San Francisco-based artist Jim Campbell is widely known to be one of the most extraordinary and significant artists working with new media. His sculptural installations have pioneered new ways of transmitting images, from light emitting diode (LED) screens to touch-sensitive computers. He is unique among artists working with digital media in that he uses technology in the service of profound humanism. A recurring theme in his work is Heisenberg's "Uncertainty Principle" as it relates to human desire. In many of his works, Campbell suggests that the closer one gets to that which s/he pursues, the more intangible it becomes.

Campbell uses custom-made electronics to explore the relationship between information and knowledge, examining how we translate and understand the data that we receive. His work is deeply immersed in new technologies of software, electronic components, programming languages, the physics of waveform and light, transmission, and frequency. He is fascinated by the very nature of perception. While his works are technologically complicated, the concepts are shared human concerns such as memory, intimate familial relationships, and our bodies. For instance, in Photo of my Mother a photograph of the artist's mother slowly transforms from foggy to clear at rate of artist's breath as digitally recorded for one hour, as though he is breathing on the glass in front of the photograph. In Portrait of My Father a photograph of his father is visible for an instant and then disappears.

That process happens over and over at the rate of artist's heartbeat, which was recorded over an 8-hour period one night. In Ambiguous Icon #5, Running/falling a matrix of 768 pixels made out of red LEDs shows a figure running and falling.

The Knoxville Museum of Art recently acquired a significant work by Campbell titled Reconstruction #4, 2005. The museum's new piece consists of a grid of 192 white LED's that flicker on and off in a pattern that creates a moving image. To give you some perspective, your computer screen has well over a million pixels making up the image you see. 192 pixels comprise such low resolution that you should not be able to understand the imagery you see at all. However your brain fills in the gaps of information and produces meaning. Jim is interested in how or why we understand the things we understand.

Jim Campbell was born 1956 in Chicago and in 1978 received degrees in mathematics and engineering from MIT, Cambridge, MA. He holds many patents in video image processing. He transitioned from filmmaking to interactive video installations in the mid 1980s. His custom electronic sculptures and installations have made him a leading figure in the use of computer technology as an art form.

Quantizing Effects: The Liminal Art of Jim Campbell is organized by SITE Santa Fe in collaboration with the MATRIX Program of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.