THE SIMULATION OF MOVEMENT

"[Siegfried] Kracauer wants films to be as little as possible like dramatic stories and as much as possible like photographs that move."
—page 41, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium by Gilberto Perez

"Glass plates were not usable for motion pictures since there was no practical way to move them through a camera or projector."
—page 452, Film Art: An Introduction by David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson

A darkened space. A frame of light. Blurred images move across the frame. They float. They glide. They hesitate. Time freezes. Time accelerates. Time collapses. Temporal and spatial ghosts. Ephemera.

It is nearly impossible to describe the pieces of art in Quantizing Effects: The Liminal Art of Jim Campbell at the Museum of Glass. The concepts seem rather simple, but are actually philosophical, and become more complex the more you think about them. The execution and construction of the pieces seem rather simple, until you realize that Jim Campbell is doing things with the materials of his pieces that have not been done before. He is actually revolutionizing electronics in the same way that Eadward Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Thomas Edison revolutionized the motion photography that became early cinema. Jim Campbell is changing the way we view video images. In fact, he holds many patents on the way that video images are processed.

The pieces that I found most intriguing were what he collectively calls Ambiguous Icons. Many consist of a grid of LEDs that are set behind a plate of glass or plexiglas. The glass plates are of varying distances from the LED grid, are of varying thickness, and are of varying translucence (running the gamut from nearly opaque to nearly transparent). The "flickering" of the LEDs and custom electronics produce images on the "screen" of glass. These insubstantial ghost images move across the screens, some with great deliberation, others with great abandon. Most of the images are indistinct enough that we cannot individualize them, but distinct enough that we can generalize them. One represents a face, another a human figure in motion, another cars and pedestrians moving in front of a stationary "viewpoint" on a street. Yet, when you get up close and look at the piece you realize that it is a grid of programmed LEDs and a plate of glass! (What is it that we are bringing to the piece?)

These pieces haunt me. I keep thinking of the early work in studying, attempting to understand, and trying to capture in images, the movement of animals and humans that Muybridge, Marey, and Edison were involved in. Their inventions radically altered the way that we view photographs and ushered in the age of cinema, as well as the subsequent video age. I believe that Campbell is doing something similar in his work. His roles of inventor, engineer, artist, philosopher, and observer have overlapped in his work. These pieces of art are unlike any others I have seen. They disturb in some sense. They are unconscious of us as viewers, and yet somehow seem aware of our presence. They bring past, present, and future together.

I will have to wander back to view them again, this time alone. The child was intrigued by some of the pieces that involved memory and lights, but ultimately moved too quickly from piece to piece, needing to move, to be stimulated. I need time to stand still, to observe, to process, to commune.