Silent Stream can be found at the Union Square Muni station. Meant to evoke an underground creek “Silent Stream” consists of 12,000 highly polished stainless-steel disks of varying sizes; it measures 250 feet in length with widths that vary from 4 feet to 8 feet.
Originally from Chicago, San Francisco based Jim Campbell is an engineer by training, with degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics from MIT. But in college, he was interested in film, and he took a class on documentaries with Richard Leacock, a pioneer of cinema verité. That led to some feature filmmaking, but “I did not have the personality to be a director,” Campbell says. “I was a basket-case introvert. An MIT dysfunctional.”
His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship Award in Multimedia, and a SECA Electronic Media Award presented by SFMOMA. His video LED installation “Day for Night” atop Salesforce Tower debuted in May 2018.
Werner Klotz is a German-born American artist living in New York City and Berlin who works extensively in site-specific and interactive art contexts. His other public works include the interactive, kinetic installation “Anemone,” which is on permanent view at the San Francisco International Airport. Klotz is the recipient of the New York City Art Commission award for excellence in Public Art and Germany’s Marler Medien Kunst Preis Raum-Medien award for media art.
