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David Rokeby

The Giver of Names

KW Art Gallery | Centre In The Square | 101 Queen St. North

In The Giver of Names, a computer looks at objects that visitors have chosen and placed on a pedestal. Through processes of visual analysis, association and grammatical construction, the computer responds to the objects, constructing sentences which it speaks aloud. This is a very human kind of process, and so The Giver of Names is in part an exercise in self-portraiture. But what is important is how this portrait fails to represent its subject. The peculiar expressions of this synthetic, alien point-of-view clash with our own responses to the objects, perhaps, despite the work's title, removing the names from things. Faulty representations can be as revealing as 'accurate' ones as they can challenge unacknowledged assumptions and make the familiar unfamiliar enough to be re-examined.