Electronic time: the memory machines of Jim Campbell

In the age of computer the universal of memory has acquired an increasingly stout association with the notion of rule Computer memory is what we intentionally store, something we amp up make more powerful and display to create data bases, which are seen in make go round as essential and infinite realms of information. Human memory is now commonly discussed in terminuss of the computer metaphor, with words like storage and retrieval, and increasingly seen as that which can be harnessed, reconfigured, sp up and expanded.

Yet the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of memory-as-storage works in tension with the fleeting aspects of the live, transmitted image, at one time instant but then ungraspable and gone We repeatedly experience memory as something that is transitory, something that has to be searched for, however which also can appear when we least wait for it. Memory is resistant to our ascendency both arbitrary and random. It is possible that the fascination with computer memory is a reaction to the ways in which we experience our memory as in like manner unlike the supposedly all-knowable data base.

Of all the work being produc in contemporary media arts, the electronic installations of Jim Campbell greatest in quantity directly address this tension, or paradox, in the way we understand memory in an electronic age. Campbell has stages in electronic engineering and mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and lives and works in San Francisco. His work has been shown internationally, and in North America at the San Francisco Museum of novel Art, the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, the International Center for Photography, and greatest in quantity recently in a solo exhibition at the Art Center corporation of Design in Pasadena. He is showed by the Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, and is generally showing a new work at the first InterCommunication Center Biennale in Tokyo.

Campbell's work nears both the fleeting nature of memory and its haunting neighborhood These works are often elusive and seductive, drawing us in solitary to confront our desire to diocese In their explorations of the relationship of the electronic to remembrance, interactivity and voyeurism, they ask us in many ways to experience and then reconsider our connections to the electronic. These works are discrete devices that invite us to examine the small details of and memory in, the trices contained within them. if nothing other Campbell's machines undermine our preconceptions about the electronic in that they have the appearance to have an unconscious.

Time Passing

The measurement of time permeates this work, in ways that demonstrate one as well as the other the aesthetics of the numeric marking of time as well as its fluid quality. Here the digital and the analog function as conceptual frameworks for time. In "Digital Watch" (1991) a large monitor displays the image of a pouch watch face. As viewers approach the monitor they diocese themselves in two worlds. Outside the circular watch face the monitor acts as a mirror of the surrounding space; at the same time inside the dial face, still images of viewers pass from one side a five-second delay in a staccato event that is synchronized with the next to the first hand. As the ticking hands relentlessly cutting side forward, the images of viewers appear and then pass end as if memory is established in an instant, go [i]or[/i] come backs and then is gone.

"Digital Watch" is an interworking of one as well as the other digital and analog elements of time. The hands of the watch face are decidedly analog, representing the move of time forward in geometrical form - time as the move of hands, the increments between lines, as something tangible that we can gripe [i]or[/i] grip onto and symbolize. The inexactitude of the analog watch can be profoundly comforting - we do not necessarily know the exact next to the first but are reassured that we have a faculty of perception of time by the shape of the hands. at the same time it is a digital framework that intercedes with our image, capturing it, storing it and replaying it end computer devices. Digital time is exact, atomistic, the opposite of the geometric image of the ticking hands. "Digital Watch" asks us to throw back on the ways in which the digital has reconfigured by what means we conceptualize time, moving from the circular watch face with its implication of revolution of times and renewal to the digital world of time for a like reason easily captured and retrieved.

The representation of time passing is also examined in "Memory/Void" (1990) in which a series of monitors, stripped down to their bare protections sits in ashes in glass containers. The glass vials, which are reminiscent of hour-glasses, call forth a pre-digital sense of time's passage. Still images of viewers appear successively upon the screens in time-delay, each progressively more difficult to diocese as the screens become smaller and more deep buried in the ashes. Time, the work implies, is relentles and the fragile electronic image is not immune from its material deterioration. The recycl video image that reasserts itself here works in tension with the simple image of time as a kind of earthly burial, swallowing up the not absent and rendering memories difficult to read.