Born in Chicago in 1956 and now living in San Francisco, Jim Campbell earned baccalaureate degrees in both electrical engineering and mathematics from MIT. Surely this is an uncommon background for a visual artist, but then again it might be an advantage to have had this kind of preparation when confronting present possibilities for making art. While much of the last seventy years has been shaped by discoveries of new and often startling visual vocabularies, we were and are still indebted to a modernist environment that was already well-defined by 1925. Not that the achievements from then until now aren't to be lauded, but to the extent that new art being produced today succumbs to a wholly modernist framework, it is diminished in its ability to capture a sense of this unique and transitional moment in history.

One kind of art which does breaks away from the past and may not, at first glance, possess obvious signs of being a radical departure, is digital interactive art. While advantaged by the allure of its technology, this new art is also indebted to earlier media -- to video and installation art in particular. But what is really new about some of it, the thing that is not so modernist, is this work's engagement of the spectator, interactively, in the realization of its meanings.

Installation art has always done that, in a way, by making a visitor walk into the territory of the art and become an object among objects. The scale and surface of Abstract Expressionist painting did it too, by rejecting illusionist perspective and thrusting the artwork into physical space, forcing it to be seen in relation to a viewer's own body and proximity. There is precedence as well in the lyrical wind sculptures of Alexander Calder or George Rickey's kinetic minimalist works, both of which injected an element of time and chance and the notion that works of art can be an active collaboration between external as well as internal forces. Walter de Maria's Lightning Field comes to mind as well, as do Mark di Suvero's humanistic, climbing sculptures. There are many other examples -- earthworks and urban art, and the reading of text-based work -- all slightly more interactive than the small degree to which all art demands some level of participation by those who experience it.

But these flirtations with interactivity have largely been a by-product of more prominent intentions centered on the issues, theories, and debates of modernism, its various manifestations and sub-categories. The content of modernism has always been a one-way communication, its plateaus reached by artists first and audiences second -- often dominated by authoritative text and official interpretation.

The term radical in our time has meant reaching outside the prevailing system for an imagery that looks like just about everything else before it looks like art. This has made for a rich and powerful expression, but it has also made the outcomes of modernism into something of an acquired taste for the educated and wealthy class. This, despite its more egalitarian beginnings in the ordinary subject matter of Impressionism or the mass-utopian yearnings of Constructivism. How we arrived where we are is probably more a matter of unruly economics and lack of education than of cultural intent, but it is nonetheless how things have turned out. Recognizing a difference in social class has not made many artists want, particularly, to speak a language of the lowest common denominator, and so a very large portion of the potential audience for art remains disengaged. Many contemporary works of art have become a boundary that marks the separation between artist and audience. With the inclusion of interactivity, however, the terms used to describe consumers of art -- an audience, spectator, visitor, or viewer -- are somewhat less adequate than the term participant, and the number of persons to which the work is accessible increases greatly.

The technology that makes a more purposeful interactivity possible also softens this hardened boundary and undermines hierarchies of control and authority. Viewers are invited, proactively, to be participants in the completion of an artwork and to enter into a process of discovery. The specific meanings of a work, if any, are not delivered as much by an artist to the audience, as they are by the audience to itself. Interactivity can bring an intimacy, a sense of personal discovery as layers unfold according to one's own activity. This two-sided process, in which a work of art is literally unfinished until interaction with it occurs, is different than the traditional model in which art is offered to a passive audience as the completed outcome of a singular endeavor.

Campbell, in a 1996 lecture at New York's Museum of Modern Art, takes a discussion of interactivity further by distinguishing between two kinds, "controllable" and "responsive:"

I find it useful to put interactive work on a dynamic spectrum with controllable systems on one end and responsive systems on the other. In controllable systems the actions of the viewer correlate in a 1 to 1 way with the reaction of the system. Interactive CD-ROM's are on this end of the spectrum and generally speaking so are games. In responsive systems the actions of the viewer are interpreted by the program to create the response of the system. . . . If a work is responding in a predictable way, and if the viewer becomes aware of the correlation between their action and the work's response to their action then they will feel that they are in control and the possibility of dialogue is lost. The first time I walked through an automatic door at the supermarket I thought the door was smart and was responding to me. Now I step on the mat to open the door on purpose. The point is that often the first time an interface is experienced it's perceived as being responsive but if the interface is experienced again it becomes controllable. The second time it's not a question but a command.

Triggered by sensors and video cameras, responsive interactivity may at first go unrecognized, allowing viewers to gradually become aware of how their presence is affecting what they are seeing. Once captivated in this manner, they are partnered with the work of art and invested in what it has to offer. In some sense, certainly more so than conventional art, interactive art is entertaining. It is able to engage a large audience that is widely differentiated in its level of awareness about contemporary art theory, history, and practice. Unlike a video arcade, however, its interactivity is part of a process that manufactures meaning, without which there would be no art in what is presented.

Campbell's works all to one degree or another forge their meanings out of interactive participation. In Memory/Recollection, live video images of persons viewing the work are captured and frozen on a series of small monitors. The piece selectively stores images for up to two years, and displays the older ones intermingled with those that are more recent. Over time, those who have observed the piece become its collective subject matter -- without them there would be nothing for future viewers to see. Memory/Recollection documents its own history as a work of art, and becomes a kind of self-measuring clock. It is a piece in which interactivity ultimately bends our perceptions of time and space.

Many of Campbell's works are clocks, if not literally then in the sense that they diagram and measure change. Often they do this by playing with our linear perspectives, turning them inside out and causing us to stop and examine the way in which we experience these perceptual dimensions. His distortions are not just clever tricks or slight-of-hand. If our empirical assumptions about time and space are wrong or incomplete, then so may be some of the rather more ponderous items in our religious or philosophical beliefs that are built upon those assumptions.

In untitled (for Heisenberg), Campbell presents a long, narrow and darkened room, at the end of which is a bed-sized black pedestal. On this pedestal is poured a gentle rolling landscape of salt and projected onto the salt, onto the surface of the bed as it were, is a video image of an intimate couple. As a viewer approaches the image from one end of the room, the video projector senses their presence and zooms in on the groping couple, showing successively larger and more abstract fragments the closer the viewer gets. In the "uncertainty principle" of quantum physics, Werner Heisenberg states that the more accurately one tries to observe or measure an object, the more that object will be affected by the observation. Campbell, in a series of works dedicated to Heisenberg, has substituted gallery visitor for physicist, placing the former on the unstable ground of a search for the true nature of things. Campbell seems to share a scientist's wonder and curiosity about the same shifting nature of reality that has propelled other artists into a somewhat more solemn postmodern critique.

Much of what distinguishes interactive art has to do with hierarchies and egos, with how artists choose to position themselves as either part of or apart from their audience. Campbell sees himself as a facilitator, as one who posits and shares questions and processes, rather than answers and outcomes, to a community of the curious. In I Have Never Read the Bible, the artist displays his own interaction with a piece in which the viewer sees an old dictionary mounted on the wall. From this book comes the sound of Campbell whispering each letter of every word in the Bible -- a process that takes 37 days to complete. While Campbell himself professes to have never read the Bible, the digital equipment he uses is able to retrieve his whispered 26-letter alphabet from its memory and deliver it, one letter at a time, married to the stored text of a digitized Bible. Mozart's Requiem, played in the background when the alphabet was recorded, comes out in tiny one-letter fragments, indecipherable and re-arranged. The Bible is thus reduced to the sounds of its own anatomy, perhaps causing us to contemplate the gap between the objective reality of reading words and the subjective reality of their meanings. Or perhaps the vast and wonderful diversity of human literature, in this case reducible to 26 fundamental building blocks, is being offered as a wry metaphor for evolutionary biodiversity and the conflict between scientific and religious beliefs.

Subjective and objective reality are notions that often conflict in Campbell's work. Digital Watch is a piece that allows a viewer to go back and forth between our subjective, linear concept of time and the objective, relative time of physics. As a large-screen video display is approached, viewers see themselves, as in a mirror. In the face of a real-time watch which also occupies the screen, they see themselves in the past, following in their own footsteps.

Memory, a quality until recently ascribed only to organic life forms, is also a recurrent theme. In a series of small works that hang on the wall, Campbell uses memory as part of his artistic palette, rendering it in delicate and sometimes poignant washes, as a watercolorist might. In two side-by-side pieces, Photo of my Mother and Portrait of my Father, the artist combines his own family memories with computer memory. On the left, a photograph of Campbell's mother is protected by a piece of glass that alternately fogs and clears as if someone were breathing against it. The rate of this cycle is governed by the computer's memory of the artist's own respiration, which had been previously digitized over a period of one hour. Next to this piece, a photograph of his father is visible for an instant and then disappears. It's cycle repeats over and over according to the rate of Campbell's heartbeat, which was recorded during an eight-hour period.

Campbell also discussed memory in his MoMA lecture and sees an even larger role for it in his work:

The potential of the computer to be able to extract information from an input and store it not as raw data but as associated data is one of the fundamental characteristics that allows for a work to be able to change and grow with time and even change its vocabulary with time. To me this is one of the most exciting and unique possibilities in computer art and very little work has been done in this area -- works that perceivably never repeat themselves, works that respond to their environment not just in a short term way, but in a long term way unpredictably and meaningfully . . . easier said than done.

In the series of memory works and others in this exhibition, Campbell repeatedly tests our assumptions about some of the things human beings typically take for granted. Our sense of time and space, of how we draw upon the past, of what is real and what is an illusion created by our need to function effectively day-to-day, all are the substance of his investigation. That he achieves his ends by interactively engaging the spectator is not an idea imposed on the media he uses, but rather it emerges naturally from the innate opportunities of digital technology. In this he is not unlike the modernists before, whose achievements came from discovering within every different medium a unique and unparalleled path to meaning. At the same time, engaging viewers interactively at multiple levels of access and dismantling the hierarchies between providers and consumers of aesthetic experience is a very new possibility. The irony in all this may be that, given our lengthy history of cynicism about technology, of fearing that it will ultimately transform us into a society of androids, it is the humanizing aspect of Jim Campbell's interactive art that is among its most compelling qualities.