David Rokeby is an artist who has been making works of electronic, video and installation art since 1982. He lives with his wife, pianist Eve Egoyan, and daughter, Viva, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His early work Very Nervous System is acknowledged as a pioneering work of interactive art, translating physical gestures into real-time interactive sound environments. Very Nervous System was presented at the Venice Biennale in 1986.
Work
Rokeby's pioneering interactive work Very Nervous System has been evolving since 1982. In Wired Magazinethe work is described as
"A combination of technologies, some off-the-shelf, some rare and esoteric, and some cooked up by Rokeby himself. Initially, in 1982, much more of the system was homemade. His circuitry, designed to speed up the response of the sluggish Apple II, was still not fast enough to analyze an image from an ordinary video camera, so he built his own low-res device: a little box with 64 light sensors behind a plastic Fresnel lens. But Very Nervous System has been evolving for 13 years, during which time the world has seen any number of technological revolutions. So Rokeby now has a lot more store-bought components incorporated into the system: it can handle a Mac Quadra and real video cameras, via sophisticated "Max" software from Paris."
A number of Rokeby's works address issues of digital surveillance, including Watch, Guardian Angel and Sorting Daemon. In addition to his surveillance art, other works engage in a critical examination of the differences between human and artificial intelligence. The Giver of Names and n-chat are artificial subjective entities, provoked by objects or spoken words in their immediate environment to formulate sentences and speak them aloud. David Rokeby's installations have been exhibited extensively in the Americas, Europe and Asia. He has been an invited speaker at events around the world, and has published two papers that are required reading in the new media arts faculties of many universities. In 2002, Rokeby represented Canada at the Venice Biennale of Architecture with Seen. In 2004 he represented Canada at the São Paulo Bienal in Brazil. In 2007 he completed major art commissions for the Ontario Science Centre and the Daniel Langlois Foundation in Montréal. Rokeby's sculptural piece Cloud is one of three permanent art installations at the OntarioScience Centre. Cloud consists of an array of blue and transparent squares that rotate in various ways to simulate the three states of matter: solid, liquid and gas.
