Arnold Rockman

Arnold Rockman is a Canadian sociologist and professor at York University in Toronto, where he taught communications and cultural theory. His teaching explored how institutions and environments shape meaning, which guided his work on exhibitions and writing critical essays during the 1960s. Through this, he examined how context shapes perception, asking what happens when ordinary objects or new technologies are framed as art.

In 1964 Rockman co-authored The Electronic Computer as an Artist in Canadian Art with Leslie Mezei, a Hungarian-Canadian computer scientist and one of the earliest computer art practitioners in North America. The essay was the first published work of computer art criticism in Canada and examined whether computers could generate images that merited critical attention. It marked the moment when Canadian art discourse first addressed the computer, bringing a technical subject into a mainstream art magazine and introducing the idea of machine-generated images to a general audience. Rockman’s perspective connected questions of communication and social meaning to the emerging field of computer art, arguing that the placement of computer-generated images within the discourse of art raised new questions about authorship, creativity, and the role of technology in shaping cultural value.

In 1968 he organized Random Sample, N=42 at the University of British Columbia Fine Arts Gallery. Working with his York students, he used chance operations to select and arrange everyday objects, which were then retrieved and displayed in the gallery. The project displaced items like clothing and furniture from their usual environments and forced them to be read as artworks once positioned in the exhibition. Random Sample, N=42 took place during UBC’s Festival of the Contemporary Arts, where it appeared alongside works by Intermedia artists.