OK, I will admit that when I first heard the title of our newest exhibition, it wasn’t all that meaningful to me. I wasn’t sure what to expect in a show called Quantizing Effects: The Liminal Art of Jim Campbell. So I turned to Google and Wikipedia and found that the title could not be more fitting.

Early on, I had the opportunity to see still images of Jim Campbell’s work, but a photo of artwork that incorporates moving images never really does it justice. After meeting the artist and hearing him talk about the work, I understood the photos much better, but seeing the exhibition was the real eye-opener. I find Campbell’s work really intriguing; much of it deals with perception and boiling down a visual image to its bare essentials—putting the work right on the edge of what you or I can perceive. And I have tremendous respect for him in that he builds the custom electronics that power most of his pieces; he is responsible for both the idea and its execution.

Quantizing is clearly a key word in the title of the show, and despite acing my “physics for poets” class in college many years ago, I didn’t have a clear sense of what it meant. Wikipedia says, “Quantization is the procedure of constraining something to a discrete set of values…” For instance, light coming through the lens of a camera can be an infinite number of colors, but there’s a limit to the number of colors your digital camera can capture. So when you take a digital photo, the camera is quantizing the image information—constraining the infinite number of colors to a predefined set of values, and throwing out all the other information. Since a typical digital camera can save over 16 million colors, there’s plenty of image information for a photo to look realistic.

Video of Running Falling Cut

Quantizing is exactly what Jim Campbell is doing in his artwork. For Instance, Running Falling Cut takes video and greatly reduces the number of pixels used to display it, reduces the millions of colors to a handful (actually there is only one color of light bulb, but it has a few possible states of brightness). The exhibition shows the effects of greatly quantizing image information; Campbell reduces images to their essence and takes them to the edge between visual noise and perceptibility. That edge, is what the word liminal is all about.

Liminal is an obscure word, and when I heard it in the title of this show, I supposed if something could be subliminal then maybe something could also be just liminal. Merriam-Webster Online defines liminal as “of or relating to a threshold” and “barely perceptible.” Both definitions fit Jim Campbell’s work perfectly. He is pushing toward the threshold of perceptibility. I had a chance to talk with Campbell last year, and one of the things he said is that while he could strip away a certain amount of information from a still image and hit this threshold, if he introduced movement—video rather than photo–he could strip away even more.

Video of a Work in the Ambiguous Icon Series

Can you perceive what the subject of the original video may have been? See the answer…

Campbell’s work reminds me that computers and electronics are all around us, from PCs and phones, to gas pumps and even some of my children’s toys. It challenges me to think about what’s lost in the translation from analog (with infinite possibilities) to digital (with limited possibilities). Now that our digital world includes more and more possibilities, there’s a move by many hardware and software developers to simplify, to remove features and to quantize the options to smaller sets. Quantizing Effects reminds me how beautiful, revealing and interesting it can be to look at the world, both analog and digital, pared down to its essentials.

You gotta come out and see this show, photos and even video don’t compare with seeing the work in the gallery…

What do you think of Campbell’s work? What does it make you think of? Toss in your two cents below.

For more:
Our exhibition page on Quantizing Effects
Wikipedia’s Quantization and Quantization (image processing)