David Rokeby, Toronto new media artist, talked about his work here in Kitchener last night, in conjunction with the CAFKA-Haptic contemporary art festival. The installation that he brought with him, a project that obsessed him for over a decade, is called the "Very Nervous System." In the words of Marcel Duchamp, he now classifies this project as 'definitively unfinished.' It has much yet to offer, but not in Rokeby's hands.
This incarnation of the installation sits just outside of the front doors of Kitchener City Hall and is almost entirely invisible. In fact, an unobservant visitor could walk right through it without noticing that it was there at all. The Very Nervous System consists of a small hidden camera, a few speakers, and some clever computing. The camera and computer divide a zone of space into a number of small segments, and Rokeby programs a palette of sounds that are produced by movements through the zones. In keeping with the haptic theme of this year's festival, the sounds are locally produced recordings of hands moving over tools, materials, and hardware. Though this is not a very difficult thing to do with current technology, Rokeby's first version of the work, in the early 1980's, required him to build his own cameras and to program the entire effort in something that only the bravest go near these days -- 'assembly language programming' - Rokeby's apt analogy was that writing in assembly was a bit like sculpting using atoms.
There was much to interest me in Rokeby's talk, but one idea captured my mind completely. Rokeby explained that at some point in the development of the project, he came to feel that the computer was beginning to anticipate his movements. He tried various kinds of 'gunslinger' games to try to initiate a movement before the speakers announced his movement with a sound, but he found that he could never do so. The sound of his movement always seemed to precede his decision to make a movement by a fraction of a second. Rokeby delved into the neuroscience literature and discovered the work of Benjamin Libet, who has shown, astonishingly, that we somehow become conscious of a decision to act some time after the decision has actually been made. The experiments are clever. They involve asking a participant to watch a sweeping clock hand while making random and unpredictable decisions to carry out a simple movement. When they report the location of the clock hand at the time they felt they made the decision, brain and muscle traces always report that the bodily activity accompanying the movement has already begun when the conscious 'decision' is being made. This finding, fascinating all by itself, has rippling implications. A friend of mine (in fact the person who introduced me to Rokeby's work about a year ago) advised me to spend a lot of quality time in the Very Nervous System. "The longer you spend in the space, the better the experience becomes because the computer learns about you," he said. As it turns out, this is not true at all, but it resonates with Rokeby's experiences with this and other installations that the more closely peoples' actions are monitored, the more detailed and fine-grained the surveillance, the more they feel they are having a truly interactive experience. Our mental confusion about when things happen, the smearing of event time, can invert our commonplace constructions of causality.
In short: our conscious selves don't exactly have the kind of access to our decision-making processes that we might think. Decisions seem not to originate in conscious acts of will, but somewhere else. Consciousness somehow skiffs along the surface of our actions, noting them, constructing interesting and entertaining accounts of what we do, but not really providing the motive force. As Rokeby points out, there are some ominous overtones. Lacking a firm grasp on when we do things, we won't necessarily know why we act.
Rokeby and Stelarc make a fine pair at this festival. Stelarc robbed me of my 'where' and now Rokeby questions my 'when'. This has been a dazzling and slightly disorienting week of ideas for me.
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