David Rokeby: Taken
OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, April 3, 5-6 P.M. FOLLOWED BY: GALLERY TALK @ 6 P.M. The events are free and open to the public. Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday 12 to 5 P.M. Location: Porter College, UCSC. Parking is free on weekends and the gallery is wheelchair accessible. Group tours are available by appointment at (831)459-3606.

David Rokeby has won acclaim in both artistic and technical fields for his new media artworks. The Toronto artist, who was born in Tillsonburg, Ontario in 1960 and studied at the Ontario College of Art, uses technology to reflect on human issues. A pioneer in interactive art and an acknowledged innovator in interactive technologies, Rokeby has achieved international recognition and has developed technologies which have been applied by a broad range of arts practitioners and medical scientists. Rokeby's best-known work, Very Nervous System, premiered at the Venice Biennale in 1996 and is permanently installed in several museums throughout the world. He has been an invited speaker at international events, and has published papers that are required reading in new media arts curricula in many universities. Rokeby's video processes present distortions of the perception of time. The artist explains, "One of the most striking sensations I have experienced while working with interactive technologies is the sensation of sculpting time itself."

During his stay on the West Coast, David Rokeby will conduct a four-day residency with new media electronic art students at UCSC as well as install his unique surveillance piece Taken, 2002, for the Sesnon Art Gallery. Following the opening reception on Thursday, April 3, he will give a talk about this work and other projects. He will then travel to UCLA for another lecture series. Taken is a surveillance installation that tracks the movements of visitors within the gallery space and projects their actions onto the wall. On the left side of the wall, gallery visitors are extracted from the gallery space, and then looped back onto themselves at 20 second intervals. This 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 side is a cooler catalog of the gallery visitors. Individuals are tracked within the space. Their heads are zoomed in on and adjectives are attributed to them (i.e., Ôunsuspecting,Õ Ôcomplicit,Õ ÔhungryÕ). 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, highly ordered and rather threatening. For more information, please see David Rokeby's web site at http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/home.html