Jim Campbell was born in Chicago in 1956 and lives in San Francisco. He received degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from MIT in 1978. He transitioned from filmmaking to interactive video installations in the mid 1980s. His custom electronic sculptures and installations have made him a leading figure in the use of computer technology as an art form.

Excerpt from the essay "Jim Campbell: Working in the Open Sphere" by Marilyn A. Zeitlin from the catalog Jim Campbell: Transforming Time, Electronic Works 1990-99, published by Arizona State University Art Museum:

By joining physics and metaphysics in a mutual safari into epistemology from assorted scientific, artistic, and spiritual positions, while remaining acutely aware of the limitations to our ability to know, Campbell's work reinforces the skepticism characteristic of the body of theoretical writing loosely collected under the rubric "postmodern." The perennial human desire to know is paired with a need to know how we know. Campbell's genius, if I may use such a word, is in his skill at bringing us back to that state of relative innocence in which we again ask not only what reality might be but how we can know it when we sense it...

Campbell combines more traditional media, such as video, with his own inventions. He is expanding video in particular as a medium, using it to posit questions about time, memory, and perceived reality in the vocabulary of the electronic age or perhaps, more accurately, the post-electronic age. He welcomes viewer for whom the silent, static work of art is often no longer engaging, employing media of communication familiar to people who grew up not only on television, but on Nintendo and the Internet. He is on the forefront of interactive work. Yet Campbell does not limit his viewership to the children of cyberspace. His work has a timeless quality in its ideas, its conceptual concision, and its apparent simplicity.

Jim Campbell was born in Chicago in 1956 and lives in San Francisco. He received 2 Bachelor of Science Degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from MIT in 1978. His work has been shown internationally and throughout North America in institutions such as the Whitney Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Carpenter Center, Harvard University; The Power Plant, Toronto; The International Center for Photography, New York, and the Intercommunication Center in Tokyo. His electronic art work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the University Art Museum at Berkeley, and the San Jose Museum of Art. In 1992 he created one of the first permanent public interactive video artworks in the U.S. in Phoenix, Arizona. He has lectured on interactive media art at many Institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in NY. As an engineer he holds more than a dozen patents in the field of video image processing.