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Interview with Jim Campbell

by Richard Whittaker 

In August of 1998 Jim Campbell was given a retrospective show at the SanJose Museum of Art. His work has been shown internationally and is in
included in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art in San
Francisco.  Campbell received undergraduate degrees from M.I.T. in
mathematics and electrical engineering. He divides his time between his art
work and  work as an electrical engineer specializing in cutting edge digital
technology.

JC: I've always felt that even using the word "interactivity" with computers was completely wrong. I mean "interactivity" historically has always meant a mutual, reciprocal thing that happens. Whereas the way I see it, computers are really about control. You are controlling them to do something. The Heisenberg pieces bring up those issues in kind of direct ways: the more you want to see something, the more you're trying to control the situation and the less you control it, and the less you are able to see.     For instance, with the bed piece (untitled for Heisenberg), as you walk toward the bed, with the image getting closer, you don't start to see the pores of the skin. You see the pixels. When you're far away you 
see these two lovers but as you approach, you can't make it out anymore. The Buddha is the same way. From a distance you can see the statue of the Buddha, but as you approach, only the shadow is left. "What are you seeing? Both refer to Heisenberg's principle. You know it?

works: You can't know both the speed and the location of a subatomic particle at any one time.

JC: Right, but it goes further than that. It says that if you even try 
to measure something at all, you affect it.

works: Yes. A very counter-intuitive principle, isn't it?

JC: Yes, but there are ways of talking about little parts of it that 
aren't counter-intuitive. For example, if you try to measure an electron 
really closely you have to put a lot of light on it and light has 
energy, and so you're affecting it. That's one way to talk about it. 

     The non-intuitive notion of Heisenberg's principle is that the 
universe is probabilistic. This means that not only are you unable to 
measure the position of the electron accurately, but that it does not 
exist accurately. That, I agree, is totally counter-intuitive.

      Those two pieces were about taking the notions of Heisenberg and 
this desire we have to measure things, to observe things. And they also 
are exploring how that fits into some questions about what interactivity 
means with regard to computers. 

works: On this question of interactivity and computers, I see I'm 
reluctant to embrace the idea that what happens between a computer and 
me is "interactivity" in some essential sense.

JC: That's exactly what I'm talking about. Maybe it's just a semantic 
thing but I think it's more than that because using that word brings up 
certain notions. Actually, for me it does two things: it also takes away 
from the old meaning of interactivity. I mean, in the other way, which is 
kind of interesting, I would regard my relationship with my computer 
to be a control relationship. So if I use the word "interactivity" 
between me and my computer that's one thing, and if I also use the word 
for me and you, then it changes everything. 
     I do think I can interact with a cat. That's a feeling I have. But 
not with an ant, for example. With a cat I feel like there is 
interaction, a mutual thing going on. 

works: Yes, that's interesting, and if you were on LSD maybe you could 
interact with the ant too.

JC: [laughs.]

works: I say that in jest but I do have the experience, and I imagine 
others do also, of having isolated moments in a particular 
state of mind where I feel a real relationship with a bee, for instance in the
sense that we're both living beings.  

JC: Right. But let's say, "living beings", that would be a cut-off.

works: I revisited your retrospective (San Jose Museum of Art 1998) alone to spend a little more time with it. I was standing back where I could see your "Memory Pieces" and some other pieces all at the same time. After a while a very poignant and sad feeling came over me. These little electronic devices were all ticking away quietly in a white room. I felt them as relics of deep and human realities, just echoes in this empty white room with
wires attached. All that remained were these little memory machines. It made me feel sad. (A few examples for the reader:  Campbell's piece, "Portrait of My Father" is a small portrait of his father hanging on a wall with two wires running from the bottom of the 
frame down into a small metal box which controls what happens: the photograph of his father alternately fades from view and back into view to the rhythm of a heartbeat, which we understand to be that of his son, Jim Campbell. This is accomplished electronically. Campbell's "Photo of My Mother" is similarly designed but the photograph of his mother fades and comes into focus to the rhythm of his breathing. "I Have Never Read the Bible" is a piece in which a large old Webster's Dictionary is attached to the wall with wires running down from it into a small metal box. There is a small speaker installed into the Dictionary through which the bible is being whispered letter by letter. To accomplish this, Campbell recorded the twenty six letters of the alphabet in his own voice and then created a computer type program that would read and play back each word in the bible letter by letter. As Campbell recorded the letters of the alphabet, by chance music from Mozart Requiem was playing in the background. So each letter when it is read as part of the Bible, also is accompanied by the notes played in the background when it was first recorded. The result, played back, is haunting.) I was very touched by this.

JC: You think it was mostly the audible part?

works: That certainly had a lot to do with it. Part of the sadness that 
was evoked for me had to do with the absence of the evidence of human 
warmth and touch, the removed and abstracted quality of it all. I wonder 
if that is something of your intention, or is that just an accident of 
the objects themselves and my associations with them?

JC: A complicated question. I don't know if I can answer it. There is 
definitely an aspect of that in the relationship between the physical 
and technological manifestation of these human, or supposedly human 
memories. I do think there's a clash there that necessarily happens, but 
that I am also working with, for example with regard to the little 
aluminum, sterile, cold boxes and the wires and the glass, and the 
objects. 
     One of the things I've always said about interactivity is that the 
real interactivity that takes place in "interactive" works is between 
the viewer and himself, or herself. It's not between the viewer and the 
computer or the program.  
     So most of my work is like that but the memory works are not. Those 
are definitely personal. All of those memories have to do with me, even 
the collective ones like the Bible.
   

works: I'm curious about your piece called "Memory/Void," the one with 
the three video tubes reducing in size.

JC: It's similar to the five-monitor one(Memory/Recollection). It's 
three monitors in three jars which capture your image with a camera. 
Your image appears first on the largest CRT(cathode ray tube) and then 
slowly fades and moves to the smaller jars and fades away altogether. 
The third and smallest jar is sort of buried in ashes, the last screen 
on which you appear. 

works: A powerful piece, I thought. What was that piece for you?

JC: That's a very old piece. I have a kind of love/hate relationship 
with it. I think my work has become almost too formal and conceptualized 
such that I would never do another piece like that these days. Part of 
it feels like an art-school piece because there is some contrivance to 
it, putting ashes in, ashes representing time and decay. In other words, 
throwing a bunch of symbols together

works: But now you would move away from that. Would you call it heavy- 
handed?

JC: No. I would call it contrived. For me now, it's the idea of a work 
that is important. Not setting up a bunch of symbols around the idea. 
The distillation of that piece can be seen in the other piece, the one with five
monitors, no ashes, no jars, but your image is decaying just the same. 
It feels less "art-school." You know what I mean?  Doing something to 
evoke a response. I really try to stay away from that. And it's kind of 
easy for me to stay away from that because when I'm working on something I
get kind of excited about it. I don't want to finish with it and know where all the
meaning is. And I'm really excited when I first plug it in to see what happens. I
don't know what is going to happen. 

works: There must be, when you succeed_ is "joy" too strong a word?

JC: If the opening isn't the next day, [laughs] No, it's true, because 
the process is so disjointed. There is some sort of creative process in 
figuring out what I want to do. Then there's an engineering process of 
doing it, that has nothing to do with the original creative process; it's 
implementation, and that takes months, although during that I get 
glimpses of what its going to look like, and usually these glimpses 
actually change what the end result will be quite a bit. 
     But, yes, there is joy. Particularly because the engineering aspect 
is mostly the labor of doing it. So it's nice to actually finish and go 
back to the original creative idea, since that whole intervening time 
I'm just focusing on mathematics. I have to be able to figure out how to 
do it in a mathematical way. That's what computers do. They crunch 
numbers. So any idea you want to manifest through computers has to be 
reduced to a mathematical form, which usually is not a process good for 
communication or creative expression. It's usually a reduction. 

works: You spoke of ideas, of trying to leave contrivance behind, and to 
put together a representation of an idea in a more pure way somehow and 
I wonder, what are some of the ideas that are most important to you?

JC: A good example maybe is the spinning nail with the camera on it. 
There are a couple of different ideas in that. The notion of what a 
frame of reference is. In fact, I revised the title of that piece to be, 
"Frames of Reference." Einstein obviously was very interested in that. 
That's where Relativity originally came from, that is, seeing something 
from a different frame of reference or perspective. 
     So this camera is moving. You could throw that camera and have it
swinging wildly_and the nail would always be perfect because it is nailed to
the board the camera is on. So no matter what the camera would show, the
nail would still maintain the same relative point of reference. 
     Originally I had a watch at the other end of the board; so it was a 
camera pointed at a watch on the board spinning. Well, one day the watch 
fell off. I had it mounted there with a nail, and I realized the nail 
worked just as well, even better. I saw I didn't need to "hit people 
over the head" with the watch.
    And I was very interested in the notion of something going that 
didn't have control of itself. Originally it was going to be part of two 
pieces. One of them would track you very closely, and so no matter where 
you were, you would see a picture of your face behind it. So it would be 
a very accurately controlled system. And the second piece would have 
been just the opposite. One that was not in control of what it was 
pointed at. So it would have been a simple dual piece that could be 
about will; I guess a computer, mechanized notion of will. 

works: I'm not sure I am following this. How do you make the  connection?

JC: It wants to track you. It wants to know where you are at all times. 
The other one has no control of what it is pointing at. 

works: So it has no "will," and the other one does?

JC: Yes. Not that it does. Rather, it is "will."

works: But what I want to do with that is make both parts a metaphor for 
the individual.  We have this wish to be in control but, in fact, if we 
are able to notice it, to a really great extent, we're not. 

JC: Right. Exactly. That is what I'm saying.  We just get kicked, and we 
respond to being kicked. 

works: what are some of the things you've thought most about?

JC: The lecture I gave at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1996 
and which you read. I spent probably six months preparing it, for a 
number of reasons. One being that I'm very nervous in front of large 
groups of people. It's the first time I'd really thought about what I 
was doing from a different perspective, from a perspective of okay, 
"what ties this all together? What is it that I'm really interested in 
doing?" 
     After six months of thinking about what I was doing and needing to 
verbalize it, well that was both good and bad. It clarified for me some 
of the things that were going on at an unconscious level, and another 
thing that happened, was that it made me become a little more rigorous in 
terms of actually doing a work. Now a work has to fit into certain ways 
of thinking for me.

works: When was it again that you took this time to think about your own 
work in this broad sense?

JC: 1995 and 96. It was about a one-year process of really laying it all 
down for myself. That was one of the major transitions that has occurred 
for me and some of the work that came out of that, for example, were the 
"Memory Works." I think those really came out of thinking about what I 
was doing, and why I was doing it.
      Before that, with specific works I was very focused, maybe even more 
so than now, and was creating something mostly from a psychological 
perspective. "How can this specific work, work in a psychological way?" 
That was what I was working with. I was never really anle to 
verbalizable it. There was really no way for me to talk about it except 
by showing the work or documentation.  
     So what I needed to do was to come up with this whole structure of 
the meaning of why I'm doing what I am doing. That was what was needed 
for a series of lectures and panels that started st the end of 94. 
     Here's a side point. Some people say that this lecture I spent all 
that time working on has nothing whatsoever to do with my work. [Laughs] 
Which is really fascinating to me. 

works: That's your paper on the question of interactivity in electronic 
art, right?

JC: Yes. It's called, "Delusions of Dialogue:Control and Choice in 
Interactive Art." 

works: Do you have an inkling why some people would say this has 
nothing to do with your work?

JC: I think maybe because, in a positive sense, it comes from the fact 
that my work is more psychologically based, and in some of the better 
work, more personally based. The text of the lecture is a very precise, 
logical kind of paper about the problems of interactivity. 
     When I gave the lecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 
the way I introduced it was to say "I'm going to talk about all the 
problems with interactivity in electronic art today and talk about why I 
think it's not there yet, why there really is not any interesting 
interactive art. And I'm going to use my own work as an example..." 
[laughs] So that was kind of an interesting perspective which was kind 
of a joke, but also not a joke.

works: It occurs to me that a concern with interactivity could easily be 
understood as indicating a concern with relationship. So, that's a 
rather personal thing: interaction, relationship. And to abstract it, one 
loses that personal feeling particularly if we're talking about a 
computer, and whether or not it's working. So, that's one thing. But I 
want to propose that this topic  relationship  is really of interest to 
you. What do you think?

JC: It's a good point, and probably a hard question to answer. It's 
probably why I do work. One of the reasons I do work, and I know this, 
is because anyway ten years ago this was true and hopefully not as much 
today  I'm not very good at communicating with people. I certainly grew 
up never feeling like I was able to express what I was feeling or 
thinking. And so that's completely why I got interested in the visual 
arts. I mean I know that. It was a need to express things I couldn't 
express any other way. Partially for my own psychological/neurotic/ 
whatever reasons. 
     So I think, "yes"  to answer your question. The works specifically do 
deal with notions of human interaction, and maybe issues  and I wouldn't 
even say this is on a conscious level, but if I analyze what I've done  
maybe issues that I have with intimacy and interaction and people and 
socializing and all the problems and issues that come up with me on 
interacting. 

works: Just as a personal aside, I find it very easy to relate with you. 
And find you very good at relating, myself. I suppose I might say you 
seem less an extrovert than introvert, so to speak. 

JC: Which I've never completely accepted about myself and I used to be 
ten times worse. 

works: would you say this has been a good direction? Moving away from 
that?

JC: I always look at the plus and the minus. There are still situations 
where maybe I'm with a group of people and I just don't say anything all 
evening long  zero words, literally. 
     What I have figured out, and what I tend to try to set up with 
regard to social situations, is really one-on-one situations. I haven't 
figured out how to deal with other situations.

works: So it's a challenge, and it's interesting that your work is 
obliging you, from time to time, to speak in front of groups. 

JC: Which I avoid constantly. I say "no" five out of six times. 

works: What happens on that sixth time?

JC: I hate it. I think it's exaggerated for me because, and I think I 
mentioned this to you before, both of my parents are handicapped. And so 
they both have been completely physically insecure their whole lives. 
They were handicapped in the forties and fifties and sixties when it 
wasn't accepted like it is today, and so they grew up, not as freaks, 
but definitely as people who were outcasts. 
     Somehow "inherited" is the wrong word, but somehow I definitely 
picked up that incredible physical notion of insecurity, and I think 
it's the reason it's really hard for me to speak in front of groups of 
people. And for example, I've never danced in my life, I've never been 
able to do physical things that were on display, I guess, like in groups 
of people. I don't know how the work fits into that.

works: Well, clearly your work moves you toward more engagement in the 
world. You can't get out of it totally, I mean, because you're doing 
this work. You're dragged into more interaction. It seems a beneficial 
thing.

JC: For the work?

works: For you. For your work. I mean it would only be beneficial to 
someone who had a sense of the possibility of growth. It seems to me 
that it might not be too much of an exaggeration to say that for 
artists, as a group, there's something in the impulse to create that 
comes from a sense of greater possibilities. And so, it's an interesting 
thing listening to you, that one of the results of your work is that 
you're sort of dragged into more contact with that bigger world, so to 
speak. 
     And it's interesting to ponder that in the context of being reared 
by two handicapped parents. It's easy for me to imagine that must give you
many insights others wouldn't have.

JC:  I think maybe "insight" is the wrong word.  I think on one end it
has given me at times the ability to empathise and on the other end
it has made me a little more self-conscious than I might otherwise have been.
      One of the works I've done actually deals with the notion of being 
handicapped in a subtle way. Do you remember the one called "digital 
watch"?  Where it takes your body and moves it in staccato movement, 
once per second? It's often actually how handicapped people move, 
certainly handicapped people have this more than the rest of us.  
     Because of its delay, and because of its staccato movement, one of 
the effects that this piece has, one of the things this piece makes you 
feel, I think, is that you don't have control of your body. Because you 
move and your image isn't moving like you're moving. It takes the 
immediate feedback away. It takes the feeling you have control over your 
body away. That was definitely not on my mind when I did that piece. I 
just thought that was an interesting insight I had after I did it. 
     "Hallucination", the fire one, was completely consciously about my 
brother who was schizophrenic. 

works: Yes, you'd told me about that. My father's brother committed 
suicide. He had been diagnosed as having "dementia praecox" which they 
called it before the term "schizophrenia" had been invented. And this 
came down in our family it certainly affected me It was a dark sort of 
thing, unacknowledged, and which no one in the family

JC: knew how to deal with?

works: Right. No one knew how to deal with it. And somehow I inherited 
some very dark thing about that. My father died about four years ago and 
I found some letters written by his older brother, the one who committed 
suicide. Very upsetting material. Looking back on it I feel that this 
poor young man was simply in an environment where a certain kind of
understanding was not available to him at all. If he'd been in the right
environment he might have pulled through, even become extraordinary, and
yet no one had a clue about that. Very distressing. I don't know if any of that
would apply but just in general I know this is terribly difficult stuff. 

JC: Oh yes. I think I have a copy of a film I spent two years making about that. I will give you a copy of that("Letter to a Suicide"). Generally I haven't shown It to people in the lasteight or nine years but since it's relevant      The whole reason I started doingelectronic interactive installation work was because I needed to give up film-making. After I'd made that film, and I'd been making videos and film for about six years at that point, when I finished doing that film about my brother there was no place for me to go. I am not a director. I don't have a "director" personality. And there was no other place for me to go with personal films so I just gave it up. I stopped doing art for three years, I guess. And then the first video(electronic) things I did were on a similar theme. Three mental illness works in 1988.      Just trying to think about where I am these days, and where I've been, I see that one of the interesting cycles that happens for me is "personal vs. impersonal" in terms of the content of my work. It's definitely a cyclical thing. Part of the reason I gave up film-making and began doing interactivework  and it wasn't called interactive at the time, it was just called mediainstallation work  was that it was a way of doing something that was more conceptual, and more "academic" is the wrong word, because those workscertainly aren't academic but they weren't personal in any way. I mean no onewould ever get that "Hallucination" is about my brother being mentally ill, in a million years if you don't know the history behind it. And so it was a way for me to change the direction of the content of my work to being not personal. 
     So that lasted too long, I think. And I started feeling uncomfortable, feeling that the work had no meaning to me anymore. That's about the time I started doing the "Memory Works," like the two about my parents, and some of the other ones, they have personal 
content, in fact they're all personal although they don't all seem that way.  And now I'm going back away from that again. It's somehow out of my control.

works: Interesting just to see that, this unconscious action at work. I've had a
few experiences myself where I've done a painting or something, and a year
later, or six months later I see so clearly why I did that painting, it's almost a
shock. It is a shock, in fact, a shock to see how transparent the meaning is,
and how I was not at all conscious of that meaning at the time. The shock is
really to see that there is such a thing as the unconscious, and that it is an
active force. To really see irrefutable evidence. And then to suddenly know
that.

JC: I think the two other pieces that have definitely a bizarre 
unconscious relationship to me are the portraits of my parents, 
(Portrait of my Mother, Portrait of My Father) because both of my 
parents have been very ill in the hospital at different times. 
     My mother is 85 and she is doing great right now, but she was in 
the hospital for 8 weeks for one of those eternal pneumonia things that 
just wouldn't go away. And she also had that infection you pick up from 
just being in the hospital.
     My father has heart problems. He's always had heart problems. And I 
was completely unaware of that when I made these two pieces, where my 
mother's image is modulated by my breath and my father's image is 
modulated by my heartbeat. I was just completely unaware of that. It's 
very strange.

works: That's very striking. It makes me want to just be quiet for a 
little bit. There is something just so profound about that.

JC: Yes. I agree. Well, I have to say, I've always considered both the 
positive and the negative aspects of those works in that, which one 
reviewer actually completely got, which is that my existence is 
completely at their expense. 

works: As with every son and daughter? 

JC: Yes. I know when I did the one of my father that I saw it as a very  
 it's a very pulsing one, as opposed to the one of my mother, which is 
slow. The opening was the next day and of course I was literally up all 
night. When I finished it, I thought the piece was too violent to show. 
I decided I wasn't going to show it. A friend of mine came over and it 
was the usual kind of pre-opening frenzy, and I remember I just burst 
into tears. 
     I almost never cry about my work or what I'm doing. And she said, 
"What are you talking about? It's not violent at all!" But I saw it as 
violent just because of that pulsing movement. Plus, it's also about me 
erasing both my mother and father, and bringing them back.

works: That is one of the things I think is so profoundly attracting in 
art. I mean, in potential. That it is truly an avenue at times to the 
very deep things, the very deep places in myself, places where in a way 
we're sort of lost, we don't know our way around. Some feel a draw 
towards these hidden places, covered over places, maybe for the purpose 
of understanding more. The concern I'm articulating is, I suppose, 
called "romantic" and I reject that if, in a sense such a label is meant 
to invalidate its meaning or worth.

JC: I think the way I've thought about that in similar terms is that  
and I know it's true of me, particularly the film I made, but other 
stuff also  it's a therapeutic process. It allows me to work out 
something, to focus on it that much, and to understand something about it, to
create a work about it. And  then 

works: And then, what happens if something is worked out? Of course, 
this is putting it in too general a way I guess 

JC: That's what I mean. Nothing is ever worked out. 

works: But wouldn't you say that something changes?

JC: Oh yes. The best example for me is spending two years on the film on 
my brother. I mean I know that was a really difficult thing for me to 
do, to spend so much time focusing on it. And very self-indulgent, but 
it was very therapeutic. I think it made me understand some things and 
accept some things that otherwise I think I may never have thought about 
or focused on in such depth. To me that's the easiest example. The other 
stuff isn't as clear but I think it's there. But it's harder to be specific about it.
But again, obviously it didn't get rid of any issues. It has clarified some things.
I mean that's how I look at therapy. I don't expect some big revelation one
week. Okay, I'm done! [Laughs] 

works: I guess I'm wanting to get a little more information into this 
conversation about your background. I think it might be interesting.
What were your interests when you were leaving high school?

JC: I think I was your typical person leaving high school. I don't think 
I knew what I wanted to do. What I thought I wanted to do, was what I 
thought I should want to do. 
     In terms of art, I think the only thing that was interesting was a 
film class which was part of an english class, part of an experimental 
semester. Other than that I was planning on becoming an engineer, which 
I did. 
     My dad actually worked at a tv station. He was a television 
engineer. And I think I assumed I would go in that direction. I didn't 
feel real strongly about that and I still don't. I feel much stronger 
about art than engineering. And I was good at mathematics and science 
and thinking about things in that direction. Not so good in literature. 
     I went to M.I.T. and got a degree in mathematics and then in 
electrical engineering, and then got out and spent three years repairing 
tv's. In a lot of ways that was very good because I'm the only engineer 
I've ever known in this field who has that kind of real experience. The 
kind of engineering I ended up doing and still do, is on video, HDTV 
kind of equipment. So that experience has been incredibly useful. 
     Most engineers only know things from the point of view of an 
engineer, not from the point of view of the user. I've actually been 
with the same company for 16 years now. Hardly ever full-time, but 
sometimes for short periods. And they've been willing to deal with this. 
The way things come up with art, typically I give them a week 
notice. So basically, they've been very open for me to do whatever I 
need to do for the art stuff. 
     Did I mention that I've kept this life completely separate? I even 
have a different name. I go by "Jack." So for the first time in fifteen 
years the people who I do engineering with actually came to the show in 
San Jose last August and saw what I did with the rest of my life. That 
was really a weird experience. [Laughs]
     Some of them really enjoyed it. Some of them, I felt, were 
threatened by it. Most of them got at least some of it. The more conceptual
works some of them didn't get.
     It was just fascinating to have my two worlds collide. People who 
knew me as Jim and people who know me as Jack all in the same room.