que en su misma prdida de informacin hace posible la apertura de un
lugar tan incierto como con aspiracin a lo universal. Sealaba el artista:
He estado reelaborando lo digital hacia la conversin fsica y buscando los patrones rtmicos que existen entre la creacin de
imgenes como proceso electrnico y la creacin de imgenes como el proceso humano de resolucin de la percepcin y la
asociacin de memoria.6
Extendido entre lo percibido y lo recordado, como corresponde a las prcticas del cine hogareo, aunque aqu
ampliado a una familia que posee los contornos de la humanidad.
conos de incertidumbre
Las Obras de baja resolucin de Jim Campbell exploran las aventuras de la obtencin de la forma bajo estados
mviles. Denominadas por su autor como conos ambiguos, en ellas el acceso a lo figurativo se ubica en un plano
dinmico, ingresando su reconocimiento por medio del movimiento y temporalizacin ms que por el recorte
de una forma fija. A Fire, a Freeway and a Walk (1999-2000) explota al mximo las cualidades opacas de una
pantalla, dejando entrever slo en los bordes del cuadro la luminosidad de las situaciones evocadas por su ttulo. A
su vez, en Church on 5th Avenue (2001), conformada por un conjunto de diodos emisores de luz (LED) tras una pantalla
de plexigls, y realizada a partir de un video registrado despus de los atentados del 11-S, recupera el deambular de
los transentes de la arteria ms concurrida de Nueva York en las cercanas de la iglesia del ttulo. El movimiento
entremezcla la agitacin urbana con la proximidad del templo, zona de recogimiento, as como su composicin
por puntos en su sector izquierdo y su paulatina configuracin continua a la derecha de la pantalla, procedimiento
que Campbell ahondara en Divide (2005) y Reconstruction 7 (2006), comprueban la no radicalidad de la oposicin
entre lo continuo y lo discreto en la imagen. Para el artista, como sugiri alguna vez Vilm Flusser, la oposicin
digital-analgico no es tajante y binaria, sino una cuestin de grados progresivos, aqu planteada por las cualidades difusoras (y paradjicamente formativas) del plexigls y las ntidas, aunque diseminadoras, de las figuras
consteladas por los puntos LED.7
Library (2004) contrasta la alta resolucin de su fotograbado esttico de la fachada de la Biblioteca Pblica de Nueva
York con las formas apenas configuradas de sus seres mviles, as como Fundamental Interval Commuters #2 (2011)
registra el trnsito de los pasajeros en la Grand Central Station entre la fotografa y la recomposicin en LED de su registro videogrfico, abriendo un sistema de doble consistencia, entre la nitidez y lo apenas formado, entre lo mvil y lo
esttico de un mundo visible en evolucin.
Las estructuras de LED diseadas por Campbell son piezas de un arte lumnico definitivamente posedisoniano,
altamente sustentables en su gestin de energa aunque en su custom electronics a veces conserven trazos de
esa memoria objetual observable cuando, como en Scattered Light, mantienen la tradicional forma de la bombilla
incandescente. Pero en su seno hay un LED, y no configuran otra cosa que pxeles en su sentido etimolgico, de
picture elements, ms que computacional, herederos del puntillismo impresionista. Andr Chastel destac alguna vez que, para Seurat, sus pinturas eran como un aparato visual complejo, que inclua tanto al artista como al
observador.8 El minimalismo de Fight (2000), con su exigua matriz de pxeles, da muestra acabada de ese grado
de participacin extrema que integra al sujeto, a la vez que Motion & Rest 5 (2002) nos instala en una posicin
intermedia entre las tempranas cronofotografas de locomocin humana de Eadweard Muybridge y los experi6
7
8
Campbell, Jim, The Beginning, en Dietz, Steve, op. cit., p. 34 (nuestra traduccin).
Flusser, Vilm, Digital Apparition, en Druckrey, Timothy (ed.), Electronic Culture: Technology & Visual Representation, New York, Aperture, 1997, pp. 242-246.
Chastel, Andr, Seurat et Gauguin, Art de France, n 2, Paris, 1962, pp. 297-304.
13
mentos sobre el movimiento aparente realizados por el fundador de la Gestalt, Max Wertheimer, a partir de la conmutacin de lmparas en plena oscuridad. Ante la baja informacin, el movimiento se impone a la forma, como
si incluso hasta pudiera prescindir de ella. Y sin embargo, en la marcha, el descanso, la incorporacin o el avance
trabajoso de cuerpos en cuyo esfuerzo se visualiza cierta discapacidad motriz, surge una impresionante comprobacin de humanidad. Impacta que ella no se apoye en el reconocimiento icnico o en la empata a partir del
realismo fotogrfico, del cine o del video. Slo se funda en la correspondencia con cuerpos en la dura conquista de
una accin, sombras comprometedoras del visitante de la exhibicin. El movimiento no solamente es lo que hace
comprensible lo que llegamos a ver, sino responsable de que, previamente a la comprensin, lleguemos a sentirlo.
El instante y el flujo
Las Obras de imgenes fijas son homenaje explcito al futurismo y al fotodinamismo de Boccioni, pero tambin
inversin de sus estados de nimo.
Lo cinemtico aqu se desplaza de Muybridge al futurismo aunque para los futuristas el referente era ms
bien tienne-Jules Marey en cuanto a apresar el movimiento, pero tambin a la exigencia de simultaneidad de
accin de medios y sentidos.
Los futuristas consideraban la foto, como el cine, medios fros, que crean que era preciso recalentar.9 Para ello,
como en otros mbitos, apelaban a las posibilidades de hacer un arte con aparatos, arte de medios en expansin,
promotores de formas de percepcin transensorial. Ms all de vista y odo, buscaban una vibracin de ndole
tctil, desde un toque hasta un shock. En los trabajos de Campbell, este toque llega a ser emotivo tanto o ms
que sensorial, ya que esto ltimo se sostiene en riesgo, oscilando en un estado cercano a la incertidumbre. En esa
zona de bordes, el sentimiento no cesa de emerger con efectos perturbadores.
Richard Grusin ha analizado la cualidad transmeditica del trabajo del artista bajo la perspectiva de la remediacin, de la reconversin de un medio en otro.10 Cabe, por otra parte, considerar estos trabajos, en la ms productiva adhesin al legado futurista, como piezas off media, que desafan radicalmente la misma definicin de cada
medio.11 As, desbordando foto y procesamiento digital, emergen los Dynamisms: del Dinamismo de un perro con
tralla (1912), de Giacomo Balla, al Dynamism of a Cyclist (2000) o al inesperado, por lo reticente de su apacible
sujeto, Dynamism of a Cow (2001).
Complementariamente, en los Illuminated Averages lo que importa no es el movimiento condensado en los
Dynamisms, sino el tiempo fijado en la imagen. Illuminated Average #1: Hitchcocks Psycho (2000) entabla un
inevitable dilogo con la clebre 24 Hour Psycho (1993) de Douglas Gordon, aunque lo que en aqulla era una
expansin del film a 1.440 minutos, aqu se convierte en la condensacin en una sola imagen fija, resultado del
escaneo de todos los fotogramas de Psicosis. Impresiona avizorar en la imagen obtenida en esa sntesis una mancha luminosa que remeda (ms por el peso del recuerdo que por la percepcin actual?) a la momia de Mrs. Bates
en el momento de la revelacin en el stano, bajo la violenta oscilacin de una luz que va y viene, o a la calavera
apenas entrevista que fugazmente se sobreimprime a la ltima sonrisa de Norman mirando a cmara.
Por su parte, Illuminated Average #3: Welles Citizen Kane Breakfast Table Sequence (2000) juega con la compresin de un nmero crecientemente insoportable de maanas tediosas: las del flashback, evocado por Bernstein, que repasa los desayunos de Charles Foster Kane y su primera esposa, convirtiendo sus dos siluetas blanquecinas al borde de lo irreconocible en ltimo vestigio del aburrimiento infinito de una pareja. Frente a esos dos
casos paradigmticos de dilogo con el cine, Illuminated Average #2: Bachs Suite for Cello #2 (2000) refuerza otro
punto de contacto entre la singularidad del trabajo de Campbell y el viejo programa de accin futurista. Condensacin temporal y sinestesia se anan para remitir, desde el trnsito del video al digital, a la evocacin del fotodinamismo futurista, muy particularmente el de Il violoncellista (1913), de Anton Giulio Bragaglia.
cin flotante respecto del entorno. En alguna medida, podra afirmarse que sus obras no trabajan tanto la mirada
que posa su foco decidido sobre un objeto, sino una visin con mucho de perifrica, abierta a la percepcin global
del entorno. Eso que irrumpe es lo que de pronto se ve cuando no se lo est mirando de modo atento. Algo de su
trabajo impacta de lleno en el modo en que percibimos el espacio vivido a nuestro alrededor, sea el de las galeras,
los museos o los mbitos pblicos.
Hace ya mucho tiempo, artistas como Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Thomas Wilfred o Zdenk Penek, entre otros,
imaginaron formas de arte lumnico en movimiento que proponan transformar la percepcin del espacio y el
tiempo arquitectnicos y urbanos, con la finalidad de habitar y recorrer lugares presentes que reclamaban nuevos
estados de conciencia, disposiciones tanto del entorno como de s. Obras de las dimensiones excepcionales de
Scattered Light o la estrechamente ligada y acotada a un espacio museal Exploded View (Commuters) (2011)
son herederas de aquel legado hasta hoy slo atendido de modo intermitente.
Contra la especificidad y las viejas polticas esencialistas de definicin meditica alguna vez perseguidas por
las artes audiovisuales y que comenz a disolver saludablemente el tejido de las artes electrnicas, la produccin
de Jim Campbell se hace crucial en la recreacin contempornea del arte y sus medios. Desde las instalaciones,
objetos y piezas de baja resolucin, pasando por la invencin de nuevos gneros y experiencias e incluso desafiando las fronteras entre arte y diseo en sus obras de espacio pblico, el pattern fundamental de conexin en sus
trabajos es, en definitiva, el que logra establecer el artista con sus interlocutores. A travs de destellos mviles y
fugaces que, no obstante su fragilidad de lucirnagas en la noche, dan cuenta de lo viviente, los partcipes de estas
percepciones fugitivas somos interrogados de un modo perturbador. Algo en esos puntos luminosos, sin dudas,
nos mira directo a los ojos.
Trabajar el tiempo para llegar a ver
Steve Dietz ha resaltado la condicin liminal del trabajo de Jim Campbell, que insistentemente bordea las fronteras de la percepcin y lo perceptible. A la vez, destaca su compromiso con el ritmo, aunque entendido no en
un sentido estricto como podra considerrselo en trminos de msica, sino como el cuidado de cierto patrn
perceptible en los flujos del tiempo.12 Algo que sorprende a lo largo del encuentro con sus obras, cualquiera sea la
serie o el ciclo al que pertenezcan, es cmo la cantidad de informacin es reducida al mnimo. El artista cree que
es preciso slo dar lo suficiente para evocar, sin necesidad de abundar en la descripcin. Esa caracterstica hace
de la posicin y el trabajo de sus espectadores una actividad intensa y no necesariamente intelectual: el ritmo
hace que la mente analtica no intercepte el efecto, en el umbral perceptivo, de captacin paralela a cierta atenLista, Giovanni, Cinema e Fotografa Futurista, Milano, Skira, 2001.
Bolter, Jay David y Grusin, Richard (eds.), Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2000.
Celant, Germano y Maraniello, Gianfranco, Vertigo: A Century of Multimedia Art from Futurism to the Web, Bologna, Skira-MAMBo, 2007.
12
Jim Campbell in conversation with Steve Dietz, en Dietz, Steve, op. cit., p. 148.
9
10
11
14
15
Mirar para ver mirando*

Richard Shiff
La primera vez que pas por la puerta automtica de un supermercado pens que la puerta era inteligente y me responda. Ahora piso la alfombra para abrir la puerta la segunda vez no es una pregunta, sino una orden. La ancdota
fue contada por Jim Campbell en una conf erencia que dio en 1996 sobre el tema del arte interactivo. Campbell sostena
que muy rara vez se produce una interactividad abierta en las comunicaciones entre una mente activa y una tecnologa
reactiva. Programamos nuestras mquinas electrnicas para que funcionen en relacin con indicaciones especficas, y
las tornamos ms controlables que sensibles. Con estos aparatos experimentamos momentos de exploracin fluida,
incluso ldica, pero normalmente con un propsito en mente. Completar una tarea, ganar un juego: el objetivo puede
ser tan simple como entrar en un edificio, lo que implica sortear la puerta electrnica. Con la experiencia, llegamos a
dominar nuevas tecnologas adems de las ya conocidas, y abandonamos rpidamente todo pensamiento acerca de
que el dispositivo programado posea una voluntad independiente. Sin embargo, observa Campbell, todo juicio perceptivo tiene un aspecto psicolgico: Es difcil para los observadores no proyectar inteligencia en un programa que tiene
respuestas con sentido a sus acciones.1
Concebimos la situacin de una manera, luego de otra. Estamos controlando a la mquina, o ella est determinando nuestro comportamiento? En la fantasa, podra parecer que un dispositivo o un objeto participa en un
plano de igualdad en el intercambio sensible. Y la fantasa abunda en una cultura saturada de objetos destinados
a atraer y mantener la atencin de quienquiera que se tope con ellos. En el mercado, tras la puerta que nos llama: Ven, breme, entra, cada artculo de consumo nos asedia: Prubame, cmprame. Preguntar u ordenar,
responder o ser controlado: en el mundo de la experiencia cotidiana que coincide con la construccin de nuestra
fantasa cultural, los estados activos y pasivos de la percepcin se desdibujan.
La pantalla de Chance
Los objetos y sus imgenes nos hablan. Las tecnologas que representan acciones ms all de las suyas propias
son las que tienen ms probabilidades de inducir esa impresin de interactividad, cierta sensacin de comunicacin
como la que se da entre personas de carne y hueso, entre un punto de vista y otro punto de vista. Un sistema de representacin remplaza una realidad polifactica por una imagen limitada. Se centra en una sola perspectiva, canaliza
la informacin y pone nfasis en aspectos seleccionados, con lo que estimula an ms la fantasa. La novela Desde el
jardn, de Jerzy Kosinski, tiene como tema el estado de la percepcin organizada tecnolgicamente alrededor de 1970;
un mundo de TV ms que de PC. Kosinski llama Chance a su protagonista, un hombre prcticamente aislado desde su
nacimiento. No habiendo sido formado por la familia o los estudios, Chance carece de programacin social; aprende sobre la vida mediante el sistema de representacin dominante, a travs de la programacin que la televisin le
ofrece. Tiene trasmisiones de televisin en lugar de socializacin pblica, una situacin que reduce sus posibilidades de desarrollo, pero tal vez no ms que cualquier otro control sobre la percepcin y la perspectiva individuales.
Chance toma las acciones de los personajes proyectados en la pantalla como su gua de comportamiento adecuado; imita sus gestos. Cuando las circunstancias lo arrojan abruptamente a la compaa de personas vivientes con
cuerpos fsicos reales, reflexiona sobre los misterios de las relaciones sexuales como un hombre limitado a mirar,
no instruido en tocar:
Quiso decirle cunto ms hubiera preferido mirarla, que slo contemplndola poda fijarla en su memoria y poseerla [] La vista
abarcaba todo simultneamente: el tacto era siempre parcial [Ella] no tendra que haber deseado que l la tocase ms de lo que
pudiera desearlo una pantalla de televisin.2
Richard Shiff
Titular de la Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art, The University of Texas at Austin, donde dirige el Center for the Study
of Modernism. Es autor de numerosas publicaciones sobre arte moderno y contemporneo y su teora. Entre sus libros
ms recientes figuran Doubt (Routledge, 2008) y Between Sense and de Kooning (Reaktion, 2011).
16
Con su entendimiento totalmente filtrado por el medio figurativo, Chance tena motivos para ignorar la presencia de
la pantalla en s. Tocar su suave vidriosidad no habra revelado nada ms que su aparente transparencia. La pantalla
desva el tacto a la vez que se abre a la visin. Si los programas de televisin creaban para Chance un mundo interactivo
de fantasa, la naturaleza fsica de la pantalla no intervino en ello. Sin embargo, tendra que haberlo hecho; tal vez de* Ensayo publicado originalmente en Dietz, Steve (ed.), Jim Campbell. Material Light, New York, Hatje Cantz - Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, 2010.
1
Campbell, Jim, Delusions of Dialogue: Control and Choice in Interactive Art, Leonardo, vol. 33, n 2, 2000, pp. 133-134. sta es la versin publicada de una conferencia que Campbell dio inicialmente en The Museum of Modern Art, Nueva York, el 13 de mayo de 1996. Agradezco a Jim Campbell sus generosas respuestas a numerosas solicitudes de informacin, as como a Caitlin
Haskell, Katie Anania y Jason Goldstein por su asesoramiento en la investigacin.
2
Kosinski, Jerzy, Being There, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970, pp. 113-114 (edicin en espaol: Desde el jardn, Barcelona, Anagrama, 1999, p. 131). La trama de Desde el jardn
utiliza la percepcin fortuita de la semejanza auditiva entre Chance, the Gardener (Chance, el jardinero, su profesin) y Chauncey Gardiner, un nombre aristocrtico que parece adecuado a
la ropa elegante de Chance y los trajes heredados de su rico empleador. En la obra de Kosinski se acumulan varias capas de lectura literaria y biogrfica; pudo haber tomado como modelo de
su propia vida una novela polaca similar a Desde el jardn, lo cual sugiere que su posterior acto de escribir podra ser a la vez plagio impersonal y confesin personal, arte y vida que se imitan
mutuamente. Vase Park Sloan, James, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, New York, Dutton, 1996, pp. 65-67.
17
(transformada en una secuencia de toques aplicados a las diversas partes, el recuerdo de una accin). En un instante, el tacto ampla e intensifica el sentido de cualquier fragmento de la imagen que capte; descubre los detalles
que la vista no registra. Pero la vista slo necesita un nico instante para captar el todo. Si pasar de un sentido a otro
genera un beneficio, tambin origina una prdida, independientemente de qu opcin elijan un artista que crea o
un espectador que interpreta. La percepcin slo se perfecciona en una ilusin imaginativa selectiva: en la fantasa.
Sometida a los requerimientos de preguntas implacables, toda tecnologa de la representacin se convierte en
un artefacto de baja resolucin y expectativas decepcionadas. Chance slo aprendi un poco acerca del comportamiento humano con sus programas diarios de TV. Un informe sobre los problemas de la trasmisin por televisin en
sus etapas iniciales indica que stos eran (y an pueden ser) tanto fsicos como conceptuales:
Una apertura infinitamente pequea [en el disco de exploracin] es imposible de lograr en la prctica; debe tener dimensiones
finitas. Como resultado de esta limitacin [] las lneas de demarcacin claramente definidas entre las partes brillantes y oscuras
de la escena original aparecen borrosas o difuminadas en la imagen televisiva recibida.6
Experiments in Touching Color, 1999
bera haberlo hecho. ste es el quid del problema de la representacin, que Chance no consigui comprender: cada
medio tiene una presencia material independiente que complementa la presencia que est destinado a mostrar.
Si explorar la pantalla y otros componentes del aparato no agrega una dimensin a la presunta realidad detrs
de la proyeccin, puede que esa situacin requiera una investigacin sensorial alternativa. Cuando Chance, fascinado por la televisin, separ la significatividad de lo visual de la falta de sentido de lo tctil, limit sus propias
posibilidades. Ver puede ser todo simultneamente, pero no puede representar lo que el sentido rival del tacto
experimentara. All donde la visin interroga, el tacto manda, del mismo modo que donde la visin ordena, el tacto slo puede interrogar. Cada sentido es un misterio para el otro. Generalmente, coordinamos ambos modos de
informacin, pero slo ignorando sus contradicciones ms conflictivas.
La visin es el modo todo-de-una-vez, la exploracin continua; retrata un mundo analgico de experiencia.
El tacto tiende a ser discreto, intermitente; hace contacto aqu, luego all, en momentos sucesivos. Diferencia
rasgos materiales que para la visin resultan similares. La asociacin de dedos con dgitos alienta a ampliar la distincin: si la visin es analgica, el tacto debe ser digital. Pero, desde el punto de vista de Campbell, tal clasificacin
es slo metafrica. Para ser digital, una cualidad debe ser ms que espacial o temporalmente discreta; debe ser
cuantificada (expresarse en unidades de medida).3 Cuando ejercemos presin tctil sobre una superficie, la fuerza
de esta accin se modula: ms analgica que digital, la presin aumenta y disminuye segn un arco continuo.
Cuando miramos, el aqu y el all se fusionan en un continuo analgico, tanto en el tiempo como en el espacio;
mientras que cuando tocamos, el aqu y el all por lo general siguen siendo discretamente aqu y all, ahora y despus, a pesar de la continuidad de la presin en cada punto de contacto. Cada uno de los dos modos sensoriales
suprime de su representacin de la experiencia aquellas cualidades a las que no logra dar cabida debido a sus
caractersticas fsicas y fenomenolgicas.
En 1999, Campbell cre Experiments in Touching Color, un dispositivo que permite tocar para ver el color, toque
a toque. Si el Chance ficticio hubiera podido experimentar el arte real de Campbell, tal vez la totalidad de su mundo
sensorial se hubiera vuelto ms viva. Experiments in Touching Color proyecta una imagen de video estable pero mvil, como, por ejemplo, una toma continua del rostro de una persona que habla. La pantalla est montada en forma
horizontal, como la superficie de una mesa. Cuando un observador toca la imagen de video, toda la pantalla se tie
de un color uniforme que corresponde al valor del pxel especfico con el que se hizo contacto. Este proceso programado e interactivo convierte una imagen visual integrada, digitalizada dentro del espacio pictrico de la pantalla,
en un extrao hbrido de lo visual y lo tctil, digitalizado en el tiempo (toque a toque). Si bien sta no era necesariamente la intencin de Campbell, parece que la imagen proyectada adquiere el potencial de ser reconstituida en
la memoria del observador-manipulador, si tiene el tiempo suficiente para tomar contacto con cada pxel en una
sucesin espacial y temporal y construir la reserva de memoria necesaria. Cada unidad de este banco de memoria
tambin funcionara como una representacin de un rasgo por lo dems oculto de la imagen totalizada; aspectos de
la propia memoria de la imagen, si se puede antropomorfizar de este modo la situacin (el tacto percibe los rboles
para los que la visin es ciega; la visin percibe el bosque para el cual el tacto es insensible).4
Campbell afirma, en forma provocadora: Las memorias [tanto humanas como computacionales] estn ocultas y deben ser transformadas para ser representadas.5 Con exigencias cambiantes, el carcter de una memoria
se modifica; puede tornarse ms visual (convertida en una imagen total, el recuerdo de una visin) o ms tctil
No confunda digital con discreto! Una imagen fija digital es cuantificada en espacio y cuantificada en valor. Campbell, declaracin al autor, 25 de marzo de 2005 (el nfasis es original).
Campbell explica que la obra incluye un componente de audio que complementa el componente de video: El sonido se desvanece a medida que la imagen se funde [a un solo color] para
darles a los observadores ms informacin para imaginar la imagen no vista [] El sonido y el color juntos es lo que realmente gua nuestra imaginacin (declaracin al autor, 21 de diciembre
de 2009).
5
Campbell, Jim, Video Documentation List, Selected Works 1988-2003, texto original indito, 2003 (cortesa de Jim Campbell).
3
18
El enfoque de la realidad de Chance era ms restringido de lo que l poda advertir. Trataba de aprender sobre
la sexualidad interactiva viendo a su pareja ertica como una imagen (Me gusta mirar, le dice).7 Esto no poda
proporcionarle ms que una distorsin o una reduccin de lo que podra aprender aplicando un modo diferente
de observacin y representacin, un tipo distinto de foco perceptivo; por ejemplo, tocando el cuerpo de la mujer.
Y, viceversa, si tocara, podra aprender algo ms mirando. La realidad material frustra cada uno de los sentidos,
as como interfiere con cada tecnologa inventada para observar la realidad material ms all del simple alcance
de los sentidos. Todo aparato distorsiona a la vez que revela. Toda revelacin, al haber asumido una perspectiva
experiencial, es una distorsin.
Un medio de proyeccin interfiere con la proyeccin y hace que tenga al menos un grado menos de resolucin
de lo que una teora del medio ideal prevera. La teora est aqu; la prctica est all: la materia fsica impide cualquier enlace perfecto. En los primeros tiempos de la televisin, el ideal terico inalcanzable de un disco de exploracin infinitamente fino cedi a la realidad de un disco que poda ser fabricado con materiales concretos.8 As como
la materialidad del aparato de proyeccin afecta la calidad de la trasmisin, la presencia fsica de una persona
que ocupa un espacio real y est ubicada para observar una imagen proyectada se convierte en un factor material dentro del sistema de representacin. El tamao del cuerpo humano y las capacidades de sus sentidos son
variables que interfieren con la operacin ideal de un aparato de representacin visual.9 La interferencia material
es la regla, no la lamentable excepcin. Nuestra experiencia cotidiana confirma el principio de incertidumbre de
Werner Heisenberg, como si este poco de ciencia enrarecida debiera ser aceptado como sentido comn. Campbell
alude deliberadamente a Heisenberg: Si uno trata de observar algo [] influir en ello [] Cuanto ms informacin uno trata de obtener de algo, menos obtiene.10 El simple hecho de arrojar luz sobre un objeto altera el objeto:
[Trate] de controlar la situacin y menos la controlar, y ser menos capaz de ver.11 La observacin no es una
puerta de supermercado, dominada por un momento de comprensin emprica. Cuando observamos, lo hacemos
oscuramente, con una iluminacin indirecta.
Muestre sus recursos
El medio utilizado por Campbell es la electrnica mayormente, una tecnologa de caja negra de operaciones
inaparentes. Muchas de sus obras recientes generan imgenes mediante paneles de diodos emisores de luz
(LED) computarizados que permiten visualizar material fotogrfico y flmico. A menudo reduce la cantidad de
elementos constitutivos de las imgenes (pxeles) a casi un mnimo. Esto proporciona inteligibilidad visual a sus
mrgenes absolutos, como para adaptarse al desafo de la ingeniera electromecnica de la informacin, que, en
su estado digitalizado, es inaccesible a la inspeccin visual. Una vez que una imagen figurativa se desplaza ms
all (es decir, por debajo) de su lmite de inteligibilidad, Campbell tiende a referirse a la configuracin resultante
como abstracta: Las imgenes de muy baja resolucin existen en el lmite de la abstraccin.12 Su ingeniera se
Dinsdale, Alfred, First Principles of Television, London, Chapman & Hall, 1932, pp. 128-129.
7
Kosinski, Jerzy, Being There, op. cit., pp. 114-115 (p. 132 de la edicin en espaol, op. cit.). Con respecto al conflicto en la percepcin sensorial, comprese con la obra de Campbell Untitled (for
Heisenberg) (1994-1995), en la que la imagen de unos amantes se torna progresivamente menos reveladora a medida que el observador se aproxima a ella.
8
Dinsdale, Alfred, op. cit., p. 130.
9
Con respecto a su reciente serie de construcciones Home Movies, Campbell aprendi por experiencia la relacin entre la distancia de observacin y el carcter abstracto versus la comprensin de la imagen (Campbell, declaracin al autor, 3 de julio de 2009).
10
Campbell, Jim, 29 de agosto de 2007, The Buzz @ SJMAJim Campbell, en http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0-06mGjtjs (consultado el 17 de diciembre de 2009). En 19931994, Campbell cre Shadow (for Heisenberg), un cubo de vidrio que contiene un Buda; el vidrio se empaa cuando se acerca un observador, lo cual anula el intento de ver el objeto en mayor
detalle. Vanse Campbell, Jim, entrevista de Richard Wittaker, 1999, Frames of Reference, Conversations.org: Interviews with Social Artists, en http://conversations.org/story.php?sid=30
(consultado el 18 de diciembre de 2009); Dietz, Steve, The Difference that Makes a Difference: The Liminal Art of Jim Campbell, en Dietz, Steve et al., Quantizing Effects: The Liminal Art of
Jim Campbell, Santa Fe, Site Santa Fe, 2005, p. 18.
11
Campbell, Jim / Wittaker, Richard, entrevista citada. Campbell tambin expone ese principio en su Video Documentation List, Selected Works 19882003, op. cit.: Cuanto ms fielmente
uno trata de observar o medir un objeto, ms se ver afectado ese objeto por la observacin.
6
19
transforma en arte cuando pone de relieve lo borroso ubicado en

la divisin entre demandas y preguntas, resolucin y oscuridad.
Las imgenes de baja resolucin plantean cuestiones fundamentales de percepcin, al atraer la atencin hacia los mrgenes
y los lmites de la coherencia visual. Campbell tiene ingeniosas
formas de buscar el lmite. Home Movies Grid (2007) utiliza unidades de LED para proyectar una imagen flmica en una pantalla
doble de plexigls. La pantalla de atrs reduce la visibilidad a lneas que forman una cuadrcula: vemos la imagen en el diseo
lineal, no en los cuadrados mucho ms grandes que quedan entre
las lneas, que permanecen en blanco. La pantalla de adelante diHome Movies Grid, 2007
fumina o borronea las lneas de la cuadrcula, que constituyen por
s solas la imagen. A pesar de estas restricciones, con alguna experiencia del dispositivo, su imagen mvil se torna legible, como
si fuera proyectada sobre un plano continuo. Al igual que en la visin convencional de un film proyectado convencionalmente, nuestra tendencia a percibir una continuidad analgica tal vez la demanda programada de nuestro
cerebro elimina la conciencia de las rupturas espaciales y temporales discretas en el sistema. La abstraccin es
evidente, pero la representacin se mantiene. Home Movies Grid nos sita en la puerta nica que se abre a ambas
clases de imagen, a la representacin y a la abstraccin, y nos obliga a pasar de la demanda a la interrogacin.
Cuando Campbell comenz a experimentar con poner pantallas de difusin frente a sus imgenes LED espaciadamente pixeladas, materializ una irona conceptual:
Colocar un simple filtro [] entre el observador y la imagen hace que sta sea ms comprensible [] Al quitar informacin, se
comunica ms significado. Los pxeles [son] ruido dentro de este sistema de comunicacin.13
El medio de Campbell se vuelve el ruido extrado: la interferencia perpetua. Cuando se oscurecen los signos de la
presencia material, sensorial, del medio, la imagen que proyecta se torna an ms evidente; una especie de principio
de incertidumbre que trabaja en favor del observador. Sin embargo, no vemos ms de la imagen que lo que nos
permite su borrosidad. Enfocar es restituir el factor ruido, el carcter discreto de los pxeles, un efecto contradictorio con la continuidad analgica de la imagen proyectada. No es la imagen lo que la pantalla pone fuera de
foco, afirma Campbell, puesto que nunca hubo inicialmente una imagen ntida: Son los pxeles o los artefactos
de la informacin los que son desenfocados por la pantalla.14 El aumento de la distancia entre el panel LED y la
pantalla de difusin minimiza el carcter discreto de los pxeles; la misma operacin maximiza la borrosidad y
convierte la imagen de relativamente abstracta en relativamente figurativa. Campbell disea ciertas obras LED
con un armado flexible del panel y la pantalla: manipulando la estructura y ajustando el ngulo y la distancia de la
difusin, los observadores pueden explorar la correspondencia entre una abstraccin en particular y su representacin. A diferencia de la pantalla de televisin pasiva de Chance,
aqu una proyeccin de video al alcance del espectador adquiere
activamente un significado variable. Este tipo de arte alienta el
aprendizaje mediante la accin, por contacto directo.
Algunos de los videos programados que los paneles LED de
Campbell recomponen muestran olas marinas que rompen (Wave
Modulation, 2003; Divide, 2005). Este rasgo de la naturaleza visible evoca los fenmenos de onda y pulso en general, incluyendo
la luz, que, en teora, existe como digital (energa en paquetes discretos) o analgica (energa modulada). Si la luz se trasmite en ambas formas, entonces de acuerdo con nuestra lgica de exclusin
mutua, por nuestra insistencia en que sea de una forma o la otra
Wave Modulation, 2003
puede no tener una esencia fija. Una representacin pixelada de
una ola marina tambin se presenta a la vez como analgica y
digital. Esta imagen tambin carece de una autntica esencia? La estructura de muchas de las obras de Campbell
insiste en este criterio, al permitir a un observador percibir tanto el panel LED como la pantalla de difusin desde
Campbell, Jim, Final Project Report for Explorations of Meaning in Quantized Information: Submitted to the Langlois Foundation, August 18, 2001, texto original indito (cortesa de Jim
Campbell). Como ingeniero en computacin, Campbell ha hecho uso de la frmula de interpolacin de Nyquist-Shannon, un algoritmo que describe [las] transformaciones liminales entre
analgico y digital, ente percepcin e ilegibilidad; Dietz, Steve, op. cit., p. 13.
13
Campbell, Jim, Proposal to The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology: Explorations of Meaning in Quantized Information, January 28, 2000, texto original indito
(cortesa de Jim Campbell). Campbell replante este principio en su Final Project Report for Explorations of Meaning in Quantized Information, op. cit.: La visibilidad de los pxeles dentro de
una imag en agrega ruido a esa imagen.
14
Campbell, Jim, Final Project Report, op. cit.
12
20
una perspectiva lateral, con la imagen simultneamente construida y deconstruida (deconstruida, porque los
trminos de nuestra comprensin del dispositivo son modificados por el dispositivo mismo). Tal vez la verdadera
interactividad se produce cuando nuestras categoras y ordenamientos lgicos se desdibujan como lo hacen en el
arte de Campbell, que infunde la conciencia de que, cuando observamos abiertamente, nuestros sentidos dejan
al descubierto su propia inseguridad. Su arte demuestra que debemos continuar preguntando aun cuando nos
hayamos acostumbrado a demandar: La ingeniera tiene que ver con resolver problemas, concluye, y el arte,
con crearlos.15
La reciente serie de Campbell Home Movies impone el recurso de la proyeccin dentro de la lnea de visin
de un espectador situado frente a la pantalla que refleja la imagen mvil. Estas obras insertan incmodamente
el volumen del aparato entre el observador y la pantalla, de modo que el proyector (unidades LED suspendidas,
distribuidas a lo largo de cables de instalacin elctrica) se convierte en una fuente material de ruido informativo.
Las unidades LED introducen un segundo nivel de ruido cuando los cables se enroscan ligeramente como reaccin
a su peso gravitatorio o se mueven muy levemente en respuesta a las corrientes de aire. El observador probablemente no advierta esta distorsin de la distorsin, porque la imagen proyectada una pelcula casera de autor
annimo tiene ya muy baja resolucin. Pero la inspeccin del aparato, situado claramente a la vista, torna obvias
las diversas fuentes potenciales de distorsin, aun cuando sus efectos pasen inadvertidos. La distorsin puede
ser ms accesible al anlisis que a la sensacin.
Es probable que la combinacin de las imgenes triviales (la filmacin casera) y el extrao dispositivo de proyeccin traslade la atencin del espectador de la imagen a sus recursos. Aqu el sistema de informacin y su trasmisin resulta ms interesante que el sistema de significado sociocultural.16 Carecemos de clasificacin para un
modo de proyeccin tan atpico, aun cuando deja una huella tecnolgica extremadamente evidente. Podramos
estar ante un caso de arte modernista? Muestre sus recursos es un aforismo modernista del siglo XX.17 Campbell
parece llevar esta cuestin al absurdo, transformando la conocida exigencia modernista en una pregunta que requiere una nueva investigacin. Cuando desdibuja nuestras categoras habituales de organizacin perceptiva, las
expone a la interactividad experiencial. En cierto modo desconcertado por su experiencia de su propia obra que
es la respuesta de un artista, o la de un filsofo-ingeniero, Campbell concluye que aprendemos cmo mirar
estas imgenes mirndolas.18
Lo borroso en la historia
Cada vez que cambia la relacin entre el pixelado y la borrosidad, es probable que tambin se modifique la expresin o emocin percibida desde el punto de vista de Campbell, el significado, en oposicin a la informacin:
Recientemente vi una demostracin antes y despus de una imagen fija de la toma de la cabeza y los hombros de una mujer
antes y despus de la compresin. Supuestamente las dos imgenes deban tener la misma apariencia. Pero en la comprimida
advert que las curvas estaban reducidas en los labios. Su sonrisa haba desaparecido! Slo unos pocos pxeles de diferencia y,
sin embargo, un significado totalmente distinto.19
Al pedirle que explicara con mayor detalle su observacin, Campbell respondi:

En la imagen original la mujer tena, claramente, una leve sonrisa, y despus de la compresin, no [] Realmente me hizo ponerme a pensar acerca de la transformacin del significado en los procesos de traduccin digital.20
El inters de Campbell en la influencia del medio sobre el significado recuerda la forma en que los artistas y los crticos del siglo XIX juzgaban los avances de la tecnologa de la representacin en su propia poca. Hacia la mitad del siglo,
el nuevo medio de la fotografa tanto el daguerrotipo de una sola copia como el calotipo de copias mltiples haba
introducido niveles inesperados de precisin en prcticas de representacin relativamente comunes, como el retrato.
Pero este nuevo nivel de detalle (una ciencia de la representacin) no necesariamente se traduca en mayor expresividad (una poesa de la representacin). A pesar de nuestra capacidad para codificar informacin y sentido de modo que
concuerden en condiciones limitadas, ambos factores siguen siendo fundamentalmente inconmensurables.
Campbell, Jim, en Lineberry, Heather Sealy, Electronic Interview with Jim Campbell, en Jim Campbell: Transforming Time, Electronic Works 19901999 (cat. exp.), Tempe, Arizona State
University, 1999, p. 64.
Informacin se refiere especficamente a la informacin en el sentido matemtico, mientras que el concepto de significado abarca el significado en el sentido potico. Campbell, Jim,
Artists Statement, en Coblentz, Cassandra (ed.), Surface Tension, Philadelphia, The Fabric Workshop, 2003, en http://www.fabricworkshop.org/exhibitions/surface/campbell-statement.php
(consultado el 18 de diciembre de 2009).
17
Un tpico comentario de principios del siglo XX: Gran parte del poder emotivo de las telas de Czanne deriva del hecho de que el pintor, en lugar de ocultarlos, muestra sus recursos. Lhote,
Andr, LEnseignement de Czanne, Nouvelle revue franaise, n 15, 1 de noviembre de 1920, p. 665 (el destacado es original).
18
Campbell, Jim, declaracin al autor, 3 de julio de 2009.
19
Campbell, Jim, Final Project, op. cit.; vase tambin nota 16.
20
Campbell, Jim, declaracin al autor, 19 de diciembre de 2009.
15
16
21
Ante el desafo a las prcticas y las expectativas tradicionales, algunos crticos decimonnicos sostenan que
los daguerrotipos, si bien ofrecan una mayor capacidad informativa, carecan del tipo de sensibilidad que podan
trasmitir una pintura o un dibujo convencionales. Thophile Thor escribi en 1845:
El artista no es meramente un ojo, como una placa de daguerrotipo, un espejo insensibilizador, pasivo, que reproduce fsicamente la imagen que se le presenta; se convierte en una fuerza impulsora y creativa que, a su vez, regenera la creacin externa.21
En 1848, sin embargo, el mismo crtico elogiaba la innovacin de la copia fotogrfica en papel, porque su mayor
velocidad y facilidad de ejecucin ofrecan a los artistas un medio eficiente para el posterior estudio de los efmeros efectos de la luz solar, la sensacin de disfrutar de la naturaleza en trnsito, detenindose en una curva de un
sendero del bosque.22 La invitacin de Thor a los artistas a sumergirse en la naturaleza y extraer, por cualquier
medio, emocin de la visin espontnea es anloga a la distincin hecha en la prctica fotogrfica misma, donde
se perciba la necesidad de retener el temblor orgnico momentneo en la copia permanentemente inmovilizada.
En 1851, Francis Wey sostena que el foco difuminado de la impresin del calotipo, por oposicin a la nitidez de la
placa del daguerrotipo, era particularmente efectivo para animar una imagen naturalista:
En cierto modo, la fotografa [impresa en papel] constituye un vnculo entre el daguerrotipo y el arte propiamente dicho. Parece
que, al pasar al papel, el mecanismo se torna animado: el aparato se eleva a una inteligencia que combina los efectos, simplifica
la ejecucin, interpreta la naturaleza y agrega a la reproduccin de planos y lneas la expresin del sentimiento o de la fisonoma.23
Recordamos la apreciacin de Campbell: Es difcil para los observadores no proyectar inteligencia en un programa que tiene respuestas con sentido a sus acciones.24 Aqu, la accin es la fotografa y el programa es el
proceso de impresin en papel. En los principios de la fotografa, el signo de un realce de la expresividad, incluso
una especie de inteligencia, era lo borroso. Un calotipo de alrededor de 1850 requera un tiempo de exposicin
relativamente corto, pero no insignificante. Este proceso desdibujaba selectivamente. No consegua aquietar los movimientos ms fugaces y variables, como el temblor de las hojas en una rama, mientras que inmovilizaba casi todo lo
dems en una escena de bosque. Los observadores de las fotografas de paisajes de mediados del siglo XIX no consideraban el follaje borroso como un defecto, sino como un indicador de la fuerza viva de la naturaleza, una evidencia de
la continua (analgica) vivacidad de sta. La naturaleza y el proceso fotogrfico se expresaban en armona.
La capacidad de sentimiento (el trmino francs de Wey era sentiment), ms que la exactitud del detalle o el
matiz, era, para muchos observadores, el aspecto en funcin del cual la representacin fotogrfica y la obtenida
por cualquier otro medio experimentaran un auge o una cada, al menos en cuanto a su uso artstico. Dicho de
otro modo, los mecanismos y los productos que generaban carecan del sentimiento que la mediacin humana,
el toque humano, aportaran a la representacin.25 No obstante, se comprob que exista una forma mecnica de
aumentar la vivacidad de la fotografa, tornndola ms expresiva: desde el punto de vista de Campbell, incrementando el sentido en relacin con la cantidad de informacin. Este nuevo mtodo consista en un tipo de animacin
mecnica, lograda en las secuencias fotogrficas (cronofotografa) de Eadweard Muybridge y tienne-Jules Marey.
Poco despus apareci la proyeccin cinematogrfica, cuyo nombre fue inicialmente fotografa animada la ilusin
de movimiento creada por una sucesin de fotogramas separados.26 Campbell apunta que, en comparacin con una
imagen fija similar, una imagen mvil (film o video), cuando es proyectada mediante un panel LED de baja resolucin,
requiere menos informacin (menos elementos codificados) para ser descifrable.27 Su serie Motion and Rest, de 2002,
muestra a individuos discapacitados caminando. Campbell redujo la informacin al punto de que slo el modo de
andar resulta inteligible; nicamente el movimiento, y ningn otro factor de la apariencia individual es significativo
desde el punto de vista expresivo.
La mecnica de la cinematografa y sus imgenes mviles es extremadamente complicada, y slo adquiri
lentamente un nivel de perfeccin adecuado para los fines de la produccin y la exhibicin comerciales. Un problema era la interferencia material conocida como parpadeo, causada por el registro fantasmal que tiene el ojo de la
accin del obturador, una rpida alternancia de luz extrema [obturador abierto] y oscuridad extrema [obturador
Thor, Thophile, Salon de 1845, en Les Salons, 3 vols., Bruxelles, 1893, vol 1, p. 105; vase tambin Salon de 1847, vol. 1, pp. 446 y 449.
Thor, Thophile, Revue des arts, Le Constitutionnel, 6 de febrero de 1848, s/p.
23
Wey, Francis, De linfluence de lhliographie sur les beaux-arts, La Lumire, 9 de febrero de 1851, p. 2.
24
Campbell, Jim, Delusions of Dialogue, op cit.
25
La forma moderna de esta nocin es la cartesiana, con su diferenciacin radical entre un alma animada y la materia muerta y la materialidad. Vase Descartes, Ren, Discourse on Method
(1637), en Kemp Smith, Norman (ed. y trad.), Philosophical Writings, New York, Modern Library, 1958, p. 119. Para un enfoque opuesto, vase La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, Treatise on the Soul
(1745), en Thomson, Ann (ed. y trad.), Machine Man and Other Writings, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 65-66.
26
Hepworth, Cecil M., Animated Photography: The ABC of the Cinematograph (ed. Hector MacLean), London, Hazell, Watson & Viney, 1900; Talbot, Frederick A., Moving Pictures: How They Are
Made and Worked, London, William Heinemann, 1912, p. 7 (la fotografa animada no es en absoluto animacin [movimiento real]).
27
A estas bajas velocidades de informacin, el movimiento de una imagen es tan importante como el contenido esttico de pxeles de sta para distinguir el contenido total de imagen.
Campbell, Jim, Final Project, op. cit.
21
22
22
cerrado], cuando cada fotograma se colocaba en posicin frente a la lente de proyeccin.28 La intensidad del
parpadeo, durante los primeros aos del cine, dependa del tipo de obturador utilizado, as como de la distribucin
de la luz y la sombra en la escena proyectada. El fenmeno del parpadeo, que irrita y fatiga la vista, se impone en
la imagen; se convierte en una instancia dramtica de la tensin entre las caractersticas materiales del medio
y su funcin representativa de expresar una imagen en forma denotativa que, idealmente, no requerira traduccin adicional de la informacin, slo interpretacin del significado.29 Cuando los primeros operadores intentaron
eliminar el parpadeo dejando de usar el obturador, apareci la lluvia, una manifestacin diferente de la persistencia de la visin, un resultado del contraste en la sucesin de imgenes proyectadas ms que en el haz de luz
proyectada repetidamente interrumpido (los tonos de un fotograma continuaban apareciendo en la visin del
fotograma siguiente).30 El medio an no haba alcanzado la suficiente transparencia o el suficiente silencio, la
ausencia de todo ruido informativo, de modo que slo fuera evidente la imagen figurativa.
Con el tiempo, la tecnologa elimin el parpadeo reduciendo el tiempo que cada fotograma de una pelcula permaneca sin interrupcin en el haz de luz proyectado. Ahora el tiempo durante el cual la imagen mvil se iluminaba
era igual al tiempo en que se oscureca, y este intervalo preciso estaba determinado por el tiempo requerido para
pasar a la siguiente imagen-fotograma en la frecuencia animada mecnica.31 Los imperativos mecnicos de la proyeccin cinematogrfica motivaron que el movimiento la dimensin temporal fuera regularizado, promediado
y asimilado a una cuadrcula, de modo similar al efecto de la fotografa en la dimensin espacial. Con el establecimiento de este orden de tiempo mecanizado, abstracto, un realizador poda refigurar la temporalidad en forma
material. La serie de Campbell Home Movies reintroduce la experiencia, anloga al parpadeo, de tener conciencia
visual del aparato de proyeccin y ver simultneamente la imagen expresiva en tiempo mecanizado. El aparato
agrega su propio grado de expresividad, al afectar las emociones del observador, aunque slo sea creando obstculos
para la recepcin de un nico canal de denotacin. La presencia ineludible del sistema de proyeccin bloquea la nitidez
propia de la imagen y reduce la baja resolucin a un nivel an menor. Las imgenes triviales de las Home Movies
de Campbell reuniones de familia, nios que juegan, un nadador no exigen interpretacin, pero, por su forma,
despiertan el deseo de interpretar. Este impulso de interpretar desplaza su objetivo del contenido expresivo del
film proyectado al proceso de percepcin en s. La percepcin ha dejado de ser tan transparente como la imagen
percibida. La interpretacin pasa de la narracin anodina de la pelcula casera a la reserva potica del medio.
De manera anloga al parpadeo flmico, las trasmisiones de radio sufran interferencias en forma de esttica
audible, y, en pocas posteriores, las emisiones de televisin presentaban ondas de distorsin, efectos de anamorfosis y el fenmeno conocido como nieve. En el caso de las partculas de nieve que centellean rpidamente,
la interferencia es generada por el sistema electrnico interno del televisor. La nieve puede originarse en seales
aleatorias dbiles que entran en conflicto con la seal dominante, pero se vuelve especialmente evidente cuando
el aparato recibe slo seales dbiles o ninguna seal. Como respuesta, el amplificador busca una seal fuerte, o
una de cualquier tipo. A falta de algo mejor, el medio receptor producir un diseo mvil transitorio propio en la
retcula de pxeles de la pantalla variaciones de la iluminacin en o cerca de la escala de los elementos individuales de la imagen, que nunca se funden en una imagen inteligible.32 Aun sin seal de emisin y la consiguiente
imagen, la pantalla no se oscurece. La anima un juego de vaco y fosforescencia, una interferencia que interfiere
con nada. En una inversin familiar para los pintores modernos, esta afirmacin material del medio se convierte
en la imagen; de ah la metfora de la nieve, que, paradjicamente, evoca un referente en la naturaleza con el
que la imagen no tiene una correspondencia causal. El efecto de la nieve electrnica representa activamente el
medio como ste se representa a s mismo en su condicin sensible de estar encendido, respondiendo al entorno ambiental electrnico.33 El medio da un signo de vida adecuadamente electrnico; una materializacin de su
presencia. La televisin muestra sus recursos: la carencia de programacin organizada sera una simple molestia
para el Chance ficcional, con su confianza en la transparencia del medio y la realidad de la imagen; pero preocupa
a Campbell, para quien el medio informativo es un elemento tan esencial en la percepcin como el significado, programado o no, que proyecta. El medio se convierte en un factor del significado, como a menudo seala Campbell:
Slo unos pocos pxeles de diferencia y, sin embargo, un significado totalmente distinto.34
Hepworth, Cecil M., op. cit., pp. 52-58 y 112-113; Talbot, Frederick A., op. cit., pp. 88-95.
Una vez que se hubieron eliminado las imperfecciones tecnolgicas ms obvias de la proyeccin cinematogrfica, los artistas que seguan la doctrina modernista de muestre sus recursos
pudieron reintroducir defectos tecnolgicos como un juego con la materialidad esencial del medio. Empire (1964), de Andy Warhol, registra tan poca accin o modificacin que, en lugar de
seguir una narracin, el observador advierte cada leve imperfeccin de la superficie material de la cinta de celuloide proyectada. El funcionamiento del medio se convierte en la narrativa
cinemtica.
30
Hepworth, Cecil M., op. cit., pp. 54-55.
31
Vase Lutz, E.G., Animated Cartoons, New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1920, pp. 12-13.
32
Campbell explora fenmenos relacionados con ste en Portrait of a Portrait of Claude Shannon (2001), donde una imagen coherente de baja resolucin se alterna con un ruido indescifrable
generado electrnicamente.
33
Sobre ruido y nieve del receptor, vase Zworykin, Vladimir K. y Morton, George A., Television: The Electronics of Image Transmission in Color and Monochrome, New York, Wiley, 1954, pp. 182
y 720. Sobre seal mnima, vase Krupnick, M.A., The Electric Image: Examining Basic TV Technology, White Plains, N.Y., Knowledge Industry Publications, 1990, p. 10.
34
Campbell, Jim, Final Project, op. cit.
28
29
23
La abstraccin de Seurat
Chance, quien consideraba intil tocar una pantalla de televisin, no estaba familiarizado con los diversos dispositivos sensibles a la presin, la temperatura, la vibracin y la luz que usualmente se incorporan a los sistemas
electrnicos interactivos (segn Campbell, sistemas predominantemente controlables o sensibles.35 El mundo
social de Chance exista como imgenes inmateriales, y no cuerpos fsicos. Irnicamente, inculto como era, adopt una actitud frente a la realidad que podra haber sido alentada por la interpretacin de un historiador de los
medios modernos. Durante milenios, el dibujo y la pintura haban satisfecho la necesidad de una representacin
visual detallada. En el siglo XIX, la tecnologa fotogrfica desplaz estas antiguas prcticas centradas en la mano.
De la fotografa al cine, y luego la televisin y otras formas de videoproyeccin electrnica, parecera que la produccin de imgenes se volvi cada vez ms independiente del trabajo manual y de la presencia fsica del artistaproductor. Con la posterior codificacin electrnica de cada tipo de representacin en conjuntos de informacin
digital, la materialidad de las imgenes visuales parecera haberse reducido en una medida tal que casi dej de
constituir un factor de la comunicacin. La presencia fsica del aparato se torna irrelevante, tal como lo consideraba Chance al mirar su pantalla de televisin sin ver ni reconocer la pantalla en s.
Un viejo medio puede adquirir las caractersticas del nuevo, as como el nuevo puede ser explorado en funcin
del viejo. La recepcin crtica acumulativa del viejo arte del dibujo y la pintura de Seurat refleja el cambio en las
expectativas sensoriales del siglo XX durante una nueva era tecnolgica de cine y televisin. Con la presencia de
cada vez menos materialidad en los nuevos medios, los observadores detectan ciertos indicios materiales en los
viejos; indicios que previamente pasaron inadvertidos. Lo que en 1890 pareca deshumanizado y mecnico en el
arte de Seurat, porque careca de los signos habituales del gesto manual, comenz a adquirir en dcadas posteriores una cualidad humana arcaica o atvica debido al simple hecho de su trabajo manual individualizado.36 Con
una exagerada percepcin de la crisis tecnolgica, Meyer Schapiro llam en 1957 a la pintura y la escultura los
ltimos objetos personales hechos a mano de nuestra cultura. Para este historiador del arte, sensible a los temas
marxistas de la industrializacin y la divisin del trabajo, no era la tcnica puntillista estandarizada de Seurat lo que
reduca el nivel de significado en la representacin, sino las seales comerciales de radio y televisin de las que los
estadounidenses haban llegado a depender.37
Seurat siempre haba generado conflictos en el plano de la crtica. Durante su vida y en las dcadas siguientes,
su arte haba ejemplificado el tipo de abstraccin material que entusiasmaba y a la vez preocupaba a los crticos
tras el arte ms naturalista de Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste-Renoir y otros integrantes de la generacin impresionista. El sentido de la abstraccin de los primeros crticos es anlogo al que hoy tiene Campbell: la abstraccin
emerge cuando el factor de resolucin de la representacin se torna tan bajo que slo permanecen las cualidades
materiales de la imagen, puesto que las cualidades referenciales se han oscurecido y cado por debajo del umbral de la percepcin. Los crticos de Seurat daban rodeos en su evaluacin, pues consideraban que el problema
de la abstraccin era tanto material como mental; el
pintor orientaba demasiado su atencin, as como la
del observador, al proceso de pintar. En 1890, Gustave
Geffroy seal que la prctica de Seurat pareca estar
perdiendo su personalidad individual, como si la expresividad personal ya no le interesara; esto tornaba su
arte an ms mecanizado, susceptible de falsificaciones mecnicas impersonales.38 Maurice Denis escribi
algo ms tarde que la fuente de la frialdad emocional
de Seurat era su abstraccin y su mente filosfica.39
A su vez, Charles Maurice adverta sobre el peligro
mortal de practicar el puntillismo con regularidad maquinal el arte reducido a la tcnica [se convierte en]
georges seurat
una ciencia nueva e intil [en la que] las manos [son]
Estudio para Le Bec du Hoc, 1885
leo sobre tela, 15,6 x 24,5 cm
responsables de la cabeza.40 Mediante la accin de las
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
manos
del pintor, programadas, por as decirlo, por el
Adquirido con fondos recaudados en la muestra
The Great Impressionists, 1984
sistema tcnico (el tipo de marca que podra hacerse
con esa mano y ese pincel), la calidad material de la in-
Campbell, Jim, Delusions of Dialogue, op. cit.

A pesar de su trascendencia cultural en su poca, seramos reacios a aceptar la descripcin de Flix Fnon de las superficies puntillistas de Seurat. Sea lo que fuere que Seurat represe nta, aseguraba el crtico, el manejo del pincel sigue siendo el mismo y la habilidad manual se convierte en una cuestin insignificante. Fnon, Flix, Les Impressionnistes en 1886,
LImpressionnisme (1887), reproducido en Halperin, Joan U. (ed.), Flix Fnon: uvres plus que compltes, 2 vols., Genve, Librairie Droz, 1970, vol 1, pp. 36 y 67.
37
Schapiro, Meyer, The Liberating Quality of Avant-garde Art, Artnews, n 56, verano de 1957, pp. 38 y 40.
38
Geffroy, Gustave, Chronique dart: Indpendants, Revue daujourdhui, n 1, 15 de abril de 1890, p. 270.
39
Denis, Maurice, La Raction nationaliste (1905), en Thories 1890-1910: Du Symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique, Paris, L. Rouart et J. Watelin diteurs, 1913, p. 196.
40
Morice, Charles, Le XXIe Salon des indpendants, Mercure de France, n 54, 15 de abril de 1905, p. 550.
35
36
24
formacin determinaba el significado expresivo de la obra; una inversin de lo que los crticos humansticos crean
que tendra que haber estado sucediendo.
Con el arte de Seurat, pues, as como con el de Campbell actualmente, los espectadores podan sentir la divisin entre informacin y significado, abstraccin y representacin, medio e imagen, digital y analgico. Los pequeos estudios de paisajes al leo sobre tabla de Seurat permiten, evidentemente, este nivel de discriminacin.
Justo por debajo de la lnea del horizonte, y a la izquierda del afloramiento rocoso que aparece en tude pour Le
Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp (1885), el pintor coloc una nica pequea pincelada de blanco, una vertical dentro de un
campo de horizontales. Debajo hay una porcin an ms pequea de rojo, que es un pigmento y no un fragmento
expuesto del panel de madera, aunque ambos podran confundirse fcilmente. El contexto figurativo indica que
esta vaga configuracin debe de representar un bote de vela, casi perdido en el mar metafrico y literal de marcas
que lo rodea. El mar de Seurat a la vez densamente material (el medio), abstractamente uniforme (la informacin) y evocadoramente figurativo (el significado) puede haber sido un elemento ms fascinante para los
ojos de mediados del siglo XX que el episodio del barco de vela, a pesar de su capacidad de evocar una narracin.
Los espectadores de Seurat en la poca de la televisin probablemente habrn admirado sus marcas como una
instancia precoz de una prctica pictrica avanzada, coincidente con la formulacin del crtico estadounidense
Clement Greenberg acerca del cuadro all-over (enteramente cubierto de pintura de manera casi uniforme), tcnica y expresivamente integrado:
una superficie integrada por una multiplicidad de elementos idnticos o similares [] Los pasos ms radicales que se dieron
en pintura [desde fines del siglo XIX] han estado acompaados, en casi todos los casos, por la tendencia a atomizar la superficie
del cuadro en pinceladas separadas [] Todas las partes de la tela [son] equivalentes [y] encontramos la esencia de toda la obra
en cada una de sus partes.41
Greenberg no estaba pensando en una retcula electrnica de pxeles, pero su descripcin la prefigura.
Seurat activ su estudio para Le Bec du Hoc no slo con su superficie incipientemente puntillista de marcas
similares, sino tambin rayando verticalmente el panel de madera dispuesto horizontalmente.42 Este veteado
cruzado resulta particularmente manifiesto en el ngulo superior izquierdo, y se evidencia en la forma en que las
pinceladas horizontales de color aparecen puntuadas por verticales sumamente finas, ms oscuras, all donde la
pintura roza la superficie fsica de los diminutos valles y cimas. Como resultado, la superficie adquiere una textura
visual similar a la de los dibujos veteados de Seurat hechos aplicando lpiz Cont sobre papel filigranado. La textura abstracta, informativa de los estudios al leo resalta en ocasiones el significado figurativo de la imagen, como
cuando sugiere el mar picado o la turbulencia del ocano. Pero como las tablas de Seurat tambin tienen, por lo
general, un claro estriado en la dimensin horizontal, que genera un sutil diseo de crestas, el rayado vertical o
veteado cruzado crea un patrn abstracto de interferencia: se materializa una grilla virtual, que se convierte en un
signo adicional de la resistencia material del medio.43
En la poca de Seurat, una considerable cantidad de crticos culturales segua creyendo que un medio centrado
en la mano como la pintura podra dominar la tecnologa ms avanzada de un medio mecanizado como la fotografa, pues estas formas de representacin que competan entre s apelaban a la imaginacin social colectiva.
Cuando Seurat adopt su nueva tecnologa una distribucin puntillista discreta de elementos pictricos, que se
aproximaba a los valores fijos de un sistema digital, y cuando aplic este nuevo mtodo a su antiguo medio de
la pintura, pareca que haba sacrificado su expresividad humana para ganar en eficiencia maquinal. A muchos de sus
contemporneos su arte les pareca mecnico. Es ms probable que Seurat pensara que, simplemente, haba evitado
los amaneramientos culturales caractersticos de muchos de los tipos sociales parisinos que representaba. Estaba
renunciando a la reivindicacin romntica de expresin personal intensificada; se estaba limitando a la observacin honesta: Ven poesa en lo que hago. No; yo aplico mi mtodo, y eso es todo.44 Ahora bien, cuando las
imgenes dominantes son electrnicas y la seal electrnica est digitalizada cuando incluso la televisin pierde
sus signos de interferencia material (no hay ms ondas, no hay ms nieve), el arte de Seurat ofrece atisbos
del medio en funcionamiento, percepciones de los factores persistentes de la resistencia de la materia. Muestra
Greenberg, Clement, The Crisis of the Easel Picture (1948), en OBrian, John (ed.), The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols., Chicago, 1986-1993, vol. 2, pp. 222-224.
Desarroll mis ideas acerca de las tablas rayadas o estriadas de Seurat en colaboracin con Robert Herbert; vase Herbert, Robert L., Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte (cat. exp.),
Chicago y Berkeley, Art Institute of Chicago, 2004, p. 56.
43
La versin final de Le Bec du Hoc (1885, modificada en 1888-1889) presenta muchos pequeos trazos verticales de pintura dentro de las pinceladas predominantemente horizontales utilizadas para representar el mar abierto. Parece que las verticales pintadas, que pueden formar parte de una serie de posteriores agregados a esta tela, remplazan la interferencia proporcionada
por el veteado del material incorporado en el estudio sobre tabla.
44
Declaracin de Seurat, reproducida por Charles Angrand, en Coquiot, Gustave, Georges Seurat, Paris, Albin Michel, 1924, p. 41. Para una versin alternativa de esa misma afirmacin, en una
carta de Angrand a Henri-Edmond Cross (comunicada a Robert Rey por Flix Fnon), vase Rey, Robert, La renaissance du sentiment classique dans la peinture franaise la fin du XIXe sicle.
Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, Czanne, Seurat, Paris, Les Beaux-Arts, 1931, p. 95. Ambas versiones destacan la preocupacin dominane de Seurat por el factor material en el arte segn lo encara el
mtodo del pintor.
41
42
25
que la materialidad del medio permanece vigente aun cuando la marca que constituye la imagen se aproxima
al grado cero de la referencia y la autorreferencialidad; cuando la marca carece de variacin, direccin y carcter
pronunciados, no describe los aspectos externos ni atrae la atencin sobre s misma. Sea cual fuere su tamao,
los toques similares a pxeles de Seurat nunca desaparecen realmente de la vista. Ms que facilitar meramente
la representacin, sealan su lmite material, ms all del cual slo puede verse la marca en s. Y esto es lo que
Campbell llama abstraccin.
Divisorias de sentido
La materialidad en la representacin es un aspecto que no nos abandona. Pinsese en una imagen de un video animado que fuera completa para el ojo, pero con evidentes espacios oscuros entre sus elementos fragmentados, espacios considerablemente mayores que los puntos de luz que la constituyen: esto describira la pantalla de Chance
si estuviera perforada por agujeros; tambin describe la obra de Campbell Home Movies Grid, y un sinnmero de sus
trabajos anteriores en los que utiliza paneles LED como medio de proyeccin. En 2001, Campell cre Running Falling
Cut, donde divide una imagen digitalizada mvil en un registro superior y uno inferior, y proyecta las dos mitades a
diferentes velocidades, desfasadas: la inferior en tiempo constante, real; la superior en tiempo variable, a veces ms
lento, a veces ms rpido que el de la imagen normativa que est debajo de ella.45 La imagen parece estar sufriendo
interferencia, algo no muy diferente de lo que ocurre en la pantalla del televisor tradicional cuando recibe una seal
extraa. En este caso, el elemento de interferencia es temporal. De algn modo, el tiempo aparece en la lnea divisoria
inmaterial entre las dos mitades no coordinadas de la imagen; un tiempo invisible que est en conflicto con el tiempo
visible registrado por el movimiento de la figura, que es l mismo irregular e idiosincrsico. Este corte del tiempo se
precipita fuera de la temporalidad de la imagen flmica que se muestra en el panel y proporciona un cuerpo de informacin separado, discreto. El corte revela que algo (ms) est sucediendo, que alguna fuerza vital est en actividad
en el mundo, una fuerza que afecta la imagen, aun cuando este parsito no tenga cabida en las categoras habituales
de anlisis.46 Como una onda distorsionadora que pasa a travs de una forma material regulada, la lnea divisoria no
ocupa un espacio propio dentro del campo pictrico. Le otorga una presencia material a un rasgo inmaterial del medio,
como si ste tuviera alguna dimensin extra que de otro modo sus observadores no pudieran percibir. Con el corte, los
espectadores experimentan este exceso en la sensacin, un factor adicional de informacin y significado, una fuente
residual de expresin en lo profundo del funcionamiento del medio.
Cuando observamos Running Falling Cut se produce una inversin modernista, del tipo muestre-sus-recursos:
una afirmacin material del medio llega a dominar la figura o la imagen propiamente dicha. Experimentar la divisin de la imagen, a la vez material e inmaterial, visible e invisible, puede ser ms memorable que observar la figura en movimiento que parece correr y caer repetidamente. Un elemento fundamental del proyecto de Campbell
es alcanzar y poner a prueba el lmite del reconocimiento de la imagen sin perderla. Sus pequeos puntos de luz,
con sus extraas configuraciones, proporcionan un signo electrnico de una compleja forma de vida tecnolgica.
Algo significativo est sucediendo, ms all de la mera representacin.
Como sabemos, varias de las obras con LED de Campbell un ejemplo es Church on Fifth Avenue (2001) sitan
la pantalla de difusin en un ngulo variable, de modo que su distancia del panel de exhibicin vara de extremadamente cercana a muy lejana. Este tipo de construccin determina una situacin curiosa: cuando la pantalla
est casi pegada a una hilera de diodos, un segmento de la imagen proyectada prcticamente no se ver borroso,
mientras que cuando se interpone un espacio apreciable entre una hilera de diodos y la pantalla, el segmento
ubicado enfrente ser considerablemente borroso. La imagen se muestra continua y figurativa donde es ms
borrosa, y discreta y abstracta donde lo es menos. En el extremo discreto de este espectro de efectos, la imagen
percibida parece retener la codificacin digital, aun cuando los diodos individuales iluminan segn una seal analgica modulada. En el extremo continuo, la imagen parece perfectamente analgica: fuera de foco, pero naturalista. La diferencia se asemeja a lo que los crticos del siglo XIX perciban cuando decidieron que la gama expresiva
de la imagen borrosa del calotipo era mayor que la de la nitidez del daguerrotipo. Para la ciencia analtica, elija el
daguerrotipo; para el arte potico, el calotipo. Esta potencial coincidencia con el arte de Campbell en realidad no
se sostiene, porque la calidad de detalle fino que la pantalla de difusin parece perder frente a su borrosidad nunca
haba sido visible en una primera instancia. Las series de unidades LED estn distribuidas en forma demasiado
espaciada, su factor de resolucin es demasiado bajo como para generar detalles en un grado significativo.
La obra titulada Divide (2005) presenta una vista de olas que rompen. Aqu, ms que la pantalla de difusin, es
el panel LED lo que Campbell tuerce, inclinndolo hacia adelante, desde la parte superior de un armazn montado
en la pared, en direccin a una pantalla colocada delante de sta, y asegurndolo a la pared en la parte inferior.
Como resultado, su imagen proyectada pasa por todos los valores, desde casi pegada a la pantalla, arriba (difusin
mnima), hasta a 7,6 centmetros de distancia, abajo (mxima difusin).
La lgica estructural de la situacin indica que la imagen debe variar gradualmente, de discreta y pixelada en la
parte de arriba a continua y borrosa en la de abajo: digital en apariencia arriba; analgica abajo. En algn lugar intermedio, la imagen debe contener la lnea que dividira estos conceptos antitticos y estas sensaciones polarizadas. El ttulo de Campbell implica exactamente eso, pero se torna un irnico desafo a la capacidad de observacin
del espectador: dejemos que ste encuentre la lnea divisoria, a la vista pero oscura, a la vez visible e invisible. sta
es la lnea divisoria perceptiva que se sita entre la materia y la mente, la sensacin y el sentido. Puede no existir.
Segn Campbell, como el tiempo real del ciclo de variacin (aproximadamente dos minutos) es diferente de la secuencia de tiempo de la imagen (aproximadamente seis minutos), la relacin
entre las dos partes tarda entre unos meses y unos aos en repetirse (declaracin al autor, 4 de abril de 2005). Habr muchos momentos en que las dos mitades de la imagen mvil se alineen,
pero se necesitara un perodo sorprendentemente largo de proyeccin continua para que se repita una configuracin de alineamiento determinada.
46
Parsito (parasite), que evoca una forma de vida que se impone a otra o la complementa, es el trmino francs que designa la interferencia de radio y televisin.
45
26
27
Obras
en exhibicin
28
29
Instalaciones
Jim Campbell naci en 1956 en Chicago, Illinois, Estados Unidos. En 1978 se licenci en ingeniera elctrica y matemticas en el Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) y actualmente vive y trabaja en San Francisco, California. Su
obra figura en las colecciones del Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art y The Museum of
Modern Art de Nueva York; el Smithsonian de Washington D.C., el San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, el Cincinnati Art
Museum y el Berkeley Art Museum, entre otras.
Campbell tambin ha realizado varias obras pblicas por encargo, y entre las distinciones que recibi se cuentan las becas
Guggenheim, Langlois Foundation y Rockefeller de Multimedia.
Exposiciones
2011
Walking + Falling: Jim Campbell, Chris Marker & Eadweard
Muybridge, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver.
Jim Campbell: Exploded View, Museum of the Moving
Image, Astoria, Nueva York.
Jim Campbell - Material Light, National Museum of
Photography, Copenhague.
2010
In the Repose of Memory, Eleanor D. Wilson Museum &
Roanoke College Galleries, Virginia.
Jim Campbell: New Work, Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery,
Nueva York.
Jim Campbell, Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.
2008
Jim Campbell: Home Movies, Berkeley Art Museum.
2007
Home Movies, Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.
Quantizing Effects, Museum of Glass, Tacoma.
2006
4300 Watts, Hosfelt Gallery, Nueva York.
Jim Campbell, College of Wooster Art Museum, Wooster,
Ohio.
Quantizing Effects, Beall Center for Art and Technology,
Irvine, California; Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee.
2005
Ambiguous Icons, The Center for Photography at
Woodstock, Nueva York.
Jim Campbell: New Work, Byron Cohen Gallery,
Kansas City, Missouri.
Material Light, Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, Nueva York.
New Work, Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.
Quantizing Effects, Site Santa Fe.
2004
Jim Campbell, Palo Alto Art Center.
Wavelengths, American Museum of the Moving Image,
Nueva York.
Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art.
2003
Jim Campbell, University of South Florida Contemporary
Art Museum, Tampa.
Memory Array, Berkeley Art Museum.
Seeing, Exploratorium, San Francisco.
2002
Data and Time, Nagoya City Art Museum.
Digital Works, Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.
Jim Campbell, Gallery 2211, Los ngeles.
Motion and Rest, Arizona State University, Tempe.
2001
Contemporary Configurations, Museum of Art and History,
Santa Cruz, California.
Jim Campbell: Time and Data, Wood Street Galleries,
Pittsburgh.
Time, Memory and Meditation, Anderson Gallery, Virginia
Commonwealth University, Richmond.
2000
Cohen Berkowitz Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri.
Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.
1999
Transforming Time: Electronic Works 1990-1999, Nelson
Art Museum, Arizona State University, Tempe.
1998
Reactive Works, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jos,
California.
1997
Digital Watch, Kemper Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.
Reactive Works, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena,
California.
1996
Electronic Art, Cohen Berkowitz Gallery, Kansas City,
Missouri.
Digital Watch
Dimensiones variables
Dos videocmaras blanco y negro, monitor de video de
retroproyeccin de 50, circuito electrnico adaptado, reloj
1995
Dialogue, Rena Branstein Gallery, San Francisco.
1994
Hallucination, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art,
Salem, Carolina del Norte.
1992
Electronic Art, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco.
1991
Hallucination, Fresno Art Museum, California.
30
La obra consiste en un gran monitor de video de retroproyeccin, una cmara que apunta hacia un reloj analgico
de bolsillo y otra cmara dirigida al observador. El circuito
electrnico adaptado combina una imagen en vivo del reloj de bolsillo con otra, procesada, de los observadores, de
modo tal que se ve la imagen en vivo del espectador fuera
del campo ocupado por el reloj. Dentro del rea del reloj
se ve una imagen entrecortada del observador, diferida en
cinco segundos.
31
Frames of Reference
Dimensiones variables
Cmara, circuito electrnico adaptado, proyector de video,
madera, clavo
Esta obra consiste en una pequea cmara de placa de
circuito fijada a un extremo de un trozo de madera.
En el otro extremo hay un clavo parcialmente hundido.
Este sistema est colgado y conectado a un motor que
sacude la pieza de madera aproximadamente cada media
hora para mantenerla en movimiento. La imagen de la
cmara dirigida hacia el clavo se proyecta en la pared, al
tiempo que el tablero rota lentamente, haciendo un paneo
de la sala y manteniendo el clavo centrado dentro de la
imagen. La imagen en s es procesada mediante un filtro
de ponderacin temporal, de modo que a medida que
el tablero gira, la sala y el pblico aparecen borrosos, en
segundo plano, mientras que el clavo y la madera se ven
muy ntidos, lo cual exagera las diferencias ente ambos
marcos de referencia.
32
33
34
35
Obras de baja resolucin
Exploded View (Commuters)

Hileras de luces LED en una trama de 182,87 cm de ancho
por 38,10 de profundidad
En un rincn oscuro, oscurecido an ms por paredes pintadas de negro, hileras verticales de LED cuelgan de los cables
que los alimentan. El conjunto define, aproximadamente,
una gran caja rectangular, que, por cierto, evoca el uso muy
difundido de ese tipo de forma en la escultura minimalista.
En esta versin, los pxeles iluminados estn programados
con filmaciones de pasajeros que se desplazan diariamente
entre su hogar y su trabajo realizadas en la Grand Central
Station de Nueva York. Cuando se sita cerca de la obra, el
observador slo ve pasar a travs de ella ondas de oscuridad,
aparentemente al azar, como sbitos cambios de humor, en
tres dimensiones.
36
37
Fundamental Interval Commuters #2

83,82 x 117,76 x 5,08 cm
Circuito electrnico adaptado, 1.728 LED, pantalla
de difusin de Duratrans montada, plexigls tratado
Divide (Wave Studies, 2002-2005)
56,4 x 75 x 9,8 cm
Circuito electrnico adaptado, 768 LED, plexigls tratado
En esta serie de obras Campbell rene medios fotogrficos

y paneles LED de baja resolucin para llevar a la foto fija
una inquietante sensacin de tiempo y movimiento.
Fundamental Interval Commuters #2 yuxtapone una transparencia en color de pasajeros que caminan en la Grand
Central Station con una reproduccin LED de un video
captado exactamente en el mismo lugar. Cada tanto, ambas coinciden durante un breve lapso. El resto del tiempo,
las imgenes en movimiento existen como rastros fantasmagricos detrs de la imagen esttica en color.
Aqu, ms que la pantalla de difusin, es el panel LED lo que

Campbell tuerce, inclinndolo hacia adelante, desde la parte
superior de un armazn montado en la pared, en direccin a
una pantalla colocada delante de sta, y asegurndolo a la pared en la parte inferior. Como resultado, su imagen proyectada pasa por todos los valores, desde casi pegada a la pantalla,
arriba (difusin mnima), hasta a 7,6 centmetros de distancia,
abajo (mxima difusin). La lgica estructural de la situacin
indica que la imagen debe variar gradualmente, de discreta
y pixelada en la parte de arriba a continua y borrosa en la de
abajo: digital en apariencia arriba; analgica abajo (Richard
Shiff, Look to See by Looking).
38
39
Church on 5th Avenue

(serie 5th Avenue)
55,9 x 73,6 x 17,8 cm
Circuito electrnico adaptado, 768 LED, plexigls tratado
Reconstruction 7 (Serie Reconstruction, 2002-2009)

54,9 x 36,5 x 8,9 cm
Circuito electrnico adaptado, 384 LED,
pantalla de resina montada
Una matriz de 32 x 24 (768) pxeles constituida por LED

rojos muestra una escena de circulacin de transentes
y automviles en Nueva York, tomada desde un punto
situado fuera de la calle. Frente a la cuadrcula se ubica
una lmina de plexigls. Cuando los peatones se desplazan
de izquierda a derecha, las figuras pasan gradualmente de
una representacin discreta a una continua (o, metafricamente, de una representacin digital a una analgica).
En estas obras, una pantalla de difusin de resina est

montada frente a una matriz de pxeles LED. Varias escenas de trnsito de peatones, automviles y barcos se
muestran desde la perspectiva de un observador externo.
El bloque de resina suaviza la representacin altamente
pixelada de los LED y la transforma en una imagen descifrable. Los pxeles se distinguen cuando se mira desde un
costado. En algunos, la proyeccin de la luz cambia gradualmente desde su menor punto de condensacin hasta
un brillo homogneo; en otros, se mantiene como una
esfera de suave resplandor.
40
41
Library
(Photo-based Works, 2003-2009)
56,5 x 75 x 6 cm
Circuito electrnico adaptado, 768 LED, fotograbado,
plexigls tratado
Publicada por Graphicstudio, Tampa, Florida
Motion & Rest #5 (Serie Motion & Rest, 2001-2002)

55,9 x 73,7 cm
Circuito electrnico adaptado, 768 LED
Esta serie muestra a individuos discapacitados caminando. Campbell redujo la informacin al punto de que slo
el modo de andar resulta inteligible: nicamente el movimiento, y ningn otro factor de la apariencia individual,
es significativo desde el punto de vista expresivo
(Richard Shiff, Look to See by Looking).
Esta pieza est compuesta por un fotograbado de alta resolucin de la Biblioteca Pblica de Nueva York, impreso en
papel de arroz y colocado en un marco de plexigls colgado frente a una superficie de LED que contiene un chip de
video con imgenes en movimiento de baja resolucin, en
loop, de 25 minutos de duracin. Imgenes poco definidas
de pjaros y personas parecen entrar y salir de la biblioteca y cruzar la fachada.
42
43
A Fire, a Freeway and a Walk

30,4 x 38 x 4 cm
Circuito electrnico adaptado, 42 LED, terciopelo
Fight
30,4 x 38 x 4 cm
Circuito electrnico adaptado, 88 LED RGB,
plexigls tratado
Cuarenta y dos pxeles rodean el permetro de un cuadro

situado delante de la pared y crean el borde de una imagen mediante LED rojos, verdes y azules. Esto genera lo
que Steve Dietz llama una caverna de Platn inversa de
luces titilantes; significantes titilantes (en Quantizing
Effects: The Liminal Art of Jim Campbell, 2005).
Una matriz de 8 x 11 pxeles constituida por LED RGB

(rojos, verdes y azules) muestra una pelea entre dos
campeones mundiales de boxeo.
44
45
Home Movies 560-1

213,36 x 152,4 x 7,62 cm (aprox.)
Videoinstalacin
Circuito electrnico adaptado, 560 LED
Se trata de una nueva obra constituida por 28 hileras de
20 pxeles cada una, con un total de 560 LED. La serie
Home Movies utiliza filas muy espaciadas de LED para
proyectar en la pared secuencias de viejas pelculas caseras de tpicas reuniones familiares y nios jugando. Las
obras de Home Movies son muy similares entre s; sus diferencias radican en la cantidad y el espaciado de los LED
y la filmacin de video que muestran. Reintroducen la experiencia, anloga al parpadeo, de tener conciencia visual
del aparato de proyeccin y ver simultneamente la imagen expresiva en tiempo mecanizado. El aparato agrega su
propio grado de expresividad, al afectar las emociones del
observador, aunque slo sea creando obstculos para la
recepcin de un nico canal de denotacin. La presencia
ineludible del sistema de proyeccin bloquea la nitidez
propia de la imagen y reduce la baja resolucin a un nivel
an menor (Richard Shiff, Look to See by Looking).
46
47
Obras de memoria
Las Memory Works (1994-1998) son una serie en la cual cada obra se basa en la memoria de un hecho grabada digitalmente. Algunos de esos registros electrnicos representan un recuerdo personal, y otros un recuerdo colectivo. Estas memorias
electrnicas son manipuladas y luego utilizadas para transformar un objeto asociado montado en la pared. Evitando las
nociones habituales acerca de qu es un recuerdo, ninguno de los recuerdos originales es una imagen o un sonido. Estas
obras exploran la caracterstica de algo oculto que es comn tanto a la memoria humana como a la de la computadora. Las
memorias estn ocultas y tienen que ser transformadas para representarlas.
Portrait of My Father
180 x 40,6 x 15,2 cm
Circuito electrnico adaptado, vidrio, fotografa, material LCD
Photo of My Mother
180,3 x 38 x 15 cm
Circuito electrnico adaptado, vidrio, fotografa, material LCD
Una fotografa del padre de

Campbell es visible por un
instante y luego desaparece. Este proceso se repite
una y otra vez al ritmo de
los latidos del corazn del
artista, que fueron grabados durante un lapso de
ocho horas, en una noche,
mientras dorma.
Una fotografa de la madre

de Campbell pasa lentamente de borrosa a clara, al
ritmo de la respiracin del
artista, grabada digitalmente durante una hora, como
si respirara sobre el vidrio
frente a la fotografa.
48
49
50
Cyclical Meter Base

180,3 x 38 x 15 cm
Circuito electrnico adaptado, reloj viejo
Cyclical Counter Base

180,3 x 38 x 15 cm
Circuito electrnico adaptado, reloj nuevo
La memoria sigue el ritmo de una persona que respira,

grabado durante una hora. La segunda aguja del reloj se
mueve al ritmo de la respiracin de la memoria. El reloj
mide las respiraciones.
La memoria sigue el ritmo de una persona que parpadea,

grabado durante una hora. La segunda aguja del reloj se
mueve al ritmo del parpadeo de la memoria. El reloj cuenta la cantidad de parpadeos.
51
I Have Never Read the Bible

180,3 x 38 x 15 cm
Diccionario Websters, parlante, circuito electrnico adaptado
La memoria es el texto completo de la versin de la Biblia
del rey Jacobo, y el objeto es un viejo Diccionario Websters.
La Biblia es susurrada desde el diccionario, a razn de una
letra por vez. La obra almacena el texto ASCII de la Biblia y
la voz del artista que murmura las letras del alfabeto. El texto
electrnico de la Biblia emite las letras susurradas una a una,
y crea una representacin del artista leyendo la Biblia.
La grabacin de las letras se hizo con la msica del Rquiem
de Mozart en segundo plano, de modo que cada letra murmurada est asociada con un fragmento de msica.
52
53
Typing Paper
180,3 x 38 x 15 cm
Circuito electrnico adaptado, vidrio, parlante
La memoria es el texto ASCII del discurso de Martin Luther
King Tengo un sueo. Esa informacin digital es luego
utilizada para acceder a una memoria secundaria en la que
se pulsan las teclas de una vieja mquina de escribir. No es
la grabacin de alguien que mecanografa el discurso, sino la
simulacin electrnica de la escritura a mquina de ste.
54
55
Night Lights
180,3 x 38 x 15 cm
Circuito electrnico adaptado, lmparas elctricas, vidrio
Esta obra consiste en dos memorias. La primera es la del
nivel del sonido del film de Alfred Hitchcock Psicosis.
La segunda es la del brillo de la imagen a lo largo de la
misma pelcula. Ambas memorias estn sincronizadas y
son utilizadas para modificar el brillo de dos lmparas
elctricas. Las escenas de sonido ms alto son brillantes
en la lmpara de la izquierda, y las de sonido apagado son
oscuras en la lmpara de la derecha.
56
57
Obras de imgenes fijas

La serie Dynamisms, 2000-2002, como la Illuminated Averages, rinde homenaje a las teoras futuristas de la representacin artstica del movimiento en una nica imagen grfica inmvil (Richard Gursin, Jim Campbell and the Illuminated
Average of Meditation).
Illuminated Averages, 2000-2001, es una serie de obras en la cual cada imagen fija est creada a partir del promedio de
todos los fotogramas de una secuencia de movimiento.
Illuminated Average #1: Hitchcocks Psycho

45,7 x 76,2 cm
Promedio de 1 hora 50 minutos (film completo)
Duratrans, caja iluminada
Dynamism of a Cow
45,7 x 61 cm
Promedio de 2 minutos
Illuminated Average #3: Welles Citizen Kane Breakfast

Table Sequence
45,7 x 76,2 cm
Promedio de 1 hora 50 minutos (film completo)
Dynamism of a Cyclist after Umberto Boccioni

45,7 x 61 cm
Promedio de 90 segundos
Illuminated Average #2: Bachs Suite for Cello #2

45,7 x 61 cm
Promedio de 3 minutos
Preludio ejecutado por Monica Scott
58
59
Montaje
de las obras
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
English Texts
70
71
The exhibition Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico is the first showing in Latin America of
the works by one of the most significant international referents in the field of electronic art in recent times.
The project is the result of the joint work carried out between our institution and the artist, which led to the
selection of the most representative works from his highly prolific output. These bring a group of over twenty
technological pieces into the public arena, works created by the pioneer of LED light technology art from the early
1990s to the current day.
Campbells presence in Buenos Aires gave rise to a series of guided visits and interviews with local artists and
students which fostered a more comprehensive understanding of his work and prestige as an artist, as well as
prompting the exchange of knowledge and know-how in the area of art and new technologies.
As with all the projects developed and presented by Espacio Fundacin Telefnica, we very much hope that
the exhibition will be a success in Buenos Aires as a truly innovative experience of the work created by one of the
greatest talents in this field.
Luis Blasco Bosqued

Chairman of the Board of Telefnica de Argentina
72
73
Fleeting Perceptions
Eduardo A. Russo
So, for the last ten years Ive been trying to make images that cannot be imaged; make visual art that cannot be seen, but
instead might exist invisibly beneath the analytical perceptual mechanisms of vision. There is no such thing as a digital
image.
There are only images that were at some point digital.
Jim Campbell1
The Threshold of the Visible World

This text is an invitation to tour Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico, not necessarily in chronological order, although with an eye on the course of his life and work which are intimately linked. Rather than a
piece-by-piece analysis, our approach delves into what Gregory Bateson called the pattern which connects all that
is presented here.2
The output of this artist, who graduated in math and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) in 1978, is firmly embedded in the crossroads of contemporary art and science, technology and also design
this last, according to his own reflections on his works in public areas, such as the recent Scattered Light (Madison
Square Park, New York, 2010). Multiple threads of belonging challenge conventional frontiers and the term works
itself vibrates with new meaning: his pieces are at once work and art work, often more signs of a work in construction
rather than a finished one. No work is resolved, said the artist once in a particularly revealing dialogue with Richard
Whittaker.3 Each work is primed to operate before its audience; its shape shifting within an unstable perception, very
far from proffering itself as a finished object. But even as it acquires the possibility of meaning and configuration, any
work can also forgo its outline or even just fade away, as if its substance were upheld by a temporary arrangement set
in place by whomsoever perceives it. Fleeting images, always at risk of disappearing.
Phantasmagoria is a persistent element in Campbells works, tensed by forces in conflict. On the one hand, the
perception is of things driven to coalesce, to achieve a continuum. On the other, it seems to explode into a multitude
of pulsating pinpricks of light which call out to an involved spectator. They seem to address whomsoever might be
watching, alert to or surprised by their eruption on the scene, not as objectified presences but rather as a presentification-in-the-making, shrugging on a laboriously achieved figuration.
As a student at MIT, Campbell studied filmmaking with the documentary-maker Richard Leacock. Letter to a Suicide (1985), his first work, which he defines as an experimental personal documentary, questions the memory of
his brother, who died by his own hand, and the effort made by his parents to overcome their shock and grief at this
tragedy. He moved into the arena of installations with Interactive Hallucination (1988), Shock Treatment (1988) and
Hallucination (1990), which continued to investigate loss as a theme. With these works, the involved observer was
no longer confined to watching an audiovisual work, but instead became part of a device in which he played an active
role. In these pieces, the artist experimented with the alteration of the subject faced with a space-time dislocation, the
product of an imbrication between the perception of the present and the effects of memory.
Ghosts of Time Passing
Among the installations of Tiempo esttico, Digital Watch (1991) is one which does not document the disabilities
suffered by his parents, both afflicted by motor-function illnesses, but rather evokes the disassociation between the
perception of the observers own body and the difficulty of moving around in the material world, transferring
the impression of this obstacle to movement. Between what in musical terms would be a staccato and in physical terms something spasmodic, the hiatus between the immediate past and present imposed by the time-delaying
device of Digital Watch places the observer in a constitutional state of instability where the fragility of any of the
bodys locations and directions bursts in on the situation. Campbell appeals for an interaction to take place between
the psychic and physical states in conflict which is far more effective than the so-called man-machine interactivities
worshipped by much electronic art which tinkers with gadgetry. The artist bases his output on an underlying rejec1
2
3
Campbell, Jim, The Beginning, in Dietz, Steve, Jim Campbell. Material Light, New York, Hatje Cantz - Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, 2010, p. 34.
Bateson, Gregory, Mind and Nature, New York, Dutton, 1979, pp. 89.
Whittaker, Richard, Jim Campbell. Frames of Reference, in Works and Conversations, n 2, 1999, pp. 2031 (see www.conversations.org/story.php?sid=30).
tion of the banality of this interactivityalthough he stops short of throwing out the notion altogether, he shunts it
sideways towards an inter-play between instances of a certain symmetry, a mutual dimension which he judges to be
necessary in order to invoke it with authority. Otherwise, there would only be control relationships left.4
Campbell does not operate so much on language as he does on material and the machinations of sight and sound.
His field of operations harks back to that other well-known proposition of Bateson in Mind and Nature: mans processes of forming images are unconscious ones. Digital Watch allows its observer to take part in a temporary schism
which, rather than nudging him into intellectual self-interrogation, prompts him to live the act of immediate memory
and inhabit a lapse colored by discontinuity. However, Frames of Reference (1996-1998) does the same with the
perception of space. The artifact designed by Campbell, on the verge of experimenting with perception, questions its
localization by means of movement. This is not just about seeing but about seeing oneself, breaking through the mere
mirror image and deferring location by effacing the framework of reference which aids one to find oneself. In both
works, the artist transcends the resources of conceptual art, making the field of action lived within the work the key
point of impact on its observers. From then on, Campbells output occupies a highly singular place, refusing to allow
itself to be included in the accounts of art trends, but rather fine-tuning a complex machinery of its own to feel and
think, in solitude, about a world troubled by loss.
Recollections of Light Become Substance
We shall not examine the Memory Works with the same depth of analytical enquiry displayed by Robert Riley in his
essay for the collection of texts published in Jim Campbell. Material Light,5 although there are some notes on the subject as a whole we should like to mention.
The Memory Works arise from a dramatic turn in Campbells course. During 1995-1996, a reappraisal of his artistic
career prompted him to lace together in more explicit form the tasks of engineer and artist. Sidestepping the intertextual remission or the irony which, entwined with a certain detachment, was so much a part of the post-modern
attitude of many contemporary artists, he honed his skills as the creator of processing artifacts which we might call
introspective. However, as he effectively sets up operation, not so much in the interiority of being, but between instances that meld without and within, mind and body, ones self and other Is, awaken similar tensions in the artist
and in the guests invited to his works (here, more than ever, it is work in the sense that it involves the work of the
memory). Thus, these experiences are not nouns but refer to a verb, an image in full action.
The artist has strenuously avoided the strategies of content that might encourage a coded reading of his works,
all alien to any logic of symbolic representation. The rigor of his work also impacts on the way in which the pieces function as artifacts and begin operating before the gaze of an observer who finds himself adopting another perceptive
and emotional regime, only later able to move towards the possibility of working out the concept. In both Portrait of
My Father (1994-1995) and Photo of My Mother (1996), as in the watch-counters of Cyclical Meter Base and Cyclical
Counter Base (1996), artifacts are every bit as important as the images which take shape and disappear, or the data
accumulated by different visors or quadrants. The elements which uphold their functions on the basis of energy or
processing contribute to meaning with equal efficiency. In this way, the cables and austere steel boxes regulating the
breathing rhythm in Photo of My Mother or the pulsating beat of Portrait of My Father are every bit as decisive
as the images that beat or breathe in the higher plates. Furthermore, Campbells habit of calling the components
enabling such complex objects to be controlled custom electronics refers to the artisanal and personalized dimension
of an invention in which hands are as important as the concept. The artist remembered, in the afore-mentioned interview with Whittaker, how he spent three years mending television sets after graduating from MIT with a degree in
engineering and math. His status as artist does not distance him from the material aspects of working with apparatus
in which search, design and a sizeable dimension of fixing and even repair are equally relevant.
As a counterweight to the intimate range of the Memory Works quoted above, in I Have Never Read the Bible
(1995) or Typing Paper (1995), another memory, collective in nature, recalls the formative nature of language and
the configuring discourse of subjectivity, beliefs and projects, through the two states of oral and written language,
including voice processed by automatized technologies. Between man and machine, the apparatus discloses and offers up part of this connective link, whether found in Biblical passages or in a recorded speech of Martin Luther King.
Night Lights (1995-1998) employs a strategy of temporal synthesis, averaged out, using all the sounds heard in
the film Psycho, and translating these into light variations, evoking the continuity between sight and sound. It is hard
to imagine in Hollywood films, from the graphic design of the title credits by Saul Bass, a film more likely to follow
4
Campbell, Jim, Delusions of Dialog: Control and Choice in Interactive Art, Leonardo, vol. 33, n 2, pp. 133136, 2000 (see http://interactive.usc.edu/membersmedia/
dtucker/002409400552397.pdf).
5
Riley, Robert R., The Memory Works, in Dietz, Steve, op. cit., pp. 5057.
74
75
formal patterns than Psycho. Rather, this lies in the antipodes of the home-made films which were the basis for Home
Movies. However, in these, the device which forms the image is itself part of the experience visible to the spectator in
its grid-like make-up. To see 560 micro-projectors and the image that results from these sparks an innate fascination
with moving pictures, which even as it mislays information enables the opening of a place so uncertain as to aspire to
the universal. The artist said that:
Ive been reworking the digital to physical converter and looking for beat patterns that might exist between imaging as an electronic creation process and imaging as the human resolving process of perception and memory association.6
This stretches between what is perceived and what is remembered, as befits home-movie making, although here
it is expanded to become a family which possesses the outlines of humanity.
Icons of Uncertainty
The Low Resolution Works by Jim Campbell explore how a form is sought and obtained within mobile states. With the
name of ambiguous icons bestowed upon them by their creator, they reveal how access to the figurative moves on a
dynamic plane, inputting its recognition by means of movement and temporalization rather than through the cutout
of a static form. A Fire, a Freeway and a Walk (1999-2000) exploits to the hilt the opaque qualities of a screen, obscuring all but the edges of the picture, where the luminosity of the situations conjured up by the title may be glimpsed. At
the same time, Church on 5th Avenue (2001) is made up of a cluster of LED lamps behind a Plexiglas screen and uses
a video recorded after 9/11. It reviews the passers-by wandering along New Yorks busiest thoroughfare near the
church mentioned in the title. The movement mingles urban bustle with the proximity of the house of worship, a place
of congregation, and also brings together in its composition a dot effect in the left-hand sector which becomes clearer
as it moves in slow configuration towards the right of the screen. This is a procedure which Campbell was to take further in Divide (2005) and Reconstruction 7 (2006) which proves the non-radical nature of the opposition between continuity and discretion in image. For the artist, as suggested once by Vilm Flusser, the digital-analog opposition is not
something clear-cut and binary, but rather a question of progressive degrees, here posited by the diffusing qualities
(and paradoxically shape-forming ones) of Plexiglas, and the clear, yet vague, figures constellated by the LED points.7
Library (2004) contrasts the high resolution of its photo-engraving of the front of the Public Library of New York
with the barely configured forms of moving beings, just as Fundamental Interval Commuters #2 (2011) records the
traffic of passers-by at Grand Central Station, between photography and a re-composition in LEDs of its video recording, opening up a system which has a two-ply consistency, between clarity and form, between the mobile and the
static of a visible world in full evolution.
Campbells LED structures are pieces of a luminous art which is most definitively post-Edison, highly sustainable
in the way they manage energy, although in their custom electronics they sometimes conserve traces of that objectlike memory such as in Scattered Light, where the traditional shape of the light bulb is maintained. However, there is
always an LED at their core, and they do not configure anything other than pixels in an etymological sense, as picture
elements rather than computer graphics, the modern inheritors of neo-impressionist pointillism. Andr Chastel once
said that for Seurat, his paintings were like some complex visual apparatus which involved the artist as much as it
did the observer.8 The minimalism of Fight (2000), with its meager matrix of pixels, is clear proof of this degree of
extreme participation which enwraps the subject, while Motion & Rest #5 (2002) places us in an intermediate spot,
between the early chrono-photographs of human locomotion by Eadweard Muybridge and the experiments with the
perception of movement carried out by the founder of Gestalt, Max Wertheimer, using flashing lights against complete darkness. When there is little information, movement takes precedence over form, almost as if it were able to
do without it. Yet, from the spectacle of bodies walking, resting, getting up, or in the laborious efforts that reveal the
sheer difficulty of movement, arises an impressive sense of their humanity. It is striking in that this does not seek support in iconic recognition, nor in the empathy created by photographic, cinematographic or video realism. It lies solely
in the correspondence with bodies in their hard struggle to carry out an action, the compromising shadows dogging
the visitor to the exhibition. Movement is not just what makes what we see comprehensible, but is also responsible
for making us feel it before we comprehend it.
6
7
8
Campbell, Jim, The Beginning, in Dietz, Steve, op. cit., p. 34.

Flusser, Vilm, Digital Apparition, in Druckrey, Timothy (ed.), Electronic Culture: Technology & Visual Representation, New York, Aperture, 1997, pp. 242246.
Chastel, Andr, Seurat et Gauguin, Art de France, n 2, Paris, 1962, pp. 297304.
Instant and Flux

The Still Image Works are an explicit homage to futurism and the photo-dynamism of Boccioni, inasmuch as they are
the reversal of his states of mind. The cinematographic aspects here move away from Muybridge towards futurismalthough in fact the futurists had their referent in tienne-Jules Mareyin terms of capturing movement, but
also towards the requirement to marry media and feelings together in simultaneous action.
The futurists considered photography and film to be cold media, and they wanted to heat them up.9 Thus, as
in other ambits, they appealed to the possibilities of making art with apparatuses, the art of expanding media,
the promoters of trans-sensorial forms of perception. Beyond sight and sound, they sought a tactile vibration,
anything from a caress to a shock. In Campbells works, such a caress is just as emotional as sensorial, for the
latter is bound up with risk, quivering on the verge of uncertainty. In this borderline world, sentiments blossom
unceasingly to troubling effect.
Richard Grusin has analyzed the trans-mediatic qualities of the artists work within the perspective of remediation,
the reconversion of one medium to another.10 It should also be considered that these works, in his most productive
adhesion to the legacy of futurism, are, in a sense, off media pieces, which radically challenge the self-same definition
of each medium.11 Thus, overflowing with photo and digital processing techniques, the Dynamisms emerge: from the
Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio (1912), by Giacomo Balla, to the Dynamism of a Cyclist (2000) or the unexpected,
for the reticence of its peaceful subject, Dynamism of a Cow (2001).
At the same time, in his series Illuminated Averages, what matters is not the condensed movement of the
Dynamisms, but rather time frozen in the image itself. Illuminated Average #1: Hitchcocks Psycho (2000) embarks on an inevitable dialogue with the famous 24 Hour Psycho (1993) by Douglas Gordon, although what was
in the latter an expansion of the film to 1,440 minutes, here becomes the condensation of one single fixed image,
the result of the scan of all the frames in the original Psycho. It is striking to make out, in the image obtained by
this synthesis, a luminous stain reminiscent of (perhaps more due to memory than to current perception) the
mummified Mrs. Bates at the instant of revelation in the cellar, under the violent swing of the ceiling light back and
forth, or the barely-registered skull which flashes across Normans face as he smiles into the camera at the end.
Illuminated Average #3: Welles Citizen Kane Breakfast Table Sequence (2000) plays with the compression of an increasingly unbearable number of tedious mornings, the flashback evoked by Bernstein, which replays endless breakfasts between Charles Foster Kane and his first wife, turning their two pale silhouettes into something virtually unrecognizable, the final vestiges of a couples unending boredom. On the other side of the street from these two paradigms
of dialogue with the world of film, Illuminated Average #2: Bachs Suite for Cello #2 (2000) reinforces another point of
contact between the singularity of Campbells work and the old program of futurist action. Temporary condensation
and synaesthesia join forces to recollect, from the shift from video to digital, the evocation of the futuristic photodynamism, in particular that of Il Violoncellista (1913), by Anton Giulio Bragaglia.
Working with Time in Order to See
Steve Dietz has emphasized the liminal condition of Jim Campbells work, which persistently hovers on the frontiers
between perception and the perceptible. At the same time, he underlines his commitment to rhythm, although not in
a strict sense as might be understood in musical terms, but rather in his care for a certain pattern which may be perceived in the flows of time.12 Something which never ceases to be surprising throughout the encounter with his works,
whichever the series or cycle, is how the amount of information is kept to a minimum. The artist believes that it is only
necessary to provide enough for the purposes of evocation, without the need to over-describe. This feature makes
the position and work of his spectator into an intense activity, which is not necessarily intellectual: the rhythm means
that the analytical mind does not intercept the effect made on the threshold of perception by the parallel capture of
information on the surroundings by a distinctly unfettered attention. In a way, it could be said that his works do not
work with the gaze, which focuses specifically on a single object, but on a vision which includes much of the periphery,
open to a global perception of ones surroundings. What bursts upon one is precisely what happens when one is not
concentrated on looking. Something about his work impacts powerfully on the way in which we perceive the space
around us, whether in galleries, museums or public areas.
Long ago, artists such as Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Thomas Wilfred or Zdenk Penek, for instance, conceived of
shapes of luminous art in movement which aimed to transform peoples perceptions of urban and architectural space
and time, in order to inhabit and visit places in the present which called for new states of consciousness, dispositions
Lista, Giovanni, Cinema e Fotografa Futurista, Milano, Skira, 2001.
Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard (eds.), Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2000.
Celant, Germano and Maraniello, Gianfranco, Vertigo: A Century of Multimedia Art from Futurism to the Web, Bologna, Skira-MAMBo, 2007.
12
Jim Campbell in conversation with Steve Dietz, in Dietz, Steve, op. cit., p. 148.
9
10
11
76
77
which sprang just as much from their surroundings as from themselves. Works of exceptional dimensions such as
those of Scattered Light, or the closely-linkedand limited to a museum spaceExploded View (Commuters) (2011)
are the inheritors of this legacy, one that has only received scant recognition to-date.
Jim Campbells output is crucial for the contemporary recreation of art and its media, in opposition to the specific
and outdated essentialist politics of mediatic definition once sought by audiovisual art, which the fibers of electronic art
began to unpick in a most healthy fashion. From his installations, objects and low-resolution pieces, passing through
the invention of new genres and experiences, to the point where he challenges the frontiers between art and design in
his works for public areas, the fundamental pattern of connection between his works is in essence that which the
artist establishes with his interlocutors. Through evanescent and swift flashes, which, despite their firefly-like fragility, bear witness to life itself, we, as participants in these fleeting perceptions, find ourselves interrogated in troubling
fashion. Something in those bright points of light is without a doubt staring us straight in the eye.
Look to See by Looking*

Richard Shiff
The first time I walked through an automatic door at the supermarket I thought the door was smart and was responding to me. Now I step on the mat to open the door . . . The second time its not a question but a command. The
anecdote is Jim Campbells, from a lecture he presented in 1996 on the topic of interactive art. He argued that openended interactivity only rarely occurs in communications between an active mind and a reactive technology. We program our electronic machines to perform in relation to specific cues, rendering them more controllable than responsive. With these devices, we experience moments of fluid, even playful exploration, but normally with a purpose in
mind. Completing a task, winning a game: the aim can be as simple as entering a building, which entails negotiating
the electronic door. With experience, we master novel technologies as well as established ones, quickly abandoning
any thought that a programmed device possesses independent will. Yet, Campbell notes, there is a psychological side
to every perceptual judgment: It is difficult for viewers not to project intelligence into a program that has meaningful
responses to their actions.1
We conceive of the situation one way, then the other. Are we controlling the machine, or is it determining our
behavior? In fantasy, it may seem that a device or object becomes an equal participant in sentient exchange. And
fantasy abounds in a culture saturated with objects designed to attract and hold the attention of whoever encounters
them. At the market, beyond the door that beckons, Come, open me, enter, every consumer item importunes, Try
me, buy me. To question or to command, to be responsive or to be controlled: in the world of everyday experience
which coincides with the construction of our cultural fantasyactive and passive states of perception blur.
Chances Screen
Objects and their images speak to us. Technologies that represent actions beyond their own are most likely to induce this feeling of interactivity, some sense of communication like that between living people, one point of view to
another point of view. A system of representation replaces multifaceted reality with a restricted image. It focuses a
single perspective, channels the information, and stresses selected aspects, encouraging fantasy all the more. Jerzy
Kosinskis novel Being There takes as its theme the state of technologically organized perception around 1970a
world of TV rather than PC. Kosinski names his central character Chance, a man virtually isolated from birth. Unformed by family or schooling, Chance lacks social programming; he learns about life through the dominant system
of representation, through whatever programming television offers him. He has broadcast television in lieu of public
socialization, a condition that narrows his developmental possibilities, but perhaps no more than any other control
on individual perception and perspective. Chance views the screen-figures projected actions as his guide to proper
behavior; he mimics their gestures. When circumstances abruptly cast him into the company of living people with
actual, physical bodies, he ponders the mysteries of lovemaking as a man restricted to looking, untutored in touching:
With his understanding thoroughly filtered by the representational medium, Chance had cause to ignore the presence of the screen itself. Touching its smooth glassiness would have revealed nothing beyond the apparent transparency. The screen deflects touch while opening to vision. If broadcast television created for Chance an interactive fantasy world, the physicality of the screen took no part in it. Yet it should haveperhaps it must have. This is the crux
of the representational problem, one that Chance failed to comprehend: every medium has an independent material
presence supplementing the presence that by design it would expose. If exploring the screen and other components
of the device adds no dimension to the presumed reality behind the projection, it may be that the situation requires
an alternative sensory investigation. When Chance, under the spell of television, separated the meaningfulness of the
visual from the senselessness of the tactile, he limited his own possibilities. Seeing may be all at once, but it fails
to represent what the rival sense of touch would feel. What seeing questions, touch commands, just as what seeing
commands, touch can only question. Each sense is a mystery to the other. Ordinarily, we coordinate the two modes
of information, but only by ignoring their more troublesome contradictions.
Vision is the mode of all-at-once, the continuous scan; it pictures an analog world of experience. Touch is more likely
to be discrete, on and off; touch makes contact here, then there, in successive moments. It differentiates material features that look alike to vision. The association of fingers with digits encourages extending the distinction: if vision is
analog, touch must be digital. But in Campbells terms, such classification is merely metaphorical. To be digital, a quality must appear more than spatially or temporally discrete; it must be quantized (appear in measured units).3 When we
apply tactile pressure to a surface, the force of this action modulatesmore analog than digital, the pressure increases
and decreases in a continuous arc. When we look, here and there meld into an analog continuum, in time as much as in
space; whereas when we touch, here and there usually remain discretely here and there, now and then, despite the continuity of pressure at every point of contact. Each of the two sensory modes removes from its representation of experience those qualities it fails to accommodate because of its physical and phenomenological specifics.
In 1999, Campbell created Experiments in Touching Color, a device that allows touch to see color, touch by touch.
If the fictional Chance had had Campbells real art to experience, perhaps the totality of his sensory world would have
grown more alive. Experiments in Touching Color projects a stable but moving video image, such as a continuous head
shot of a person talking. The screen is mounted horizontally, like the surface of a table. When a viewer applies touch
to the video image, the entire screen turns a solid color corresponding to the value of the specific pixel contacted.
This programmed, interactive process converts an integrated visual image, digitized within the pictorial space of the
screen, into a strange hybrid of the visual and the tactile, digitized in time (touch by touch). Although this was not
necessarily Campbells intention, it seems that the projected image acquires the potential to be reconstituted in the
memory of the viewer-handler, given sufficient time to contact every pixel in spatial and temporal succession, building
the required store of memory. Each unit in this memory bank would double as a representation of an otherwise hidden feature of the totalized imageaspects of the images own memory, if the situation can be anthropomorphized
in this way (touch perceives the trees to which vision is blind; vision perceives the forest to which touch is numb).4
Provocatively, Campbell states: Memories [both human and computer] are hidden and have to be transformed
to be represented.5 With changing demands, the character of a memory changes; it can become more visual (transformed into a total picture, the recollection of a view) or more tactile (transformed into a sequence of touches applied
to the various parts, the recollection of an action). In an instant, touch magnifies and intensifies the sense of whatever
fragment of the image it engages; touch discovers the details that vision fails to register. But vision requires no more
than the same instant to picture the whole. If shifting from one sense to the other generates a gain, it also generates
a loss, no matter which turn a productive artist or an interpretive viewer takes. Perception perfects itself only in a
selective imaginative illusionin fantasy.
Under the demands of unforgiving questions, every representational technology becomes a device of low resolution
and disappointed expectations. Chance learned only so much about human behavior from his daily TV. An early account
of problems in television transmission indicates that they were (and still may be) as much physical as conceptual:
An infinitely small aperture [in the scanning disc] is impossible to achieve in practice; it must have finite dimensions. As a result of
this limitation . . . sharply defined lines of demarcation between bright and dark parts of the original scene are blurred or softened
in the received television image.6
He wanted to tell her how much he preferred to look at her, that only by watching could he memorize her and take her and possess
her. . . . Seeing encompassed all at once; a touch was limited to one spot at a time. [She] should no more have wanted to be touched
than should the TV screen have wanted it.2
* Originally published in Dietz, Steve (ed.), Jim Campbell. Material Light, New York, Hatje Cantz - Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, 2010.
1
Campbell, Jim, Delusions of Dialogue: Control and Choice in Interactive Art, Leonardo, vol. 33, no. 2, 2000, pp. 133134. This is the published form of a lecture Campbell first presented
at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, May 13, 1996. I thank Jim Campbell for generous replies to numerous queries, as well as Caitlin Haskell, Katie Anania, and Jason Goldstein for
expert aid in research.
2
Kosinski, Jerzy, Being There (New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), pp. 113114. The plot of Being There utilizes the chance perception of aural likeness between Chance, the Gardener (his profession) and Chauncey Gardiner, an aristocratic name that seems fitted to Chances fine clothing, hand-me-down suits from his wealthy employer. Layers of literary and
biographical mediation accumulate in Kosinskis work; he may have modeled his own life on a Polish novel similar to Being There, which suggests that his subsequent act of writing could
be at once impersonal plagiarism and personal confession, art and life imitat[ing] each other; see Park Sloan, James, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, New York, Dutton, 1996, pp. 6567.
78
Dont confuse digital for discrete! A digital still image is quantized in space and quantized in value. Campbell, statement to the author, March 25, 2005 (original emphasis).
Campbell explains that the work includes an audio component supplementing the video component: Sound fades up as the image fades out [to a single hue] to give the viewers more
information to imagine the image not seen. . . . Its the sound and color together that really guide ones imagination (statement to the author, December 21, 2009).
5
Campbell, Jim, Video Documentation List, Selected Works 19882003, unpublished typescript, 2003 (courtesy Jim Campbell).
6
Dinsdale, Alfred, First Principles of Television, London, Chapman & Hall, 1932, pp. 128129.
3
4
79
Chances focus on reality was more restricted than he knew. He attempted to learn interactive sexuality by viewing his erotic partner as an image (I like to watch, he tells her).7 This could provide no more than a distortion or
reduction of what he might learn by applying a different means of observation and representation, a different kind
of perceptual focusfor example, by touching the womans body. And vice versa: if he were touching, he might learn
something more by looking. Material reality frustrates each of the senses, just as it interferes with every technology
invented to observe material reality beyond the senses naked reach. Every device distorts as it reveals. Each revelation, having assumed an experiential perspective, is a distortion.
A means of projection interferes with the projection, rendering it at least one grade lower in resolution than what
a theory of the ideal means would predict. Theory is here, practice is there: physical matter prevents any seamless
linkage. In early television, the unattainable theoretical ideal of an infinitely fine scanning disc yielded to the reality of
a disc that could be built from actual materials.8 Just as the materiality of the projection device affects the quality
of transmission, the physical presence of a personoccupying real space and positioned to observe a projected imagebecomes a material factor within the representational system. The size of the human body and the capacities
of its senses are variables that interfere with the ideal operation of an apparatus for imaging.9 Material interference is
the rule, not the unfortunate exception. Our everyday experience confirms Werner Heisenbergs uncertainty principle,
as if this bit of rarefied science ought to be accepted as common sense. Campbell pointedly alludes to Heisenberg:
If you try to observe something . . . youll affect it. . . . The more information you try to get from something, the less
you get.10 Merely casting light on an object alters the object: [Try] to control the situation and the less you control it,
and the less you are able to see.11 Observation is not a supermarket door, mastered by a moments empirical insight.
When we observe, we observe in indirect illumination, obscurely.
Show Your Means
Campbells medium is electronicsfor the most part, a black-box technology of inapparent operations. Many of his
recent works generate images by computerized LED (light-emitting diode) displays of photographic and filmic material. Campbell often reduces the number of constitutive picture elements (pixels) to a near minimum. This brings
visual intelligibility to its absolute margins, as if to suit the challenge of the electromechanical engineering of the
information, which in its digitized state is inaccessible to visual inspection. Once a representational image moves
beyond (that is, under) its intelligibility limit, Campbell tends to refer to the resulting configuration as abstract: Very
low resolution images exist at the borderline of abstraction.12 His engineering becomes art when it highlights the blur
located at the division between demands and questions, resolution and obscurity.
Low-resolution images raise fundamental issues of perception by drawing attention to the margins and limits
of visual coherence. Campbell has ingenious ways of seeking the limit. Home Movies Grid (2007) uses LED units to
project a filmic image onto a double Plexiglas screen. The rear screen reduces visibility to lines forming a grid pattern:
we see the image on the linear grid, not on the much larger squares between, which remain blank. The front screen diffuses or blurs the grid lines, which alone constitute the image. Despite these restrictions, with some experience of the
device, its moving image becomes legible, as if it were projected onto a continuous plane. As in viewing conventional
film conventionally projected, our tendency to perceive analog continuityperhaps our brains hard-wired demand
eliminates consciousness of the discrete spatial and temporal breaks in the system. The abstraction is evident, yet
the representation holds. Home Movies Grid positions us at the single door that opens to both classes of image, to
representation and to abstraction, reducing us from demanding to questioning.
When Campbell began to experiment with placing diffusion screens in front of his coarsely pixelated LED images,
he realized a conceptual irony:
Putting a crude filter . . . between the viewer and the image causes the image to be more comprehensible. . . . By taking information
away, more meaning is communicated. The pixels [are] noise within this system of communication.13
Kosinski, Jerzy, Being There, op. cit., pp. 114115. Concerning the conflict in sensory input, compare Campbells Untitled (for Heisenberg) (19941995), in which an image of lovers
becomes progressively less revealing as the viewer approaches it.
8
Dinsdale, Alfred, op. cit., p. 130.
9
With respect to his recent series of Home Movies constructions, Campbell learned from experience the relationship of the viewing distance to the abstractness vs. comprehension of the
image (Campbell, statement to the author, July 3, 2009).
10
Campbell, Jim, August 29, 2007, The Buzz @ SJMAJim Campbell, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0-06mGjtjs, accessed December 17, 2009. In 19931994, Campbell created Shadow (for Heisenberg), a glass cube containing a Buddha; the glass clouds up as a viewer approaches, negating the attempt to see the object in greater detail. See Campbell, Jim,
interview by Richard Wittaker, 1999, Frames of Reference, Conversations.org: Interviews with Social Artists, at http://conversations.org/story.php?sid=30, accessed December 18, 2009;
Dietz, Steve, The Difference that Makes a Difference: The Liminal Art of Jim Campbell, in Dietz, Steve et al., Quantizing Effects: The Liminal Art of Jim Campbell, Santa Fe, Site Santa Fe,
2005, p. 18.
11
Campbell, Jim/Wittaker, Richard, op. cit. Campbell also states the principle in his Video Documentation List, Selected Works 19882003, op. cit.: The more accurately one tries to
observe or measure an object, the more that object will be affected by the observation.
12
Campbell, Jim, Final Project Report for Explorations of Meaning in Quantized Information: Submitted to the Langlois Foundation, August 18, 2001, unpublished typescript (courtesy
Jim Campbell). As a computer engineer, Campbell has made use of the Nyquist-Shannon interpolation formula, an algorithm that describes [the] liminal transformations between analog
and digital, between perception and illegibility; Dietz, Steve, op. cit., p. 13.
13
Campbell, Jim, Proposal to The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology: Explorations of Meaning in Quantized Information, January 28, 2000, unpublished typescript (courtesy Jim Campbell). Campbell restated the principle in his Final Project Report for Explorations of Meaning in Quantized Information, op. cit.: The visibility of the pixels within
an image adds noise to that image.
7
80
Campbells medium becomes abstracted noiseperceptual interference. When signs of the material, sensory
presence of the medium are obscured, the image it projects becomes all the more evidenta kind of uncertainty
principle at work in the viewers favor. Yet we see no more of the image than what its blur allows. To focus is to return
the factor of noise, the discreteness of the pixels, an effect inconsistent with the analog continuity of the projected
view. It is not the image that is made out of focus by the screen, Campbell states, for a focused image was never
present to start: It is the pixels or artifacts of the information that are defocused by the screen.14 Increased physical
distance between the LED panel and the diffusion screen minimizes the discreteness of the pixels; the same operation maximizes the blur, converting the image from relatively abstract to relatively representational. Campbell designs
certain LED works with a flexible framing of the display panel and the screen; by manipulating the structure, adjusting
the angle and distance of the diffusion, viewers can explore the correspondence between a particular abstraction and
a corresponding representation. Unlike Chances passive television screen, here a video projection within reach assumes actively variable meaning. This art encourages learning by doing, learning by direct contact.
Some of the programmed video that Campbells LED panels reconstitute shows ocean waves breaking (Wave
Modulation, 2003; Divide, 2005). This feature of visible nature evokes wave and pulse phenomena in general, including light, which in theory exists as either digital (energy in discrete packets) or analog (energy modulated). If light
travels in both forms, then according to our logic of mutual exclusion, by our insistence that it be one way or the other,
light can have no fixed essence. A pixelated representation of an ocean wave also appears at once analog and digital.
Is this image, too, without a proper essence? The structure of many of Campbells works enforces this judgment by
allowing a viewer to perceive both the LED board and the diffusion screen from a side angle, with the image simultaneously constructed and deconstructed (deconstructed because the terms of our understanding of the device are
shifted by the device itself). Perhaps true interactivity occurs where our categories and logical orders blur as they do in
Campbells art, which instills awareness that when we observe openly, our senses uncover their own insecurity. His art
demonstrates that we must continue to question even where we have grown accustomed to demanding:Engineering
is about solving problems, he concludes, and art is about creating them.15
Campbells recent series, Home Movies, imposes the means of projection within the line of sight of the viewer who
faces the screen that reflects the moving image. These works insert the bulk of the apparatus obtrusively between
viewer and screen, so that the projector of the projectionsuspended LED units, spaced along individual strips of wiringbecomes a material source of informational noise. The LED units introduce a second level of noise as the wires
twist slightly in reaction to their gravitational weight or move ever so slightly in response to ambient currents of air.
The viewer probably remains unaware of this distortion to the distortion because the projected image, an anonymous
amateurs home movie, is already at very low resolution. But inspection of the apparatus, set in plain view, makes the
several potential sources of distortion obvious even if their effects remain unobserved. Distortion can be more accessible to analysis than to sensation.
The combination of banal imagery (the home movie) and bizarre projection device is likely to draw the viewers
attention from the image to its means. Here the system of information and its transmission proves more interesting
than the system of sociocultural meaning.16 We have no classification for such an aberrant mode of projection, even
though it leaves its technological footprint grossly evident. Might we be dealing with a case of modernist art? Show
your means is an early 20th-century modernist dictum.17 Campbell seems to take this issue to absurdity, transforming the familiar modernist demand into a question requiring reinvestigation. When he blurs our habitual categories of
perceptual organization, he exposes them to experiential interactivity. Somewhat mystified by his experience of his
own workwhich is the response of an artist, or that of a philosopher-engineerCampbell concludes that we learn
how to look at these images by looking at them.18
History Blurs
Whenever the ratio of pixelation to blur changes, the perceived expression or emotionin Campbells terms, the
meaning as opposed to the informationis also likely to change:
Campbell, Jim, Final Project Report. . ., op. cit.
Campbell, Jim, in Lineberry, Heather Sealy, Electronic Interview with Jim Campbell, in Jim Campbell: Transforming Time, Electronic Works 19901999 (exhib. cat.), Tempe, Arizona State
University, 1999, p. 64.
16
Information refers specifically to information in the mathematical sense, while the concept of meaning embodies the meaning in the poetic sense. Campbell, Jim, Artists Statement, in Coblentz, Cassandra (ed.), Surface Tension, Philadelphia, The Fabric Workshop, 2003, at http://www.fabricworkshop.org/exhibitions/surface/campbell-state ment.php, accessed
December 18, 2009.
17
A typical early 20th-century comment: A large part of the emotive power of Czannes canvases derives from the fact that the painter, rather than hide them, shows his means. Lhote,
Andr, LEnseignement de Czanne, Nouvelle revue franaise, no. 15, November 1, 1920, p. 665 (original emphasis). Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise noted, translations are the
authors.
18
Campbell, Jim, statement to the author, July 3, 2009.
14
15
81
I recently saw a before/after demonstration of a still image of a head and shoulders shot of a woman before and after compression. The two images were supposed to look the same. But on the compressed one I noticed that the curves were reduced on her
lips. Her smile was gone! Only a few pixels different, yet a totally different meaning.19
Asked to elaborate on his observation, Campbell replied:

On the original image the woman was clearly faintly smiling, and after compression she was not. . . . It really started to make me
think about transformation of meaning in digital translation processes.20
Campbells interest in the influence of the medium on meaning recalls the way that 19th-century artists and critics assessed advances in representational technology during their own era. By the middle of the century, the new
medium of photographyboth the single-print daguerreotype and the multiple-print calotypehad introduced unexpected levels of precision into relatively common representational practices, such as portraiture. Yet this new level
of detail (a representational science) did not necessarily translate into greater expressiveness (a representational
poetry). Despite our ability to codify information and meaning so that they correspond under restricted conditions,
the two factors remain fundamentally incommensurable.
Faced with the challenge to traditional practices and expectations, some 19th-century critics argued that daguerreotypes, though offering increased informational capacity, lacked the kind of feeling that a conventional painting or drawing could convey. Thophile Thor wrote in 1845:
The artist is not merely an eye like a daguerreotype plate, a deadening, passive mirror that physically reproduces the image presented to him; he becomes a moving, creative force that regenerates external creation in its turn.21
In 1848, the same critic nevertheless took an appreciative view of photographys paper-print innovation, because
its increased speed and ease of execution promised artists an efficient means to subsequent, prolonged study of
fleeting effects of sunlight, the feeling of nature enjoyed in transit, stop[ping] at the bend of a forest path.22 Thors
call to artists to immerse themselves in natureand, by whatever means, to extract emotion from the spontaneous
viewparallels a distinction made within photographic practice itself, where the perceived need was to retain the
momentary organic tremor in the permanently stilled print. In 1851, Francis Wey argued that the soft focus of the
calotype print, as opposed to the crisp clarity of the daguerreotype plate, was particularly effective in animating a
naturalistic image:
In a certain way, [paper-print] photography supplies a link between the daguerreotype and art proper. It appears that in passing onto
the paper, the mechanism becomes animated: the apparatus is elevated to an intelligence that combines the effects, simplifies the
execution, interprets nature, and adds to the reproduction of planes and lines the expression of feeling or of physiognomy.23
We recall Campbells insight: It is difficult for viewers not to project intelligence into a program that has meaningful responses to their actions.24 Here, the action is photography and the program is the paper-print process.
In early photography, the sign of expressive enhancement, even a kind of intelligence, was blur. A calotype around
1850 required a relatively short, but not negligible, exposure time. This process blurred selectively. It failed to quiet the
most transient, capricious movements, such as leaves rustling on an extended branch, while it stilled most everything
else in a forest scene. Viewers of mid-19th-century landscape photographs regarded the blurred foliage not as a fault
but as a marker of the living force of nature, evidence of natures continuous (analog) vivacity. Nature and the photographic process were gesturing in harmony.
Rather than accuracy of detail or nuance, the capacity for feeling (Weys French term was sentiment) was for
many observers the issue on which photographic representation and that of any other medium would rise or fall,
at least in its artistic use. Simply put, mechanisms and the products they generated lacked the feeling that human
agency, the human touch, would bring to representation.25 There nevertheless proved to be a mechanical way of
enhancing the liveliness of photography, rendering it more expressivein Campbells sense, increasing the meaning
in relation to the quantity of information. This new method amounted to a type of mechanical animation, achieved
Campbell, Jim, Final Project. . .; see also note 16.
Campbell, Jim, statement to the author, December 19, 2009.
Thor, Thophile, Salon de 1845, in Les Salons, 3 vols., Bruxelles, 1893, p. 1:105; see also Salon de 1847, pp. 1: 446, 449.
22
Thor, Thophile, Revue des arts, Le Constitutionnel, February 6, 1848, n. p.
23
Wey, Francis, De linfluence de lhliographie sur les beaux-arts, La Lumire, February 9, 1851, p. 2.
24
Campbell, Jim, Delusions of Dialogue. . ., op. cit.
25
The modern form of this notion is Cartesian, with its radical differentiation of an animating soul from dead matter and materiality; see Descartes, Ren, Discourse on Method (1637),
in Kemp Smith, Norman (ed. and trans.), Philosophical Writings, New York, Modern Library, 1958, p. 119. For a contrary view, see La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, Treatise on the Soul
(1745), in Thomson, Ann (ed. and trans.), Machine Man and Other Writings, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 6566.
19
20
21
82
in the photographic sequences (chronophotography) of both Eadweard Muybridge and tienne-Jules Marey. Film
projection soon followed, and its early name was animated photographythe illusion of movement created by
a succession of discrete stills.26 Campbell notes that, by comparison with a similar still image, a moving image (film
or video), when projected by a low resolution LED display, requires less information (fewer coded elements) to be
decipherable.27 His Motion and Rest series of 2002 depicts disabled individuals as they walk. Campbell reduced the
information to the point that only the gait remains intelligibleonly the movement, no other factor of the individuals
appearance, remains expressively meaningful.
The mechanics of cinematography and its moving images is unusually complicated and only slowly attained a
level of perfection suitable for purposes of commercial production and display. One problem was the material interference known as flicker, caused by the eyes ghostly registration of the action of the shutter, a rapid alternation
of extreme light [shutter open] and extreme dark [shutter closed], as each still frame shifted into position before
the projection lens.28 The severity of flicker during the early years of film corresponded to the type of shutter used,
as well as the distribution of light and dark in the scene being projected. The phenomenon of flicker, which irritates
and fatigues the eye, imposes itself on the image; it becomes a dramatic instance of the tension between material
features of the medium and its representational function of conveying an image in a denotative form that, ideally,
would require no further translation of the information, only interpretation of the meaning.29 When early projectionists attempted to eliminate flicker by using no shutter at all, rain appeared, a different manifestation of persistence
of vision, a result of contrast in the succession of projected images rather than in the repeatedly interrupted beam of
projected light (tones from one frame continuing to register on the vision of a subsequent frame).30 The medium had
not yet attained sufficient transparency or silence, the absence of all informational noise, so that no more than the
representational image would be apparent.
Eventually, by reducing the time that each frame of a filmstrip stood without a break in the cast beam of light,
technology eliminated flicker. The time during which the moving image was illuminated now equaled the time it was
obscured; and this precise interval was determined by the time required to switch to the next image-frame in the
animated, mechanical sequence.31 The mechanical imperatives of film projection caused movement, the temporal dimension, to become regularized, averaged, and grid-like, similar to the effect of photography in the spatial dimension.
With the establishment of this mechanized, abstract order of time, a filmmaker could refigure temporality in material
form. Campbells series of Home Movies reintroduces the flicker-like experience of being visually aware of the projection apparatus while simultaneously viewing the expressive image in mechanized time. The apparatus adds its own
degree of expressiveness, affecting the emotions of the viewer, if only by creating obstacles to receiving a single channel of denotation. The inescapable presence of the projection system blocks the given clarity of the image, reducing
low resolution to a degree still lower. The banal imagery of Campbells Home Moviesfamily gatherings, children
playing, a swimmersolicits no interpretation yet, by its form, sparks a desire for interpretation. This impulse to interpret shifts its target from the expressive content of the projected film to the process of perception itself. Perception
has ceased to be as transparent as the image perceived. Interpretation turns from the anodyne narrative of the home
movie to the poetic reservoir of the medium.
Analogous to filmic flicker, broadcast radio had interference in the form of audible static; and at a later date, broadcast television had distorting waves, effects of anamorphosis, and the phenomenon known as snow. In the case of
rapidly flashing particles of snow, the internal electronics of the television apparatus generates the interference. Snow
can be caused by random weak signals that conflict with the dominant signal, but it becomes especially evident when
the set receives only weak signals or no signal at all. In response, the amplifier seeks out a strong signal or any signal.
In lieu of anything better, the receiving medium will produce a transient moving pattern of its own on the screens
rastervariations in illumination at or near the scale of an individual picture element, which never coalesce into an
intelligible image.32 Even without a broadcast signal and consequent image, the screen does not become dark. A play
of void and phosphorescence animates it, an interference that interferes with nothing. In a reversal familiar to modern
Hepworth, Cecil M., Animated Photography: The ABC of the Cinematograph (ed. Hector MacLean), London, Hazel, Watson & Viney, 1900; Talbot, Frederick A., Moving Pictures: How They
Are Made and Worked, London, William Heinemann, 1912, p. 7 (animated photography is not animation [actual movement] at all).
At these low information rates, the movement of an image is just as important as the static pixel content of the image in discerning the overall content of image. Campbell, Jim, Final
Project, op. cit.
28
Hepworth, Cecil M., op. cit., pp. 5258, 112113; Talbot, Frederick A., op. cit., pp. 8895.
29
Once the most obvious technological wrinkles within film projection had been eliminated, artists following a modernist doctrine of show your means could reintroduce technological
flaws as a play on the essential materiality of the medium. Andy Warhols Empire (1964) records so little action or change that, instead of following a narrative, the viewer notices every
slight imperfection in the material surface of the projected celluloid filmstrip. The play of the medium becomes the cinematic narrative.
30
Hepworth, Cecil M., op. cit., pp. 5455.
31
See Lutz, E. G., Animated Cartoons, New York, Charles Scribners Sons, pp. 1213.
32
Campbell explored related phenomena in Portrait of a Portrait of Claude Shannon (2001), where a coherent low-resolution image alternates with indecipherable, electronically generated noise.
26
27
83
painters, this material assertion of the medium becomes the image: hence, the metaphor of snow, paradoxically evoking
a referent in nature to which the image has no causal correspondence. The effect of electronic snow actively represents
the medium as it represents itself in its sensate condition of being on, responding to the ambient electronic environment.33 The medium gives an appropriately electronic sign of lifea materialization of its presence. Television shows
its means: this lack of organized programming would be a mere annoyance to the fictional Chance, with his belief in the
transparency of the medium and the reality of the image; but it concerns Campbell, for whom the informational medium
is as vital an element in perception as the meaning, programmed or not, that it projects. The medium becomes a factor
of the meaning, as Campbell often notes: Only a few pixels different, yet a totally different meaning.34
Seurats Abstraction
Chance, who regarded it useless to touch a television screen, was unfamiliar with the various pressure-, temperature-,
vibration- and light-sensitive switches commonly incorporated into interactive electronic systems (in Campbells
terms, systems predominantly either controllable or responsive).35 Chances social world existed as immaterial
images, not physical bodies. Ironically, as uneducated as he was, he took an attitude toward reality that a historians
understanding of modern media might have encouraged. For millennia, drawing and painting had served the need
for detailed visual representation. During the 19th century, photographic technology displaced these ancient handoriented practices. From photography to film, and then to television and other forms of electronic video projection, it
would seem that the production of imagery became increasingly independent of hand-work and the physical presence of an artist-producer. With the subsequent electronic coding of each type of representation into sets of digital
information, the materiality of visual imagery would seem to have decreased to such an extent that it hardly remains
a factor in communication. The physical presence of the apparatus becomes irrelevant, just as Chance understood,
viewing his television screen without seeing or otherwise acknowledging the screen itself.
An old medium can acquire the characteristics of the new, just as the new can be explored in terms of the old.
The cumulative critical reception of George Seurats old art of drawing and painting reflects the 20th-century shift in
sensory expectations during a new technological era of film and television. With ever less materiality to be encountered in the new media, viewers detect certain material traces in the oldtraces previously unnoticed. What in 1890
appeared dehumanized and mechanical in Seurats art because it lacked the usual signs of manual flourish, began in
later decades to acquire an archaic or atavistic human quality due to the mere fact of its individualized hand labor.36
With an exaggerated perception of technological crisis, Meyer Schapiro in 1957 called painting and sculpture the last
handmade, personal objects within our culture. For this art historian, sensitive to Marxist issues of industrialization
and the division of labor, it was not Seurats regularized pointillist technique that reduced the level of meaning in representation, but the commercial radio and television signals on which Americans had come to rely.37
Seurat had always generated critical conflict. During his lifetime and in the decades following, his art had exemplified the type of material abstraction that both enthused and troubled critics in the wake of the more naturalistic art
of Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and others of the Impressionist generation. The early critics sense of abstraction parallels that of Campbell today: abstraction emerges when the resolution factor of representation becomes so low
that only the material qualities of the image remainthe referential qualities having been obscured, dropping below the
threshold of perception. Seurats critics hedged their assessment, regarding the abstraction problem as at once material
and mental; the painter was directing too much of his attention, as well as the viewers, to the process of painting. In
1890, Gustave Geffroy noted that Seurats practice seemed to be losing its individual personality, as if personal expressiveness were no longer a concern; this made his art all the more mechanistic, susceptible to impersonal mechanical counterfeits.38 Writing somewhat later, Maurice Denis argued that the source of Seurats emotional coldness was
his abstraction and philosophical mind.39 In turn, Charles Morice warned of the mortal danger of practicing pointillism with machine-like regularityart reduced to technique [becoming] a new and useless science [with] the hands in
charge of the head.40 Through the action of the painters hands, programmed, so to speak, by the technical system (the
type of mark that could be made with this hand and that brush), the material quality of the information was determining
the expressive meaning of the workan inversion of what humanistic critics believed ought to have been happening.
33
On receiver noise and snow, see Zworykin, Vladimir K. and Morton, George A., Television: The Electronics of Image Transmission in Color and Monochrome, New York, Wiley, 1954, pp. 182, 720.
On a minimum signal, see Krupnick, M. A., The Electric Image: Examining Basic TV Technology, White Plains, N.Y., Knowledge Industry Publications, 1990, p. 10.
34
Campbell, Jim, Final Project. . ., op. cit.
35
Campbell, Jim, Delusions of Dialogue. . ., op. cit.
36
Despite its cultural significance at the time, we would be reluctant to accept Flix Fnons description of Seurats pointillist surfaces. No matter what Seurat renders, the critic claimed, the
handling of the brush remains the same and manual facility becomes a negligible matter. Fnon, Flix, Les impressionnistes en 1886, LImpressionnisme (1887), reprinted in Halperin, Joan
U. (ed.), Flix Fnon: uvres plus que compltes, 2 vols., Genve, Librairie Droz, 1970, pp. 1: 36, 67.
37
Schapiro, Meyer, The Liberating Quality of Avant-garde Art, Artnews, no. 56, Summer 1957, pp. 38, 40.
38
Geffroy, Gustave, Chronique dart: Indpendants, Revue daujourdhui, no. 1, April 15, 1890, p. 270.
39
Denis, Maurice, La Raction nationaliste (1905), in Thories 18901910: Du Symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique, Paris, L. Rouart et J. Watelin diteurs, 1913, p. 196.
40
Morice, Charles, Le XXIe Salon des indpendants, Mercure de France, no. 54, 15 April 1905, p. 550.
84
Through Seurats art then, as with Campbells art now, viewers could sense the divide between information and
meaning, abstraction and representation, medium and image, digital and analog. Seurats small oil-on-panel studies
of landscape manifestly enable this level of discernment. Just below the horizon line and to the left of the rocky outcropping featured in tude pour Le Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp (1885), the painter set a single, tiny stroke of white, a
vertical within a field of horizontals. Below it is a still slighter bit of red, which is pigment, not a sliver of exposed wood
panel, though the two can easily be confused. The representational context indicates that this vague configuration
must represent a sailboat, almost lost within the metaphorical and literal sea of marks that surrounds it. Seurats
seaat once densely material (the medium), abstractly uniform (the information), and evocatively representational (the meaning)may have been a more compelling element for mid-20th-century eyes than the incident of the
sailboat, despite its capacity to invoke a narrative. Seurats viewers in the era of television were likely to have admired
his marks as a precocious instance of advanced painting practice, corresponding to American critic Clement Greenbergs formulation of the technically and expressively integrated all-over picture:
. . .a surface knit together of a multiplicity of identical or similar elements. . . . The most radical steps taken in painting since [the
later 19th century] have in almost every case been accompanied by the tendency to atomize the picture surface into separate
brush-strokes. . . . Every part of the canvas [is] equivalent [and] we find the essence of the whole work in every one of its parts.41
Greenberg was not thinking of an electronic raster, but his description envisions it.
Seurat activated his study for Le Bec du Hoc not only with his incipient pointillist surface of self-similar marks, but
also by vertically scoring the horizontally disposed wood panel.42 At the upper left corner, this cross-graining is particularly manifest, exposed in the way that the horizontal strokes of color appear punctuated by extremely thin, darker
verticals as the paint skims over the physical surface of tiny peaks and valleys. As a result, the surface acquires a visual
texture similar to that of Seurats grainy drawings made by applying cont crayon to the material variation built into
laid paper. The abstract, informational texture of the studies in oil sometimes enhances the representational meaning
of the image, as when suggesting the choppiness or turbulence of the ocean. But because Seurats panels typically
also have a distinct grain in the horizontal dimension, producing a subtle pattern of ridges, the vertical scoring or crossgraining creates an abstract pattern of interference: a virtual grid materializes, which becomes a supplemental sign of
the material resistance of the medium.43
In Seurats era, a significant number of cultural critics continued to believe that a hand-oriented medium such as
painting might dominate the higher technology of a mechanized medium such as photography, as these competing forms of representation made their appeals to the collective social imagination. When Seurat adopted his new
technologya discrete pointillist distribution of picture elements, approximating the fixed values of a digital systemand when he applied this new method to his old medium of painting, it seemed that he had sacrificed his expressive humanity to gain machine efficiency. To many of his contemporaries, his art looked mechanical. Most likely,
Seurat believed he had merely avoided the cultural affectations characteristic of many of the Parisian social types he
represented. He was relinquishing the Romantic claim on intensified personal expression; he was restricting himself to
honest observation: They see poetry in what I do. No, I apply my method and thats all.44 Now, when the dominant
imagery is electronic and the electronic signal is digitizedwhen even television loses its signs of material interference (no more waves, no more snow)Seurats art offers glimpses of the medium at work, insights into persistent
factors of material resistance. It shows that the materiality of the medium remains in force even when the constituent
mark of the image approaches the zero degree of both reference and self-referentialitywhen the mark lacks pronounced variation, direction, and character, neither describing externals nor drawing attention to itself. At whatever
size, Seurats pixel-like touches never truly recede from view. More than merely facilitating representation, they mark
its material limit, beyond which only the marking itself can be seen. And this is what Campbell calls abstraction.
Sense Divides
Materiality in representation is an issue that remains with us. Imagine an animated video image complete to the eye yet
with evident blanks of darkness between its fragmented elements, blanks considerably larger than the points of light that
Greenberg, Clement, The Crisis of the Easel Picture (1948), in OBrian, John (ed.), The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols., Chicago, 19861993, pp. 2: 222224.
My thoughts concerning Seurats scored or grooved panels developed in collaboration with Robert Herbert; see Herbert, Robert L., Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte (exhib.
cat.), Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago and Berkeley, 2004, p. 56.
43
Seurats full-scale version of Le Bec du Hoc (1885, reworked 18881889) exhibits many little vertical strokes of paint within the predominantly horizontal strokes used to represent the
open sea. It seems that the painted verticals, which may be among a number of late additions to this canvas, substitute for the interference provided by the material graining built into
the study on panel.
44
Statement by Seurat, as reported by Charles Angrand, in Coquiot, Gustave, Georges Seurat, Paris, Albin Michel, 1924, p. 41. For an alternative version of the same statement, from a
letter by Angrand to Henri-Edmond Cross (communicated to Robert Rey by Flix Fnon), see Rey, Robert, La renaissance du sentiment classique dans la peinture franaise la fin du XIXe
sicle. Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, Czanne, Seurat, Paris, Les Beaux-Arts, 1931, p. 95. Both accounts stress the primacy of Seurats concern for the material factor in art as addressed by the
painters method.
41
42
85
constitute the picture: this would describe Chances screen if it were punctured by holes; it also describes Campbells Home
Movies Grid and any number of his earlier works using LED panels as the means of projection. In 2001, Campbell created
Running Falling Cut; it splits a digitized, moving image into upper and lower registers and runs the two halves at different
speeds, out of syncthe lower in constant, real time; the upper in variable time, sometimes slower, sometimes faster
than the normative image below it.45 The image appears to be suffering from interference, not unlike what happens on the
screen of a traditional television set when it receives an alien signal. In this instance, the element of interference is temporal.
Time somehow appears within the immaterial dividing line between the two uncoordinated halves of the imagean invisible time that conflicts with the visible time recorded by the figures movement, which is itself irregular and idiosyncratic. This
cut of time precipitates out from the temporality of the filmic image displayed on the panel, providing a separate, discrete
body of information. The cut reveals that something (else) is happening, that some vital force is at work in the world, a force
affecting the image, even if this parasite cannot be accommodated by ordinary categories of analysis.46 Like a distorting
wave that passes through a regulated, material form, the split occupies no space of its own within the pictorial field. It gives
an immaterial feature of the medium a material presence, as if the medium had some extra dimension its viewers would
otherwise fail to sense. With the cut, viewers experience this excess in sensation, a supplemental factor of information and
meaning, a residual source of expression deep within the working of the medium.
A modernist, show-your-means reversal occurs when we view Running Falling Cut: a material assertion of the
medium comes to dominate the figure or proper image. To experience the split in the image, at once material and immaterial, visible and invisible, may be more memorable than observing the moving figure that appears to run and fall
repeatedly. A major element of Campbells project is to reach and test the edge of image recognition without losing
it. His little points of light, in their odd configurations, give an electronic sign of a complex, technological form of life.
Something meaningful is happening, beyond mere representation.
As we know, a number of Campbells LED worksChurch on Fifth Avenue (2001) is an exampleset the diffusion
screen at a variable angle so that its distance from the display panel shifts from extremely close to effectively distant. This
type of construction establishes a curious condition: where the screen lies nearly flush with a row of diodes, a segment
of the projected image will hardly be blurred at all, while where an appreciable space intervenes between a row of diodes
and the screen, the opposing segment will be considerably blurred. The image appears continuous and representational
where most blurred, and discrete and abstract where least blurred. At the discrete end of this spectrum of effects, the perceived image seems to retain digital coding, even though the individual diodes illuminate according to a modulated analog
signal. At the continuous end, the image seems thoroughly analogunfocused, yet naturalistic. The difference parallels
what 19th-century critics perceived when they decided that the expressive range of calotype blur was greater than that
of daguerreotype sharpness. For analytical science, choose the daguerreotype; for poetic art, choose the calotype. This
potential accord with Campbells art does not actually hold, for the quality of fine detail that the diffusion screen seems to
lose to its blur had never been visible in the first place. The arrays of LED units are too sparsely distributed, their resolution
factor is too low, to have generated detail to a significant degree.
The work titled Divide (2005) presents a view of breaking waves. Here, rather than the diffusion screen, it is the LED
panel that Campbell angles, tilting it forward from the top of a wall-mounted cage toward the screen fixed before it, and
bracketing it to the wall at the bottom. As a result, its projected image passes through all values from nearly flush to the
screen at the top (minimum diffusion) to three inches removed at the bottom (maximum diffusion).
The structural logic of the situation indicates that the image must vary along a continuum from discrete and pixelated
at the top to continuous and blurred at the bottom: digital in appearance at top, analog at bottom. Somewhere in between, the image must contain the line that would divide these antithetical concepts and polarized sensations. Campbells
title implies as much but becomes an ironic challenge to his viewers powers of observation: let the observer find the divide,
in plain view yet obscure, visible and invisible at once. This is the perceptual divide that lies between matter and mind,
sensation and sense. It may not exist.
According to Campbell, because the cycle time of the clock variation (about two minutes) is different from the loop time of the image (about six minutes), the relationship between the
two parts takes somewhere between a few months and a few years to repeat itself (statement to the author, April 4, 2005). There will be many moments when the two halves of the
moving image align, but a surprisingly long period of continuous projection would be required for any particular configuration of alignment to recur.
46
Parasite, evoking a form of life imposing on or supplementing another form of life, is the French term for radio and television interference.
45
86
Jim Campbell was born in 1956 in Chicago, Illinois. He earned a degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics in 1978, and now lives and works in San Francisco, California, USA.
Campbells work is in the collections of museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), The Whitney
Museum of American Art (New York), The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Smithsonian (Washington, D.C.),
the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum.
He has also earned several public art commissions, and his awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a Langlois
Foundation Grant, and a Rockefeller Fellowship Award in Multimedia.
Exhibitions
2011
Walking + Falling: Jim Campbell, Chris Marker & Eadweard
Muybridge, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver.
Jim Campbell: Exploded View, Museum of the Moving
Image, Astoria, New York.
Jim Campbell - Material Light, National Museum of
Photography, Copenhagen.
2010
In the Repose of Memory, Eleanor D. Wilson Museum &
Roanoke College Galleries, Virginia.
Jim Campbell: New Work, Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery,
New York.
Jim Campbell, Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.
2008
Jim Campbell: Home Movies, Berkeley Art Museum.
2007
Home Movies, Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.
Quantizing Effects, Museum of Glass, Tacoma.
2006
4300 Watts, Hosfelt Gallery, New York.
Jim Campbell, College of Wooster Art Museum, Wooster,
Ohio.
Quantizing Effects, Beall Center for Art and Technology,
Irvine, California; Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee.
2005
Ambiguous Icons, The Center for Photography at
Woodstock, New York.
Jim Campbell: New Work, Byron Cohen Gallery,
Kansas City, Missouri.
Material Light, Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York.
New Work, Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.
Quantizing Effects, Site Santa Fe.
2004
Jim Campbell, Palo Alto Art Center.
Wavelengths, American Museum of the Moving Image,
New York.
Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art.
2003
Jim Campbell, University of South Florida Contemporary
Art Museum, Tampa.
Memory Array, Berkeley Art Museum.
Seeing, Exploratorium, San Francisco.
2002
Data and Time, Nagoya City Art Museum.
Digital Works, Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.
Jim Campbell, Gallery 2211, Los Angeles.
Motion and Rest, Arizona State University, Tempe.
2001
Contemporary Configurations, Museum of Art and
History, Santa Cruz, California.
Jim Campbell: Time and Data, Wood Street Galleries,
Pittsburgh.
Time, Memory and Meditation, Anderson Gallery, Virginia
Commonwealth University, Richmond.
2000
Cohen Berkowitz Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri.
Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.
1999
Transforming Time: Electronic Works 1990-1999, Nelson
Art Museum, Arizona State University, Tempe.
1998
Reactive Works, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose,
California.
1997
Digital Watch, Kemper Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.
Reactive Works, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena,
California.
1996
Electronic Art, Cohen Berkowitz Gallery, Kansas City,
Missouri.
1995
Dialogue, Rena Branstein Gallery, San Francisco.
1994
Hallucination, Southeastern Center for Contemporary
Art, Salem, North Carolina.
1992
Electronic Art, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco.
1991
Hallucination, Fresno Art Museum, California.
87
Installations
Digital Watch
Dimensions variable
Two black and white video cameras, 50 rear projection
enclosed video monitor, custom electronics, watch
The work consists of a large rear projection video monitor,
a camera pointing at an analog pocket watch, and a camera pointed at the viewer. Custom electronics combine a live
image of the pocket watch with a processed image of the
viewers such that the live image of the viewer is seen outside the area of the watch. Inside the area of the watch is a
staccato, five-second delayed image of the viewer.
Frames of Reference
Dimensions variable
Camera, custom electronics, video projector, wood, nail
This work consists of a small circuit board camera attached to one end of a piece of wood. On the other end is a
partially hammered nail. This system is suspended from
above and connected to a motor which jerks the piece of
wood every half hour or so to keep it in motion. The image from the camera aimed at the nail is projected onto the
wall near the camera as the board slowly rotates, panning
the room and keeping the nail centered within the image.
The image itself is processed through a time averaging filter, so that as the board rotates, the room and people in
the background are blurred while the nail and board are
very precise, exaggerating the differences between two
frames of reference.
Low Resolution Works
Exploded View (Commuters)
Strands of LED lights in a grid 182.87 cm wide
and 38.10 cm deep
In a dark corner, made darker by blackened walls, LEDs in
vertical rows are connected by the hanging wires that feed
them. The whole array roughly defines a large rectangular
box, incidentally evoking the extensive use of that sort of
form in minimal sculpture. In this version the lighted pixels
are programmed with footage of commuters from Grand
Central Station in New York City. Standing close to the
work, a viewer sees only ripples of darkness pass through
it, seemingly at random, like sudden shifts of mood. Step
away and the ripples of shadow form themselves into figurative 3-D images.
Divide (Wave Studies, 20022005)

56.4 x 75 x 9.8 cm
Custom electronics, 768 LEDs, treated Plexiglas
In some the cast of light gradually changes from its smallest condensed point to a homogenous glow of information, in others the cast of light remains a soft glowing orb.
Here, rather than the diffusion screen, it is the LED panel

that Campbell angles, tilting it forward from the top of a
wall mounted cage toward the screen fixed before it, and
bracketing it to the wall at the bottom. As a result, its projected image passes through all values from nearly flush
to the screen at the top (minimum diffusion) to 7.6 centimeters removed at the bottom (maximum diffusion). The
structural logic of the situation indicates that the image
must vary along a continuum from discrete and pixelated
at the top to continuous and blurred at the bottom: digital in appearance at top, analog at bottom (Richard Shiff,
Look to See By Looking).
Library
(Photo-based Works, 20032009)
56.5 x 75 x 6 cm
Custom electronics, 768 LEDs, photogravure, treated
Plexiglas
Published by Graphicstudio, Tampa, Florida
Fundamental Interval Commuters #2

83.82 x 117.76 x 5.08 cm
Custom electronics, 1,728 LEDs, mounted duratrans diffusion screen, treated Plexiglas
In this series of works Campbell pairs photographic media
and low-resolution LED panels to bring a haunting sense of
movement and time to the still photograph. Fundamental
Interval Commuters #2 juxtaposes a color transparency of
commuters walking through Grand Central Station with a
video-based LED reproduction shot in exactly the same location. Every so often, the two align themselves for a brief
moment. Otherwise, the moving images exist as ghostly
traces behind the static color image.
Church on 5th Avenue (5th Avenue series)
55.9 x 73.6 x 17.8 cm
Custom electronics, 768 LEDs, treated Plexiglas
A matrix of 32 x 24 (768) pixels made out of red LEDs displays a pedestrian and auto traffic scene in New York from
an off-street perspective. There is a sheet of diffusing Plexiglas angled in front of the grid. As the pedestrians move
from left to right the figures gradually go from a discrete representation to a continuous one (or, metaphorically, from
a digital representation to an analog one).
Reconstruction 7 (Reconstruction series, 20022009)
54.9 x 36.5 x 8.9 cm
Custom electronics, 384 LEDs, cast resin screen
A resin diffusion screen is mounted in these works in front
of a matrix of LED pixels. Various pedestrian, auto and boat
traffic scenes are displayed from the perspective of an outside viewer. The resin block softens the image from the
highly pixelated representation of the LEDs to a decipherable image. The pixel is captured when viewed from the side.
88
This piece is composed of a high-resolution photogravure

of the New York Public Library, printed on rice paper and
placed in a Plexiglas frame suspended in front of an LED
surface containing a 25-minute video chip loop of lowresolution moving images. Indistinct images of birds and
people appear to move in and out of the library and across
the facade.
Motion & Rest #5 (Motion and Rest series, 20012002)
55.9 x 73.7 cm
Custom electronics, 768 LEDs
This series depicts disabled individuals as they walk.
Campbell reduced the information to the point that only
the gait remains intelligibleonly the movement, no other
factor of the individuals appearance, remains expressively
meaningful (Richard Shiff, Look to See By Looking).
A Fire, a Freeway, and a Walk
30.4 x 38 x 4 cm
Custom electronics, 42 LEDs, velvet
Forty-two pixels around the perimeter of a frame facing
the wall create just the edge of an image using Red-GreenBlue LEDs. This creates what Steve Dietz calls an inverse
Platos cave of flickering lights; flickering signifiers (from
Quantizing Effects: The Liminal Art of Jim Campbell, 2005).
strings of individual LEDs to project back onto the wall

footage of old home movies of typical family gatherings
and children playing. The Home Movies works are all very
similar. Their differences are in the number and spacing of
LEDs and the video footage they show. It reintroduces the
flicker-like experience of being visually aware of the projection apparatus while simultaneously viewing the expressive image in mechanized time. The apparatus adds
its own degree of expressiveness, affecting the emotions
of the viewer, if only by creating obstacles to receiving a
single channel of denotation. The inescapable presence of
the projection system blocks the given clarity of the image, reducing low resolution to a degree still lower (Richard
Shiff, Look to See by Looking).
Memory Works
The Memory Works (19941998) are a series in which
each work is based upon a digitally recorded memory
of an event. Some of these electronic records represent
a personal memory and others represent a collective
memory. These electronic memories are manipulated and then used to transform an associated object
mounted on the wall. Avoiding the usual notions of
what a memory is, none of the original memories is an
image or a sound. These works explore the characteristic of hiddenness common to both human and computer memory. Memories are hidden and have to be
transformed to be represented.
Portrait of My Father
180 x 40.6 x 15.2 cm
Custom electronics, glass, photograph, LCD material
A photograph of Campbells father is visible for an instant
and then disappears. This process happens over and over
again at the rate of the artists heartbeat which was recorded over an eight-hour period one night while sleeping.
Fight
30.4 x 38 x 4 cm
Custom electronics, 88 RGB LEDs, treated Plexiglas
Photo of My Mother
180.3 x 38 x 15 cm
Custom electronics, glass, photograph, LCD material
A matrix of 8 x 11 (88) pixels made out of Red-Green-Blue

LEDs shows a boxing match between two world boxing
champions.
A photograph of Campbells mother slowly transforms

from foggy to clear at the rate of his breath as digitally recorded for one hour, as though he is breathing on the glass
in front of the photograph.
Home Movies 560-1

213.36 x 152.4 x 7.62 cm (approximate dimensions)
Video installation
Custom electronics, 560 LEDs
It is a new work made of 28 strands of 20 pixels, for a total
of 560 LEDs. The Home Movies series uses widely spaced
Cyclical Meter Base

180.3 x 38 x 15 cm
Custom electronics, old clock
The memory is at the rate of a person breathing, as recorded for one hour. The clocks second hand moves at the
89
rate of the breathing from the memory. The clock is metering the breathing.
Cyclical Counter Base
180.3 x 38 x 15 cm
Custom electronics, new clock
The memory is at the rate of a person blinking, as recorded
for one hour. The clocks second hand moves at the rate of
the blinking from the memory. The clock is counting the
number of blinks.
I Have Never Read the Bible
180.3 x 38 x 15 cm
Websters Dictionary, speaker, custom electronics
The memory is the complete text from the King James version of the Bible and the object is an old Websters Dictionary. The Bible is whispered from the dictionary one letter
at a time. The work stores the ASCII text of the Bible and
the artists voice whispering the letters of the alphabet.
The electronic text from the Bible accesses the whispered
letters one at a time, creating a representation of the artist
reading the Bible. While recording the letters being whispered, Mozarts Requiem was playing in the background,
so each whispered letter has a fragment of the music associated with it.
Typing Paper
180.3 x 38 x 15 cm
Custom electronics, glass, speaker
The memory is the ASCII text from Martin Luther Kings
I Have a Dream speech. This digital information is then
used to access a secondary memory of hitting each of the
keys on an old typewriter. This is not a recording of someone typing the speech but the electronics simulating typing
the speech.
Night Lights
180.3 x 38 x 15 cm
Custom electronics, light bulbs, glass
Still Image Works

Dynamisms series, 20002002
Dynamisms, like the Illuminated Averages series, pay homage to Futurist theories of artistic representation of movement in a single still graphic image (Richard Gursin, Jim
Campbell and the Illuminated Average of Meditation).
Dynamism of a Cow
45.7 x 61 cm
Averaged over 2 minutes
Duratrans, light box
Dynamism of a Cyclist after Umberto Boccioni
45.7 x 61 cm
Averaged over 90 seconds
Illuminated Averages series, 20002001
Illuminated Averages are a series of works in which each
still image is created by averaging all of the frames of a moving sequence.
Illuminated Average #1: Hitchcocks Psycho
45.7 x 76.2 cm
Averaged over 1 hour 50 minutes (entire film)
Illuminated Average #3: Welles Citizen Kane Breakfast
Table Sequence
45.7 x 76.2 cm
Averaged over 1 hour 50 minutes (entire film)
Illuminated Average #2: Bachs Suite for Cello #2
45.7 x 61 cm
Averaged over 3 minutes
Prelude performed by Monica Scott
This work consists of two memories. The first memory is

of the sound level of Alfred Hitchcocks film Psycho. The
second memory is of the brightness of the image during
the same film. These two memories are synchronized and
used to change the brightness of two light bulbs. Loud scenes are bright on the left-hand bulb and dark scenes are
dark on the right-hand bulb.
90
Este catlogo ha sido editado

en ocasin de la exposicin
Tiempo esttico.
Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico,
realizada en el Espacio Fundacin Telefnica
entre julio y octubre de 2011.
Julia Zurueta
Coordinacin
Fabin Muggeri
Diseo y produccin grfica
Pablo Lasansky
Fotografas de sala y montaje
Alicia Di Stasio / Mario Valledor

Correccin espaol e ingls
Gunner & Asociados

Traduccin al ingls
Arenales 1540 c1061aar

Buenos Aires, Argentina (54-11) 4333-1300/1
Espaciofundacion.ar@telefonica.com
www.fundacion.telefonica.com.ar
92
93
Este catlogo se termin de imprimir en

noviembre de 2010
en Casano Grfica S.A.,
Ministro Brin 3932, Remedios de Escalada,
Buenos Aires, Argentina
94
95

Jim Campbell Tiempo Estatico

Cargado por

Información del documento

Derechos de autor

Formatos disponibles

Compartir este documento

Compartir o incrustar documentos

Opciones para compartir

¿Le pareció útil este documento?

¿Este contenido es inapropiado?

Copyright:

Formatos disponibles

Jim Campbell Tiempo Estatico

Cargado por

Copyright:

Formatos disponibles

Tiempo esttico.

Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

20 aos de arte electrnico

Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

Luis Blasco Bosqued

Jos Luis Rodrguez Zarco

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Directora Fundacin Telefnica

Presidente del Consejo de Admnistracin de Telefnica de Argentina

Mirar para ver mirando, Richard Shiff

Biografa del artista

Coordinacin general EFT

Percepciones fugitivas, Eduardo A. Russo

Presentacin, Luis Blasco Bosqued

Asistente de produccin EFT

Diseo de montaje EFT

Estudio Bccar Varela

Asistente tcnico EFT

Craig Lawrence Dorety

Tiempo esttico : Jim Campbell 20 aos de arte electrnico / con

1. Arte. I. Russo, Eduardo, colab. II. Shiff, Richard, colab.

Fecha de catalogacin: 1/11/2011

Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

Luis Blasco Bosqued

Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

Letter to a Suicide, 1985

Shock Treatment, 1988

Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

Fantasmas del tiempo que pasa

Recuerdos de una luz hecha cuerpo

Trabajar el tiempo para llegar a ver

Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

Mirar para ver mirando*

Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

Experiments in Touching Color, 1999

Muestre sus recursos

Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

transforma en arte cuando pone de relieve lo borroso ubicado en

Al pedirle que explicara con mayor detalle su observacin, Campbell respondi:

Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

Campbell, Jim, Delusions of Dialogue, op. cit.

Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

Obras de baja resolucin

Exploded View (Commuters)

Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

Fundamental Interval Commuters #2

En esta serie de obras Campbell rene medios fotogrficos

Aqu, ms que la pantalla de difusin, es el panel LED lo que

Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

Church on 5th Avenue

Reconstruction 7 (Serie Reconstruction, 2002-2009)

Una matriz de 32 x 24 (768) pxeles constituida por LED

En estas obras, una pantalla de difusin de resina est

Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

Motion & Rest #5 (Serie Motion & Rest, 2001-2002)

Tiempo esttico. Jim Campbell: 20 aos de arte electrnico

A Fire, a Freeway and a Walk

Cuarenta y dos pxeles rodean el permetro de un cuadro

Una matriz de 8 x 11 pxeles constituida por LED RGB