April 26, 2005
Taken
Tracing Memory
"A small enclosed gallery off of (Williams College Museum of Art's) historic rotunda, Media Field is the museum’s sacred space for video and new media work. The Toronto based artist, David Rokeby has inhabited it with his video installation Taken, specifically reformatted for the space. The work establishes a surveillance environment that monitors the room with a three-channel video projection, tracing the memory of the gallery, so to speak. Rokeby’s software responds to every visitor by focusing and recording their movements in a looped video format on three walls, leaving the center of the gallery light up and empty in wait for a performance.
That performance is your blurred image within a stream of transparent bodies flowing through the room [the day’s palimpsest of visitors] featured in the main projection. Once a new presence is detected the crowd vanishes and the new visitor is isolated in the space. Walking into the room gets you noticed – quickly- and just as quickly, you are stitched into the quilt of the gallery’s daily memory." From David Rokeby @ WCMA by Dina Deitsch, Big Red & Shiny #21.
Posted by jo at April 26, 2005 09:28 AM
