Taken
ARTIST
YEAR
COUNTRY
MEDIA
Taken is a surveillance installation that provides two readings of the activities in the gallery space. A large gallery space has one wall taken up by two very large projections. On the left hand side, gallery visitors are extracted from the ground of the gallery floors and walls, and then looped back onto themselves at 20 seconds intervals. The result is that every action that has taken place in the gallery since the computer was turned on occurs together on the screen, repeating every 20 seconds. The image stream provides a kind of seething chaos of activity that can be read both as a statistical plot of gallery activities (where do most people stand to regard the piece? Do they move around?) and as a record of each act of each visitor. The image is densely social, deeply layered and chaotic. The right hand side is a cooler catalogue of the gallery visitors. Individual visitors are tracked within the space. Their heads are zoomed in on, and adjectives are attributed to them (i.e. 'unsuspecting', 'complicit', 'hungry'). These individual head shots are collected as a set of the last 200 visitors and presented as a matrix of 100 or occasionally all 200 shots, moving in slow motion. This side is analytical and highly ordered and rather threatening.
David Rokeby is represented by Pari Nadimi Gallery
Biography
Born in Tillsonburg, Ontario in 1960, David Rokeby has been creating interactive sound and video installations with computers since 1982. His early work Very Nervous System (1982-1991) is acknowledged as a pioneering work of interactive art, translating physical gestures into real-time interactive sound environments. It was presented at the Venice Biennale in 1986, and was awarded a Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction for Interactive Art in 1991.
Several of his works have addressed issues of digital surveillance. Watched and Measured (2000) was awarded the first BAFTA award for interactive art from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2000. Other works engage in a critical examination of the differences between human and artificial intelligence. The Giver of Names (1991-) and n-cha(n)t (2001) are artificial subjective entities, provoked by objects or spoken words in their immediate environment to formulate sentences and speak them aloud.
David Rokeby has exhibited extensively in the Americas, Europe and Asia. He has spoken at events around the world. In 2002, Rokeby was awarded a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts, the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art and represented Canada at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. He has recently finished major art commissions for the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, the Daniel Langlois Foundation in Montréal. His installation “Taken” was exhibited at the Whitney Museum in New York City in 2007.
Synthetic Times - Media Art China 2008 won the Most Influential Art Exhibition of China 2008 jury grand award. the exhibition opened on June 9th, 2008, with over 600 guests attending the opening ceremony, including more than 150 guests from around the world. Fan Dian, the director of NAMOC, and Zhang Ga, artistic director and curator of the exhibition, gave opening remarks. Read more
"The Future of the Present or the Present of the Future", a roundtable discussion with distinguished quests from leading media arts institutions around the world took place on June 10, 2008 at NAMOC Read more
