The dwarfing, Lilliputian qualities of some large urban screen genres could be avoided by these less common configurations and new technologies, their size and resolution instead causing the technology to start to open up, as though walking around inside a giant TV set and getting to know its structural components. This particular aesthetic possibility was given further impetus by the work of Jim Campbell – an American artist whose LED sculptures were another highlight of the Outside the Box exhibition. His ‘Ambiguous Icons’ series, produced around 2000 to 2002, are all based on DIY low resolution matrixes of red LED lights, often as few as 10 by 15, on which surveillance style footage of street scenes are softly rendered at the limits of recognition. The difficulty in reconciling the illusion of continuous moving figures with the rigidity of the discrete LED’s turned the video screen into the site of an alchemically charged tension. When the individual pixels are scaled up into light bulbs you can directly handle then we become simultaneously aware of the electronic moving image as a phenomenon and of its materiality as an open construction – a mysterious medium that is nevertheless within our grasp, our understanding and our participation. It was also tempting to allow it to suggest an image of the Big Screen Network as a disconnected matrix across which one occasionally infers the ill defined scurry of our national media policy. But on a more practical level it is an image of how public screens might turn into a space for both criticism and to motivate active experimentation, a lure to pull the viewer closer into its politics of scale and distance. There should be no remote control for urban screens ...

Getting Closer to Bigger Screens