I once went for a walk with David Rokeby in Gairloch Gardens. It was the early spring of 2001. Oakville Galleries had commissioned a new, site-specific work from him for an upcoming exhibition, Earthly Delights: Deep Gardening, a project that explored the garden as a social and political site. We were wandering in order for David to get a sense of this garden and its relationship to the Gallery.

The remarkable work he created for that commission, Machine for Taking Time (2001–), was on view all that summer. But it didn’t disappear when the exhibition was over. You might notice it today, a small surveillance camera mounted on a wooden beam just outside a bay window on the lake side of the Gallery. The camera bobs and tilts, panning back and forth recording images of the garden, the lake, the sky and the people who are present. It might be mistaken for a security camera, mounted for the "protection" of the public gardens and the Gallery. The camera records over 1,000 images a day and stores them in its archive, building a rich memory of the panorama over time. While the view is always the same – the camera can only see so much from its perch – the images change dramatically as seasons pass, weather takes effect and human action intervenes.

The camera has continued to capture and store this archive of images for three years.

This work will be remounted for the David Rokeby exhibition this summer. Rokeby has designed a software program that processes the images to create an exquisite and mesmerizing wander through the landscape, one that spills across the projection screen hanging inside the gallery and is framed by the window and the view of the garden beyond. Seasons slip and slide into one another in hypnotic, iridescent images that flash and linger, bending linear perceptions of time and space while the natural and human dramas unfolding in the garden are continuously recorded and reordered.

Machine for Taking Time constructs an eloquent and elliptical history of Gairloch Gardens and at the same time challenges the concept that any knowable history of this natural environment is possible. Instead, Rokeby has transformed the Gallery; images are projected onto a dreamy and alluring space where histories collide. Our eyes watch the quotidian view of the garden through the window and simultaneously we experience the shimmering rendering of that scene unfold through Rokeby’s masterful deployment of digital technologies. The cool, binary code of the computer sculpts a vision that captures the warm, sensual dimensions and the ethereal spirituality of the garden in a perceptual puzzle played out against the backdrop of the view of the garden from the Gallery’s window.

The unsettling spectre of ubiquitous surveillance technology haunts this work. We are watching the watched. Ephemeral narratives – silent, fragmented – emerge and disappear on-screen as we start to interpret and reshape the action in the garden, though we know little about what is really happening. Electronic surveillance systems are widely accepted as necessary in public art galleries and many other public spaces in our culture. There is a delicate thread that weaves subtly through Rokeby’s work, a poetic interrogation that urges us to question who is watching whom, and why, to ask what they will do with the visual information they have gathered – how will it be reconstituted and distributed and to what end?

David Rokeby’s work makes it possible for us to inhabit a hybrid space, a kind of in-between world, where his interactive sound and video installations constitute elegant and often humorous social and technological laboratories. Through his work, we can explore the realm in which machines and human beings dance. Rokeby is our guide on a journey of discovery through those ambiguous territories, acting as interpreter in the whispered conversation between the biological and the cybernetic.

David Rokeby is at the forefront of a second generation of Canadian artists who make art with computers. This exhibition brings together eight of his works selected from more than 20 created between 1983 and 2004. His prize-winning work has been exhibited extensively in Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia. A prolific writer, articulate speaker, remarkable innovator and inventor, Rokeby is renowned for creating and developing the software that drives much of his work. Born in Tillsonburg, Ontario, in 1960, he graduated with a degree in Experimental Arts from the Ontario College of Art in 1984 and is now based in Toronto.

Rokeby’s work uses computers to explore the relationships that evolve between human beings and the technologies they create. His body of work asks crucial questions about the place of the computer in our personal lives and in the broader culture. Each of the installations presented here evokes critical inquiry about the differences between human and machine perception and how we imagine consciousness.

This exhibition includes works that investigate the relationships between body and machine, the parameters of artificial intelligence and the fabricated nature of the imagery gathered from electronic surveillance. His work is distinguished in this field by a painterly and graceful aesthetic that touches a variety of senses, immersing the viewer in a complex set of interactive relationships. There is a strategic and delightful use of humour and play in much of his work. It is a teasing engagement that brilliantly opens up an interrogation of human/computer interaction, testing the limits of embodied human experience that the computer cannot know and drawing on the ineffable aspects of human consciousness that machine logic cannot deduce.

Very Nervous System (1986-2004), one of his best-known works, banishes the usual computer/human interfaces of keyboard, screen and mouse to create a "virtual environment" where cameras read body movement and computers translate that movement into sound. The giddy pleasure of pulling sound out of the air is contrasted with a prophetic tug of power and control between the human body and the computer. In The Giver of Names (1991–), Rokeby has conjured a creation that has a distinct subjectivity.Alternately dark, a little lonely and very charming, it struggles to see things, understand and articulate what it 'knows', expressing itself in a jumble of poetic but nonsensical sentences. The machine’s earnest but hapless efforts to translate and make meaning expose as much about the shifting, fluid nature of human language and memory as they do about the limits of computer database and navigation systems. For n-cha(n)t (2001), a series of computers gather together, chattering among themselves and "listening" to humans through sensual ears on video screens. They appear to be able to speak to each other and, left alone, will synchronize into an unsettling chant.

His works Watch (1995/2003), Seen (2002) and Taken (2002) all operate as perception and mirroring systems that gather visual information from public spaces, transforming and reconstructing them in mesmerizing reformations. Whether studying a busy traffic intersection on a city street, a gallery in a public museum or an historic square such as Venice’s Piazza San Marco, Rokeby reshapes the interpretative frame and asks vital questions about the possibilities and the assumptions of computer-based visioning systems.

Steamingmedia.org (2002–) takes the body as its site and suspends it in a hybrid zone between earth and air. This fully functioning sauna is equipped with surveillance cameras and ethernet connections that will allow sound and images to travel across the Internet. The steam blurs not only the screen but the boundary between very intimate public and private spaces.

David Rokeby works at the radical edge where chaos and logic brush up against each other, where the body and the machine pulse. Su Ditta