Computers, in general, are mathematical machines and thus an artwork that is contained within a computer needs to be translated to a mathematical representation. This brings interesting questions to the artistic process when an artist is forced to transform an idea from a concept or an emotion or an intuition into a logical and quantized representation. A difficult thing to do without trivializing the original concept. What often happens during this reductive and transformational process is that the subtlety of the ideas are lost simply because of the fact that they have to be defined with mathematical logic. In my work I explore this collision of intuition with quantization at the electronic interface by looking at meaning in representations of filtered information.

My Ambiguous Icons projects essentially started with the question "How and what kind of meaning can be expressed with very small amounts of information?" Information refers specifically to Information in the mathematical sense, while the concept of meaning embodies the meaning in the poetic sense. The oxymoron title of this series, "Ambiguous Icons", indicates the fundamental difference between information and meaning, namely that poetic meaning is ambiguous (or plural) and mathematical information is precise (or singular). A good example of something that has no meaning, but is nevertheless informative, is a computer screen icon. These icons are specifically designed to be unambiguous pointers to something else, something larger, with more meaning, like a text document or an image or a computer program. The works in this series contain approximately the same amount of information as there is in a computer screen icon, yet, despite the sparse amount of information, are not unambiguous. The amount of information in each work is defined by the number of pixels used to create the image, and in these works, ranges from 42 to 768 pixels.

Very low resolution images exist at the borderline of abstraction. By reducing or eliminating the digital structure of an image, viewers are forced to search elsewhere in the image for meaning, causing color, motion and form to take on a new, more interdependent relationship with the interpretation of the image. In these works, as in other forms of visual abstraction, associative thinking processes play a larger role than linear or narrative thinking in the interpretation of an image. Understanding and using the characteristics of this process within an artistic methodology allows for unique forms of artistic expression while using only minute amounts of information.

ALSO SEE

> Jim Campbell: Ambiguous Icons
> Artist's CV [57KB PDF]

EXTERNAL WEBSITES

> Jim Campbell

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