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Rokeby, David
The Giver of Names
1991-2003

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.

 
Rokeby, David
born Tillsonburg, Ontario 1960
The Giver of Names
1991-2003
Apple iMac computer, camera and tripod, projector and screen, pedastal, cables, custom software, assorted objects
installation size variable, approximately 600.0 x 600.0 cm
Purchased with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Grants program, Chancellor Richardson Memorial Fund, 2009
52-001a-t

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