David Rokeby’s The Giver of Names is a fascinating interactive art work that has been exhibited many times and refined through successive versions over a dozen years. The exhibition-scaled installation, which demonstrates the artist’s ongoing interest in dynamic systems of response that probe our attitudes towards machine intelligence, was one of the first shows presented in the newly renovated Art Centre in 2000. Through a camera, computer and language database, The Giver of Names analyses and pronounces upon objects set before it by the viewer. Like the Biblical first man, the system responds to the world through articulation of its aspects. But, while its speech is evocative and grammatically correct, and it clearly (albeit selectively) grasps formal attributes of the object, the limits of its cognition are evident. The system knows nothing of function: it does not know that a boot is a boot.