David Rokeby’s “Plotting Against Time”: Erring tech grievances in Windsor

Interactions between humans and computers have been fraught with the potential for violent misunderstandings ever since Stanley Kubrick’s disturbingly rational HAL computer said “Hello, Dave” in 2001: A Space Odyssey. A master at activating the disorienting power of computer systems through moving images, the Canadian artist David Rokeby shares Kubrick’s penchant for manipulating the viewer’s sense of temporality by modifying familiar time-based technologies into something strange and distinctly non-human. In a new survey of Rokeby’s work on display at the Art Gallery of Windsor, a series of video installations scramble images of everyday sites in order to draw attention to the way that we make sense of space and time. Machine for Taking Time (Boul. St. Laurent), for instance, shows snippets from daily footage of a Montreal neighbourhood in non-chronological time, skipping from images of spring to winter to summer. The flow of imagery results in startling and beautiful juxtapositions that make obvious the different ways people and computers “think” about time while also exploring the constructed nature of all cognitive processes. In conjunction with the annual Media City festival that features 50 new films and videos presented in Windsor and Detroit venues, Rokeby’s “Plotting Against Time” is sure to make us reconsider the latent power of media technologies. (401 Riverside Dr W, Windsor ON)