Several of his works have addressed issues of digital surveillance, including Watch (1995), Taken (2002), and Sorting Daemon (2003). Taken was exhibited at the Witney Museum of American Art in New York in 2007. Another of his surveillance works, Watched and Measured (2000) was awarded the first BAFTA award for interactive art from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2000.

Other works engage in a critical examination of the differences between human and artificial intelligence. The Giver of Names (1991-) and n-cha(n)t (2001) are artificial subjective entities, provoked by objects or spoken words in their immediate environment to formulate sentences and speak them aloud.

David Rokeby's installations have been exhibited extensively in the Americas, Europe and Asia. He has been featured in retrospectives at Oakville Galleries (2004), FACT in Liverpool (2007), the CCA in Glasgow (2007) and the Art Gallery of Windsor (2008). He has been an invited speaker at events around the world, and has published two papers that are required reading in the new media arts faculties of many universities.

In 2002, Rokeby was awarded a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts, the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art (for n-cha(n)t) and represented Canada at the Venice Biennale of Architecture with Seen (2002). In 2004 he represented Canada at the São Paulo Bienal in Brazil. In 2007 he completed major art commissions for the Ontario Science Centre and the Daniel Langlois Foundation in Montréal. His 400 foot long, 72 foot high sculpture entitled long wave was one of the hits at the Luminato Festival in Toronto (2009).

Recent projects include a series of video works which explore the patterns traced by movements across time, an installation evoking the presence of Marshall McLuhan in the coach house where he worked for the 2010 Contact Festival, and a new interactive sound installation entitled “Dark Matter” commissioned by Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh. He is currently preparing a new work for the opening of the Ryerson Gallery and Research Centre in Toronto in 2011.

2010
Audio Space, Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh, U.S.A.
David Rokeby: Recent Works, Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto, Canada (solo)
CODE Live, Cultural Olympiad for Vancouver 2010, Vancouver Public Library, Vancouver, Canada
Sorting Daemons, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada

2009
Mois de la Photo, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montréal, Canada
eARTS BEYOND, Shanghai Oriental Pearl TV Tower, Shanghai, China
See This Sound, Lentos Museum, Linz, Austria
LuminaTO 2009, Brookfield Place, Toronto, Canada

2008
Mirrored States, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, Australia
Synthetic Time, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China
Plots Against Time, Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto, Canada (solo)
The Lining of Forgetting, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, U.S.A.
Plotting Against Time, Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, Canada (solo)

2007
e-art, Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal, Montréal, Canada
Profiling, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, U.S.A.
David Rokeby: Silicon Remembers Carbon (retrospective), CCA, Glasgow, and FACT, Liverpool, U.K. (solo)
Feedback, Laboral, Gijón, Spain
Transmediale, Academie der Kunst, Berlin, Germany

2005
Kodak Lecture, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada

2004
panel member, "Architectures of Vision,” Kunsthaus Graz, Graz Austria

2002
lecture, Flow, Doors of Perception, Amsterdam, Netherlands

1996
workshop leader, MasterClasses in Electronic Art, Copenhagen, Denmark

1995
panel member in Info-Art Talk Show, Kwangju Biennale, Kwangju, Korea

1991
artist-in-residence, Residency on the BioApparatus, Banff Centre, Banff, Canada