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David Rokeby: Nervous Systems

A star of international new-media art works under the radar

David Rokeby develops new software like a painter mixing new colours for paintings. The comparison is apt because Rokeby's work, its disparate aptitudes and technological complexity notwithstanding, is at its core equally uncomplicated. His medium is a vehicle for ideas, and to dismiss Rokeby's work as "computer art" would be a mistake. His transcendent installations are sophisticated and pioneering; in many, there is no computer to speak of. Various screens, monitors and surveillance cameras together create ambiguous environments in which viewers become participants and find themselves integral to the functioning of the artwork, often with oddly disorienting results.

As with many other artists involved in new media, Rokeby has worked quietly beneath the radar of the commercial gallery system. Yet he has screened works to great acclaim at national and international festivals sustained by organizations such as the Banff Centre, La fondation Daniel Langlois in Montreal and the Canada Council for the Arts. The result has kept many of the most interesting works from the view of the general public. Despite a stellar career that has seen his participation in international exhibitions such as the 1986 Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria (three times), the Kwangju Biennale (in 1995) and the 8th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2002, wide public recognition has thus far eluded Rokeby; nonetheless, he is without a doubt one of Canada's most exceptional artists.

I caught up with the artist at his home in Toronto last fall as Rokeby prepared for a group exhibition, "Algorithmic Revolutions," at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, one of the international centres of new-media art. He had just returned from Brazil, where, at the 26th Bienal de São Paulo, he represented Canada with a project proposed and curated by the Art Gallery of Hamilton's Shirley Madill. Entitled Gathering, the São Paulo piece was a two-part installation that used a surveillance camera to capture and isolate human activity at one end of Oscar Niemeyer's vast Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo, while at the other end, the camera's images, sorted by colour and shape, were projected inside an octagonal screening area. The result was a shifting rainbow of colour and skin tone that Madill says resembled "a moving abstract painting at a distance." Setting up such a complex artwork in an unfamiliar, historical modern building made for an arduous installation process, something to which Rokeby is no stranger; he is well aware of the flexibility and constant refinement demanded by his medium.

Interface—the systems that communicate with one another to facilitate navigation through cyberspace—is the starting point for Rokeby's work. In his practice, the computer interface is likened to a road map and the artist is a kind of technological urban planner. He investigates the systems that create our cyber-experience, sharing with many other current artists an interest in how systems, economic, social, linguistic or otherwise, have shaped our experience of the world. Rokeby is acutely aware of the power of interface; indeed, a concern for society's ignorance of the hidden systems that ultimately shape contemporary ideologies is central to his practice. Marshall McLuhan predicted such trouble long ago. And, as Rokeby says, "McLuhan's phrase 'the medium is the message' became a tired cliché long before our media became flexible and intelligent enough to live up to the epithet."

"David Rokeby: Nervous Systems" by Andrea Carson, Canadian Art, Summer 2005, pp 66–71

His work Seen, from 2002, makes a good metaphor for interface. The work comprises four video projections folded against one another in a kind of V-shape, each recording the same overhead view of Piazza San Marco in Venice. On each screen, the computer has isolated a different aspect of action, on the first screen emphasizing the people and pigeons within the architectural context, on the second looping their motion upon themselves, on the third expanding their movement across time and finally, on the last screen, dissolving movement to emphasize all that remains still in the context. In this eloquent study, the pigeons display considerably more randomness than the human figures, who appear to follow predetermined pathways across the piazza. What is highlighted is how, within our culture, behaviour patterns are in various ways restricted, even within apparently free physical space. Human nature seems to prefer limits against which to navigate. According to Rokeby, "The constraints provide a frame of reference, a context, within which interaction can be perceived. While the constraining structure subtly expresses itself, the interactors' ability to navigate the system gives them a sense of freedom. This freedom exists only in relation to the established structure; it is a representation of freedom, a symbolic freedom."

One of the consequences of working in new media is that what results is, indeed, new. Rokeby is a pioneer who develops much of the software that ends up in his artwork himself. His work sits comfortably within the evolution of contemporary art history, beginning with Marcel Duchamp's 1913 creation of the ready-made, which introduced the mass-produced object as art, effectively bringing about a reconsideration of art's meaning and marking the beginning of conceptualism. In later decades, artists would struggle to escape the omnipresent "Duchamp effect"; the video-art pioneer Nam June Paik has suggested that the only way to move past Duchamp's influence was with the use of new technologies. And the critic Dieter Daniels has written that Duchamp was key in showing up the "antiquated instruments from the toolbox of classical art-historical methodology, which are the wrong tools for dismantling the motor of modernism."

Artists subsequently attempted to forge a new relationship to the art object by relinquishing control of the output (an impulse exemplified by Jean Tinguely's kinetic painting machines from the late 1950s, or the chance compositions of the avant-garde composer John Cage). In his own writing, Rokeby has cited the composer Henry Cowell's critiques of Cage's chance compositions, in which the musical outcome was determined by the tossing of coins. Cowell argued, "Unfortunately...no order of tossings can give anything more than a variety of arrangements of the elements subjectively chosen to operate upon." Rokeby goes on to write that, "Whereas Cage's intent is to mirror nature's manner of operation, the interactive artist holds up the mirror to the spectator...[which] involves a dialogue between the interactor and the system making up the artwork."

Cheap Imitation, a work shown at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in 2002, presents a good example of Rokeby's style of mirroring. The piece involved a black screen that sprang to life where it sensed the viewer's presence to reveal a carefully reconstructed digital image of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), a painting that distilled movement in the tradition of Eadweard Muybridge's early chronophotography and drew attention to what the Duchamp interviewer and specialist Pierre Cabanne has called the "mechanization of man as opposed to perceptible beauty." Cheap Imitation plays on and furthers this idea. It encapsulates a theme that runs through Rokeby's work: placing the viewer into a direct relationship with the system rather than with the image.

Rokeby's work with surveillance technologies achieves this by positioning the viewer as both surveyor and surveyed, aware of the system yet strangely displaced by its effects. Taken (2002) comprises two large screens suspended in a darkened gallery. A camera surveys the approaching visitor from above. One screen is divided into many squares in which the heads of the previous 100 visitors are presented. From time to time, this image changes to show a close-up of the head of the current visitor with an adjectival word assessing their attitude ("accepting," "critical," etc.). On the adjacent screen, all activity in the gallery is accumulated into a 20-second-long video loop, creating an ongoing history of the audience "in the act of viewing and engaging with itself and the work."

"David Rokeby: Nervous Systems" by Andrea Carson, Canadian Art, Summer 2005, pp 66–71

The camera work brings to mind Bruce Nauman's seminal closed-circuit video installation Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970), in which participants entered a long corridor containing two monitors stacked at the far end. One of the monitors was connected to a camera that was positioned above the entrance, pointing toward the monitors. The approaching participant was thus able to view himself from behind (from the perspective of the camera). Nauman has said: "What interested me was the experience of putting two pieces of information together: physical information and visual or intellectual information. The experience lies in the tension between the two." Although Rokeby similarly uses the camera to highlight the participants' presence in an intermediary space, crucially, Rokeby's viewer is not engaged in action, but is watching himself be surveyed. The power of the viewer has been undermined, for the pleasure of voyeurism that exists for the surveyor is replaced by loss of anonymity and power for the surveyed.

In 2001, the director of Oakville Galleries, Francine Périnet, commissioned David Rokeby to create a piece for Gairloch Gardens, the lakeside park that surrounds one of the galleries. The result was Machine for Taking Time (2001-4), which was again a work that comprised two systems: the gathering and subsequent screening of images. A camera placed in the park slowly surveys a garden pathway; to date, it has gathered more than one million still images, which are collected into a database. A small video projection then displays these images in a continuous arbitrary flow, forming a moving photograph that spans years, seasons and hours of the day. The curator Su Ditta installed the projection in front of a bay window overlooking the garden, staging a poetic contrast between consistency and change. Onscreen, figures appear fleetingly and fade away; the skeletal branches of a tree blossom instantaneously as the camera pans along, blending seasons into a single painterly image.

Rokeby also used the garden as the setting for his best-known work. Imagine strolling in a park, near a pond surrounded by flowers and shrubs. Suddenly you realize that your movements are eliciting sound. When you stop, all is quiet. When you gingerly move forward, you hear the sound of soft tinkling. People sit on small stools nearby and observe your unwitting participation. This work, Very Nervous System (1986–90), was exhibited in Japan as part of the 1990 Kanagawa Outdoor Art Festival. Rokeby has spoken of his desire to reconcile the technological and artistic aspects of his practice by making his innovations available to others. Very Nervous System's software has since been used by composers, choreographers, musicians, artists, music therapists and even sufferers of Parkinson's disease.

Rokeby likens user interfaces to belief systems that reinforce assumptions about the way things are, much the way the Catholic church in the Middle Ages sanctioned ideas about the world that then became the standards for viewing reality. He argues that it is important to "increase our awareness of the ways that the interface carries these beliefs as hidden content." His unexpected uses of technology provide an alternative perspective. They reveal the degree to which we are still limited by our belief systems.

Summer 2005

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