Move a hand or a foot, and you’re confronted with a burst of music; twirl, leap, or run, and your dance is turned into a symphony. This is you interacting with “Very Nervous System,” a digital art work David Rokeby has been fine-tuning for over 18 years from São Paulo to Potsdam and most recently at the Glasgow Centre for the Arts, where a retrospective of his 20-year career is on view through September 15.

Like much of Rokeby’s work, “Very Nervous System” probes the increasingly delicate membrane between artificial and human intelligence to create a narrative about chaos and order in our times: how the two coexist in nature and computers—and fight for control of the human mind.

For Rokeby, digital art is a means of looking at “the big question: whether machines can really become intelligent.” But he isn’t interested in an artistic Turing test: Instead, Rokeby sees computers as tools for self-discovery. “Most of my work provides a way to communicate with one’s self through a machine—to construct a conversation with one’s self,” he says.

If “Very Nervous System” provides an exhilarating form of self-exploration, “n-cha(n)t” (2001) explores the limits of computer intelligence. Rokeby programmed a group of computers to “talk” to one another in a darkened room. Eventually, these stilted voices rhythmically “fall into chanting,” as Rokeby puts it, uncannily, anthropomorphically, emulating sentient behavior. “Cloud” (2007), a sculptural piece made of a hundred shimmering objects turning at different speeds, is a meditation on synchronicity and chaos in nature. Sometimes the pieces arrive at pure visual harmony; other times, total disorder, an alchemical simulation, says Rokeby, of the three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas.

A math and computer whiz who also made art during high school, Rokeby had his pick of college scholarships, but dropped out when he realized that he didn’t want to be a math professor—and that art was probably not the most immediately remunerative career. A lucrative job offer in data processing beckoned, but at the last minute Rokeby decided to try his hand at commercial art at the Art College of Ontario—a lucky choice, since it was there, under the wing of a new experimental art department, that he began playing with computers.

He never looked back. “I’m trying to make computers as skillful and capable as they can be,” he says. “But life is more profoundly interactive than any piece of art or technology. What we can learn about ourselves in relation to a computer is a curious gift of those machines.”—Sarah H. Bayliss

www.davidrokeby.com

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