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., '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, highly ordered and rather
threatening. For more information please see our <press
release> or David Rokeby's web site at http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/home.html