Jim Campbell

Jim Campbell was born in Chicago and now lives in San Francisco. He received 2 Bachelor of Science Degrees in Mathematics and Engineering. He has shown regularly throughout the U.S. in such institutions as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Carpenter Center, Harvard University; The Power Plant, Toronto; and the International Center for Photography, New York. His work is included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the University Art Museum at Berkeley; the Richard and Rosalind Swig collection; and that of Don Fisher of the Gap Corporation. In 1992 he created one of the first permanent public interactive video artworks in the U.S.

Hallucination creates an image in a video “mirror” that distorts the reality of the live image by engulfing the viewer in flames in image and sound. The flames surround the people and follow them wherever they go. The rest of the image reflects an accurate representation of the room. The flames are in color and the rest of the image is in b&w. The volume of the burning sounds is proportional to the distance of the viewer from the mirror. In other words, when no one is within the range of the mirror, there is no sound, and the closer the viewer gets to the mirror, the louder the flame sounds get. Another distortion of reality in the mirror is in the form of a virtual woman (She can be recognized on the videotape and slides by the fact that she is wearing a gray jump suit and she is not on fire). The viewer might be standing looking at a reflection of themselves burning, and all of a sudden, a woman will be standing next to them in the reflection, but in reality there is no one next to them. Sometimes the woman observes the viewers passively and other times her actions affect the virtual space. For example, she flips a coin and if she gets tails the viewers disappear, and if she gets heads they come back.