Exhibition: April 3 - May 10, 2003
 
David Rokeby:

Taken


OPENING
RECEPTION:
Thursday, April 3
5- 6 P.M.
GALLERY TALK
@ 6 P.M.

The events are free
and open to the public
.

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