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 (2002) For William Henry Fox Talbot (The Pencil of Nature) 2002 A site-specific installation by Chris Meigh-Andrews for "Digital Responses", an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Sept. - Oct. 2002.
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| A solar (photovoltaic) panel has been installed and positioned on the roof of Lacock Abbey directly above the large latticed window, which was first photographed by William Henry Fox-Talbot in August 1835. Electricity produced from this solar panel has been harnessed to power a digital video camera focused on the window and composed to exactly reproduce the image made famous in Fox Talbot's pioneering 'photogenic drawing'. This digital facsimile is being relayed via an ISDN phone line to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The resultant 'live' digital image of the window is projected onto a sheet of translucent Perspex to present a full size 'live' image of the abbey window in 'real time'. This shimmering digital replica of the oriel window at Lacock is being presented in a special display beside an original copy Fox-Talbot's book, The Pencil of Nature (Longman,Brown,Green & Longmans London, 1844.) the worlds' first book illustrated with photographs. This
installation establishes a complex web of interrelationships between
art, technology, light, time, and physical space. There are references
to the origins of photographic imaging, to the nature and significance
of light and vision and its relationship to the flow of communication
systems, and to the interconnecting of two geographically separate
sites. The work uses "renewable energy" as a metaphor,
as the daylight at the site of the abbey and passing through an
historic (and culturally significant) window sets the entire work
in motion. Through the installation, past, present and future are
linked electronically, geographically and conceptually.
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