Art and technology a tricky pairing

Alongside Janet Cardiff’s soul-stirring “The Forty Part Motet,” at Fort Mason’s new Gallery 308, Campbell’s work prompts us to wonder whether technology, in the hands of the right artists, might reveal as much about our inner selves as it does the external world.

Campbell is a widely respected San Francisco artist whose best-known works (a short introductory video can be found here) include large light constellations presented in the trees of New York’s Madison Square Park (2010-11), hung high in the atrium of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2011-12) or ribboned across the ceiling at the San Diego Airport (2010-13).

Rosen’s abstract cast-glass plaques and her classic drawing of a horse on translucent glass are not improved by the addition of Campbell’s flickering backlight, and her images, lovely on their own, only obfuscate his usual clarity.

Campbell’s more accustomed practice is to parse visual information into ever smaller elements, reducing his pictures to the absolute threshold of readability.

An anonymous home movie Campbell finds on eBay is atomized, and thus expanded, into the story of all families, and then our own family.

Audio speakers are arranged in a circle, controlled by sophisticated hardware to reproduce 40 singers’ voices.

Drawing close, we hear the frailty of each singer — slight timing and tonal errors, lisps and expectorations — that we could never hear but in the most physically familiar of circumstances, much less in a live performance.

Which explains the ultimate failure of what seemed a promising effort when the Contemporary Jewish Museum announced NEAT:

The show aspires to update the groundbreaking efforts of Experiments in Art and Technology, or “E.A.T.,” a loosely organized membership organization that brought together artists and engineers in the 1960s and ’70s for performances, exhibitions and publications.

Let’s set aside the outsized ambition of the CJM project, a single show that could not possibly approximate the breadth of E.A.T., a long-term international effort with, at times, substantial corporate funding.

More crippling is “NEAT’s” embrace of gimcrackery over substance, a flaw more acceptable back in the day when E.A.T. bore witness to what it saw as the dawn of a new day.

Even Jim Campbell’s contribution to the CJM show, a piece he successfully redesigned as a more compact work for San Jose, looks lightweight here, in an environment compromised by several installations that offer little more than one-off jokes and large, 2015 versions of lava lamps and Etch A Sketch.