Jim Campbell
Holding more than a dozen patents in the field of video image processing, internationally renowned electronic artist Jim Campbell initially discovered his medium of choice through engineering rather than formal art training. As a designer of integrated circuitry in Silicon Valley, he brought a high level of specialist knowledge to the field of interactive media art, allowing him to redefine the technological parameters as they pertained to his work. For Campbell, this intense involvement in the technological aspects of the medium has ensured that it remained “just a tool,” allowing him to explore the more poetic and less mathematical elements of his own perceptual experience.
Over the last two decades, Campbell’s work has primarily focused on the process of transforming empirical information into digital data, with specific concentration on the notions of time and memory, an aspect all the more relevant as subjective experience becomes increasingly intertwined with the presence of machines. Described as a “technocrat with an artist’s soul,” Campbell’s work operates on an intensely personal and intimate level despite its complexity, an achievement that illustrates the artist’s commitment to representing the subjective rather than simply demonstrating the innovative.