Peter Campus, video artist

Peter Campus, (born 1937)), is one of the early American video artists, pioneering the field in the 1970s and maintaining a practice today. His early experimentation with studio shooting and high technology (of the time) video equipment opened up a vast new set tools for art-making, as well as pushed the conceptual envelope of video art and its potential.

One of his most important single-channel works is titled "Three Transitions" in which he uses chromakey processors and video mixers to create videos in the studio. Part of the great potential in video art is that the artist receives instant feedback while shooting, being able to watch oneself in the monitor while recording is a major perceptual shift from long delay in viewing film. "Three Transitions" engages this new method of perceiving oneself, Campus is watching himself live as he goes through the motions for the camera. His live video installation works from the early 1970s at Bykert Gallery and in 1974 in his first major exhibition at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY.

Campus studied experimental psychology before his early work as a filmmaker. All of his early work engaged his interest in the psychology and the physiology of perception, and was informed by the Minimalist aesthetic of the late sixties and early seventies.

Campus abandoned video art for nearly twenty years, making digital photographs until returning to video work in the 1990s. Currently Campus is represented by Albion Gallery in London and New York. Peter Campus works have been featured in the Whitney Biennial in 1973, 1993, and 2002. His works are held in collections around the world, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), The Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, and the Museum of Modern Art.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Campus