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Issue 3.03 | Mar 1995

Very Nervous System Page 1 of 4

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Artist David Rokeby adds new meaning to the term interactive.

By Douglas Cooper

David Rokeby's Very Nervous System does a SEE ALSO

number of things. But mostly it does this: it Archive Category:

watches you. This piece of art tracks the Music & Sound

slightest movement of the human body.

Computers
Rokeby wires up a space the size of a dance
floor, and whatever moves through it is
sucked into the artwork.

Very Nervous System makes something out of you. It turns you

into a symphony. Or a jazz song. Or a samba. After determining
where you are and how you're moving, Very Nervous System takes
this information and turns it into music. Movements are read,
interpreted, and turned into many layers of sound. All of this
happens in real time. So a dancer in the space is moving, in effect,
to music of his or her own creation. The word "interactive" gets
bandied about a lot these days, but Rokeby's work has been deeply
interactive for more than a decade.

Very Nervous System is a combination of technologies, some off­

the­shelf, some rare and esoteric, and some cooked up by Rokeby
himself. Initially, in 1982, much more of the system was
homemade. His circuitry, designed to speed up the response of the
sluggish Apple II, was still not fast enough to analyze an image
from an ordinary video camera, so he built his own low­res device:
a little box with 64 light sensors behind a plastic Fresnel lens. But
Very Nervous System has been evolving for 13 years, during which
time the world has seen any number of technological revolutions.
So Rokeby now has a lot more store­bought components
incorporated into the system: it can handle a Mac Quadra and real
video cameras, via sophisticated "Max" software from Paris.

The current incarnation is astonishingly fast; it is also unusually

intricate. Different pieces of a dancer's body trigger different bits
of the software: the left hand might manipulate a brass section
while the right hand influences the double bass. And the music
created is entirely coherent; it's music you want to listen to.

Artists and engineers are equally intrigued by Very Nervous

System. It was featured at the Venice Biennale, perhaps the
world's most important international art show, and routinely
dazzles graphic designers and engineers at SIGGRAPH (the trade
show for the computer graphics industry). Douglas Cooper met
Rokeby in the artist's sun­drenched studio overlooking a busy
thoroughfare in Toronto's Chinatown.

Wired: OK, I'm standing in the center of a dance floor, surrounded by

racks of sophisticated electronic equipment: computers, samplers,
synthesizers, and things I guess the world's never seen before. I've moved
around the space and seen what this piece can do: let's just say I've never
made such impressive music in my whole life. Now, how exactly did I do
that?

Rokeby:

Each instrument is basically a behavior, an electronically constructed

personality. It's watching you. It's looking out of the video camera at your
body, and taking playing cues from your movement. These behaviors are
just algorithmic definitions ­ computer subroutines. I construct them to
suggest whether this instrument, for instance, tends to play on offbeats, or
perhaps plays on offbeats but doubles its rhythm if you move faster. The
piece you just experienced has an electric guitar, an acoustic guitar, a
bass, drums, and a brass section. It's a funk piece.

Right. So who's the composer here? Me? The software? The programmer?

All of the above. Think of a jazz band: different players, each with his or
her own style. In the case of Very Nervous System, these are the
"behaviors," defined by the software. Now give good jazz players some
input ­ say, a chord chart or an old standard ­ and each player will
improvise within his or her own style.

Would it be fair to say that what you've constructed here, in Very Nervous
System, is an approximation of the human eye?

It's more like a frog's eye. The human eye is tremendously sensitive to
shape and color, whereas the frog's eye is more specialized: it has limited
static vision but highly sensitive motion sensors, so a frog can spot flies
and quickly zap them with its tongue. Our eyes read movement, but the
frog is more highly developed in this regard. By the way, our peripheral
vision is much more froglike: you don't see things on the periphery so
much as you see movement.

Douglas Cooper's first novel, Amnesia, was published by Hyperion in

March. His second, Delirium, is being serialized by Time Warner on the
Web, at: http://www.timeinc.com/ ~twep/Features/Delirium/DelTitle.html.
Page 2 >>

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