Editing David Rokeby (section)

==Work==
Rokeby's pioneering interactive work<ref name="Douglas Cooper 1995">Douglas Cooper, "Very Nervous System: Artist David Rokeby adds new meaning to the term interactive",  ''Wired'' Issue 3.03 (Mar 1995)</ref> ''Very Nervous System'' has been evolving since 1982. In ''[[Wired Magazine]]'' the work is described as 
<blockquote>"A combination of technologies, some off-the-shelf, some rare and esoteric, and some cooked up by Rokeby himself. Initially, in 1982, much more of the system was homemade. His circuitry, designed to speed up the response of the sluggish Apple II, was still not fast enough to analyze an image from an ordinary video camera, so he built his own low-res device: a little box with 64 light sensors behind a plastic Fresnel lens. But Very Nervous System has been evolving for 13 years, during which time the world has seen any number of technological revolutions. So Rokeby now has a lot more store-bought components incorporated into the system: it can handle a Mac Quadra and real video cameras, via sophisticated "[[Max (software)|Max]]" software from Paris."<ref name="Douglas Cooper 1995"/></blockquote>

A number of Rokeby's works address issues of digital surveillance,<ref>Mark Schilling, "This must be the place: Vera Frenkel, David Rokeby, [[Nell Tenhaaf]] and Norman White", ''para-para- 022: Parachute Magazine'' No. 122 (April 2006), 7-8 {{cite web |url=http://www.parachute.ca/para_para/22/para22_Schilling.html |title=Parachute - para-para |accessdate=2004-12-03 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20070715195645/http://www.parachute.ca/para_para/22/para22_Schilling.html |archivedate=2007-07-15 }}</ref> including ''Watch'' (1995), ''Guardian Angel'' (2002) and ''Sorting Daemon'' (2003). In addition to his [[surveillance art]], 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.

He has exhibited and lectured extensively in the Americas, Europe and Asia. He is the Director of the BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies and AI at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. http://www.bmolab.ca