Taplow House
Regeneration, as viewers of Doctor Who know, is a dramatic process, as one artifact is transformed and rebuilt into another with a divergent personality and differing energies. Similarly urban regeneration with its shifting socio-spatial structures and flows of capital; a cycle that involves artists acting as complicit agents in the transformation of an area, of repopulating sites during the business of decanting, instruments both in the process of amelioration and dispossession.
On one of the largest regeneration projects in the UK, Ian Dawson and Louisa Minkin sought to explore these contradictory positions of optimism and despair. They sought to take the recording practices of contemporary archaeology onto the Taplow House estate and worked with more than 40 young people in collecting new images on this terminal estate. Sequences of workshops with the drop-in youth centre were devised to record the area and the community with new technologies such as laser scanning and photogrammetry, the very same imaging technologies employed to create the glossy virtual images that sell the arriving luxury apartments off-plan.
The appropriation of these technologies created an extensive document of partial recordings, lossy data sets of climbing frames, self-portraits and play areas. Digital objects created through the misuse of these technologies became monstrous reproductions that interrupted ideas of consistent manufacture promoting the emergence of difference; assembling a compelling imagining of the estate before its demolition.