Far Away Up Close

Mira Dontcheva   Jim Campbell

    jcat signjimcampbell.tv

Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Stanford University April 24, 2009

I’ll discuss the progression that my work has taken over the last 20 years and how my explorations have gone from creating interactive environments to creating informationally minimal perceptual experiences.  I’ll show video examples of both my earlier work which used complex algorithms to control a viewer’s experience and my recent work which looks at drastically reduced systems that rely much more on the viewer’s imagination and memory associations.   How and what kind of meaning can be expressed with very small amounts of visual information?  Can an event be reduced to an essential minimum and still have meaning? 

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Jim Campbell was born in Chicago in 1956 and lives in San Francisco. He received 2 Bachelor of Science Degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from MIT in 1978.  His work has been shown internationally and throughout North America in institutions such as the Whitney Museum of Art,  San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Carpenter Center, Harvard University; The International Center for Photography, New York, and the Intercommunication Center in Tokyo.  His electronic art work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the University Art Museum at Berkeley.  In 1992 he created one of the first permanent public interactive video artworks in the United States in Phoenix, Arizona.  He has lectured on interactive media art at many Institutions throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in NY.  He has received many grants and awards including a Rockefeller Grant in Multimedia, three Langlois Foundation Grants, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. As an engineer he holds almost twenty patents in the field of video image processing.

View this talk on line at CS547 on Stanford OnLine or using this video link.

Titles and abstracts for previous years are available by year and by speaker.