Jim Campbell comes to Auckland

In October this year the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki will present the hugely successful exhibition entitled Light Show, bringing some of the most respect international light artist working today to New Zealand. Of special interest to me is the inclusion of Jim Campell. I have been following his work for several years now and he is one of those artist who has inspired me to push my work into new territories.

His works straddle the cusp of art and technology, comprehension and emotion. After the suicide of his brother, who had struggled with schizophrenia for years, Campbell produced Letter to a suicide in 1985, a 30 minute video of Campbell and his parents addressing his brother a year after his death. That video would be his first and last and since then he has been investigating human emotional states, perception and memory through the abstraction of light and the diffusion of pixels into a 'low definition' unit which express themslves through light, grids, objects, motion and metaphors.

http://youtu.be/-JsLgypYqCM

In 2012, Jim was presented with the 13th Annual Bay Area Treasure Award by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In celebration of this honor, SFMOMA created [this] short film Jim Campbell: Transmitted in Light about his practice.

Retrieved from: http://www.jimcampbell.tv/news/

Cover image: Grand Central Station 2 –2009

pattern recognition :: Marshall McLuhan

“... You cannot cope with vast amounts of information in the old fragmentary classified patterns. You tend to go looking for mythic and structural forms in order to manage such complex data, moving at very high speeds, so the electric engineers often speak of pattern recognition as a normal need of people processing data electrically and by computers and so on – a need for pattern recognition.”

McLuhan, M. (1968) Marshall McLuhan Speaks, Centennial 2011: Pattern recognition [Video file]. Retrieved from: http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/interview/1965-the-future-of-man-in-the-electric-age/

" ...what now matters most is not the production of new content but its retrieval in intelligible patterns through acts of reframing, reiterating, and documenting."

Joselit, D. (2013). After Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (p. 55-56)

“We see and comprehend things as patterns, as meaningful events, because of the way our brains operate and they are made for the interpretation of a certain type of information, a certain type of world.”

Donath, J (2007). The imperfect observer: Mind, machines and materialism in the 21st century. MIT Media Lab. Retrieved from http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/Donath/TheImperfectObserver.pdf (p. 10)

"Personal experience is frequently rooted in collective and practical activities whose nature is stable, coherent, and patterned, although constantly, if minutely, in flux."

Coleman, G. (2013). Coding Freedom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (p. 27)

“...participants can discern the relative complexity and orderliness of paintings or patterns after only a single glance afforded by a 50 msec [millisecond] exposure...”

Cupchik, G. (2011). The Digitized Self in the Internet Age. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 5(4) 318–328. (p. 321)

"The analysis of such massive data sets is an important and challenging task, since researchers and analysts are interested in patterns in the data, including associations, correlations or exceptions."

Keim, D. A., Schneidewind, J., Sips, M. ( 2006). Scalable Pixel-based Visual Interfaces: Challenges and Solutions. Retrieved from: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~msips/papers/scalable_pixel_exploration.pdf (Introduction)

Cover image: Still image from video interview, Old versus new assumptions (1960). Marshall McLuhan Speaks Centennial 2011. Retrieved from http://marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/electric-age/1960-old-versus-new-assumptions.php

Note: Apologies to Henri Dauman for posting a previous cover image with out his permission. Henri Dauman's career as a feature photographer for Life Magazine has seen him capture some of the most important cultural, political and iconic personalities of the 20th century. He is a master photographer with a unique eye for capturing those decisive moments which defined history. For a better insight into his work visit his web site at http://daumanpictures.com/.

experiments in motion :

abandoned technologies : a lonely construct acts as a sensor, receiving inputs from an invisible source, air and wind activate its function . do these unseen forces intervene? if so, in what? are we complicit? what do we do with the things we leave behind? the things we have ignored? the objects which have been infected, lost their function? ( # )

a critical self analysis of process, intent and outcomes ...

Capturing images from the interface intrigued me and the possibilities that came from those investigations led me to think more about digital corruption/debris and the loss of clarity and intent; of the role of the artist as voyeur and documenter/observer and the possibilities that the screen provides, to not only extend and alter reality, but to also act as a catalyst for dissent and a vehicle for transporting change. // These moving images serve as a platform for further explorations into the interface and the unseen. They require further inquiry and they raise more questions than providing any tangible answers. The space that resides between intent and action, code and cortex is complex and within there lies a mass of unknown and untested possibilities which pass us by without a register or a trace.

preliminary research ::

A Scalable Image Processing Framework for Gigapixel Mars and Other Celestial Body Images, Mark W. Powell, Ryan A. Rossi† and Khawaja Shams, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, {Mark.W.Powell, Ryan.A.Rossi, Khawaja.S.Shams}@ jpl.nasa.gov : http://ryanrossi.com/papers/SIPF-Mars-JPL-IEEE.pdf ( | )

Scalable Pixel-based Visual Interfaces: Challenges and Solutions. Mike Sips, J¨orn Schneidewind, Daniel A. Keim1, Heidrun Schumann2 1{sips,schneide,keim}@dbvis.inf.uni-konstanz.de, University of Konstanz 2 schumann@informatik.uni-rostock.de, University of Rostock . Germany https://kops.ub.uni-konstanz.de/xmlui/bitstream/handle/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-opus-69112/Scalable_Pixel_based_Visual_Interfaces.pdf?sequence=1

IDL Reference Guide: IDL Direct Graphics Devices http://northstar-www.dartmouth.edu/doc/idl/html_6.2/Devices_with_Scalable_Pixels.html

Toolglass and Magic Lenses: The See Through Interface – Eric A. Bier, Maureen C. Stone, Ken Pier, William Buxton†, Tony D. DeRose‡, Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304 †University of Toronto, ‡University of Washington : http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=166126

Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM). / CHI '95 Proceedings : http://www.sigchi.org/chi95/proceedings/top.html