Artist Research | David Rokeby


David Rokeby is an installation artist from Toronto, Canada and has been creating and showing his work since 1982. His interactive installation Hand-held (2012) was probably the most interesting to me. This installation is based completely on the viewer's movements and where their hands fall on the installation. 

 The projection itself has 80 different layers of images, making it to where the height of one's hands shows different images. As one comes into focus with the main images, when the hands move the images unfocus until they're back under the right height. The image above is just one out of the 80 images used for this installation so you can see that at this height in these positions what would be clear and what would be out of focus. 

 https://vimeo.com/48946545

 Artist Statement:
"Hand-held is an installation that consists of an apparently empty space which reveals its contents as you explore it with your hands. Today, we regularly use our hands to navigate virtual commercial, social, political and information spaces and relationships using touch-screens, mice and keyboards. Hands, which have evolved to have a great degree of articulation and high concentrations of nerve endings, are reduced to pointers and signifiers.

The work occupies the exhibition space in the manner of a sculpture but is initially invisible. Your hands are your active agents with which to explore the space. When your hand moves into the space occupied by a part of the sculpture, its image appears on the skin of your hands and fingers as though it were physically present there. Moving your hand around allows you to discover the extent of the object and its relationships with things around it. As you approach an object, it is first blurry, then comes into focus as your hand comes closer. As your hand passes beyond it, the object against loses focus and dissolves. Some things move as you pass through them as though a short sequence of video frames is spread through space. In other cases, you see a fluid series of cross-sections of the interior of the object as you pass through it."

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