Taplow House: Room 001

'Taplow House' was a collaborative exhibition between Ian Dawson and Louisa Minkin.

* How can artists work with new visualization technologies?
* How do the instrumental tools of technologized vision, techniques such as photogrammetry, reflectance transformation imaging [RTI] and 3D scanning, inflect knowledge production?
* What happens when we ‘look’ at historic objects with para-epistemological hardware?
* Can we use cooperative digital technologies to construct a communal optic?

In trying to grasp how we might put these technologies to work, we used them against the grain, taking cultural heritage recording practices to the Aylesbury Estate in South London. Taplow House on the Aylesbury had a row of forgotten shops – a cab office, a laundrette, a butcher’s - a street in the sky that was closed up in the early seventies: our recent past eroded, a stratigraphy of the mundane. This site is currently under siege: demolition has begun.

Our archaeological colleagues referred to our recording attempts at Taplow House as ‘dirty RTI’. We had become interested in the artefacts of the process itself, the shiny black ball used to register each shot, the camera recording itself in a mirror, dirt on the screen, clouds and ripples in the processing; excitable and sensuous surfaces. Constructing the buildings in 3D software produced ruined monuments from the future, unstable depopulated sites, ‘inadequate descriptive systems’ of expropriation and dispossession.

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