Jim Campbell: Portrait of a Portrait of Claude Shannon

Artist(s):

• Jim Campbell

Title:

Portrait of a Portrait of Claude Shannon

Exhibition:

• SIGGRAPH 2005: Threading Time

Creation Year:

2005

Medium:

custom electronics

Category:

• Interactive & Monitor-Based

Artist Statement:

The works in this series explore the relationship between information and meaning in the context of reduced or compressed levels of information. More specifically, the works ask the question: What is the smallest amount of information needed for a specific moving image to to be rendered legible or comprehensible?

Technical Information:

These works incorporate custom electronics driving LEDs with 256 gray levels. FPGAs are used to control the image, and flash memories are used to store the image. Each work is created by taking a conventional NTSC video image and passing it through an extreme low-pass filter before the image is subsampled .