Jim Campbell
Jim Campbell is a Chicago born San Francisco based artist whose work primarily focuses on LED light installations. Although the reading does not go into much detail about Jim Campbell, what got my attention was that he was one of the few artist to have his work displayed in a museum in a time when museums were not paying much attention to digital art and electronic art. Shortly after doing some research I discovered his portfolio and was amazed to see works such as Scattered Light.
Scattered Light(2010) is composed of about 2000 LEDs which are encased in light bulbs, this public piece is roughly 20 feet high, 16 feet wide, and 80 feet long making the largest and most expensive piece that he has ever made. The light bulb are programmed in such a way that when viewed at a large distance and at a certain angle, they show a low resolution video of commuters in Grand Central Station. Viewing this from any other place just shows scattered light.
At an age when everything seems to be about high resolution, this work makes me wonder just how much information we can extrapolate from little information. It is exciting to see how he is using high-tech(LEDs) to portray something that resembles low-tech but at the same time it seems some what counter intuitive.
r a d i o q u a l i a
As a CS student I spend a large amount of time seeing other people’s code. This helps me with my work and also helps others. This approach is similar to what open source advocates do with their work. Naturally when the reading dedicated a section to open source I gravitated to that section. But what really grabbed my attention was r a d i o q u a l i a’s Free Radio Linux(2002-2004). Adam Hyde and Honor Hanger formed r a d i o q u a l i a in 1998 with the primary focus to create radio and sound art. The main interest of r a d i o q u a l i a is to use new broadcasting technologies to create artistic forms and use sound to display these ideas and information. This can readily be observed in the work Radio Astronomy(2004-present).
Radio Astronomy allows listeners to experience astronomical space by way of sound. This is possible by using radio technology that converts data that has been collected by radio telescopes into sound. This sound is then transmitted online and on FM radio. It is fascinating to me that the sounds we listen from Radio Astronomy come from millions of miles from where we sit. This project gives great insight into the chaos and awe of the cosmos because it gives the listener a way to experience it.
What interests me in this project is the idea of converting data into other types of data that can be consumed more easily by people, such as sound. This makes me wonder what else can be changed and experienced in a completely new way.This provides us to experience something in a uniquely different way that might give us a better understanding of it, such as the cosmos.