Campbell, who studied electrical engineering and mathematics at MIT, holds more than a dozen patents in the field of video image processing – many of which find use in his high-tech artworks. His new commission, Scattered Light, blankets Madison Square Park’s Oval Lawn with a 3-d matrix of nearly 2,000 LED lights suspended within a monumental support structure. Unlike ordinary light installations, these flickering bulbs also give the illusion of figures amid the viewpoint.
Shift your viewpoint, however, and the illusion fades, the figures returning to an anonymous abstract field. Blurring the boundaries between image and object, this light-based sculptural approach to contemporary image-making (also seen in a second, smaller installation near the park entrance) is elegantly simple and nothing less than contemporary