More bizarre was The Giver of Names, in which visitors are asked to place a toy from a toy box on a plinth. A computer reads the colours and also using a dictionary, picks out words which corresponded to the colours. The result – instant poetry. Or, at least, something approximating it.
When I tried a toy telephone I got on screen: “The bright emerald-green back was much silhouetted by the fair bluish azure”. There was more where that came from but that gives a pretty good idea of the overall “poem”.
More unsettling was Taken, another computer idea in which two screens show ghostly images of everyone who has been in the room. When you arrive, you are one of the images, move and a ghostly view of you moves around.
On a second screen are head shots of everyone who has been there, occasionally one shown large with a single word apparently summing up that person. Kaye admits it is all a little random like a horoscope machine but I was impressed when I was described as HIGHLY CRITICAL.
Watch is perhaps the most unnerving installation of all. In Venice, he placed a surveillance camera over St Mark’s Square and then showed four different views of the same image. In one it was like a still picture (these were the people standing still but gradually removed as they walked away), one showing everyone moving in the square over a period of time, another just capturing the movement in a sort of abstract style, and a fourth showing the flow.
He will be doing a Liverpool version with a camera atop FACT capturing the movement outside. For this, there will be just two images showing in the foyer, the still picture and the movement over a period.
Rokeby says he got the idea after a professor at his school told him to look out of the window for three hours during a class. At first he was infuriated that nothing much happened but then began noticing things like the flow of traffic “like a river” and the changing shape of a maple tree. “For the remaining hours of the class, I was electrified by the scene outside.”
DAVID ROKEBY’S exhibition opens at FACT, Wood Street, today, and runs until June 10
