"Sorting Daemon: An Installation by David Rokeby"
2003-03-27 until 2003-06-21
Goethe Institut Inter Nationes Gallery
Toronto, ON, CA Canada

This exhibition is presented by the Goethe Institut Gallery within the contexts of Digifest 2003 and The Images Festival of Independent Film and Video, as well as Contact 2003. Sorting Daemon is a site specific new media installation, a computer surveillance system, that orders, analyses, interprets, and rearranges public spaces so as to make significant aesthetic and social statements. The installation questions systematized and automated visual discrimination and the multiple meanings and uses of captured images. In a post September 11 world it becomes ever more urgent to enter into a dialogue with the multiple perspectives of this art work.

David Rokeby, winner of both the prestigious Governor General's Award and the Prix Ars Electronica, one of the artists to represent Canada at the last Venice Biennale of Architecture, has worked for years exploring real-time video processing, perception and surveillance on the one hand, and "machine intelligence," knowledge and databases on the other hand. He is a remarkably sophisticated and critical thinker. In the present display of continually changing and altered images, the artistic, technical, and political dimensions of this quest are taken to new levels of exploration and interpretation.

During the Images Festival (April 10-19) David Rokeby publicly discusses the themes of technology and surveillance with German artist Harun Farocki, who opens his installation entitled "I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts" in the Present Tense Series of the Art Gallery of Ontario on April 9. The talk takes place on Sunday, April 13th, 3pm at Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex Ave.). Both exhibitions are thematically related. In order to allow our visitors to better make the transition to the work of Farocki, the Goethe Institut Gallery is showing Harun Farocki's "Eye Machine" on a monitor in the Goethe Institut Library.

A live web cast of the opening at http://www.imagesfestival.com/source

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