Quantizing Effects: The Liminal Art of Jim Campbell
January 17 – June 3, 2007
Organized by SITE Sante Fe in collaboration with MATRIX/University of California, Berkeley
and Pacific Film Archive

Tacoma, Wash. (October 31, 2006)— The Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art presents Quantizing Effects: The Liminal Art of Jim Campbell, an exhibition comprised of 38 interactive multi-media works created between 1993 and 2003. The exhibition opens at the Museum of Glass, one of only four venues nationwide for this major exhibition, on January 17, 2007.

Jim Campbell is widely considered one of the most intriguing artists working with new media today. An engineer, inventor and artist, he utilizes custom-made electronics to explore the relationship between technology and human perception. ‘Liminal” describes a sensory threshold, a place where observations are barely perceivable and often create a physiological or psychological response. Cambell’s works act as optical filters that suppress extraneous information and leave the viewer to elicit meaningful personal associations.

Campbell holds many patents in video imaging processing. He develops most of the technologies featured in his works, utilizing contemporary technologies—from LED screens to touch-sensitive computers—to transmit images. “My goal has been to move away from the conventional computer screen ‘button pushing’ interface and instead to move towards creating works that have a more intuitive level of interaction,” states Campbell. “I have tried to create installations that are less about a viewer dominating a work and more about viewers participating in the developing personality of a work.”

Campbell possesses both a technical background in engineering and an artistic background in filmmaking. “My work has been very influenced by science. Using technological tools and scientific models as metaphors for memory and illusion, my work seeks to interpret, represent and mirror psychological states and processes, and their breakdown. Time and memory, individual and collective, electronic and real, are the elements of my work.”

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

About the Artist:
Born in Chicago in 1956, Campbell lives and works in San Francisco. In 1978, he earned Bachelor of Science degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute for Technology where he experimented with video art. He began fusing the disciplines of art and science in 1988 and has shown his work internationally and throughout North America in institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Carpenter Center, Harvard University; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Power Plan, Toronto; the International Center for Photography, New York; and the Nagoya City Art Museum, Nagoya, Japan. His work is included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California at Berkeley; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1992 he created one of the first permanent public interactive video artworks in the U.S. in Phoenix, Arizona.