ROOM 16　SHIRO TAKATANI

Shiro Takatani was a founding member of Dumb Type, an artists’ group formed in 1984. He has worked with videography, lighting, graphic design and stage set design. In 1998, while continuing his activities with Dumb Type, Takatani also began pursuing solo projects in the form of video installations and performances using cameras, prisms, and other optical apparatus. With photography as his starting point, he continues to explore ways of raising optical phenomena to the level of art, both repurposing cutting-edge technologies and returning to the earliest forms of optical equipment in his experiments with technique. He is active in a range of artistic fields, and often collaborates with artists in other genres. His 2008 performance La chambre claire turned a theatre into a camera lucida, and in 2018 he worked with Ryuichi Sakamoto on the collaborative performance ST/LL.
In the usual process of taking a photograph, an image is created on the film by the light that comes through the lens at the moment the shutter drops. In Takatani’s Topograph, images are obtained using a repurposed piece of industrial equipment called a line scanner, which scans the space vertically. The resulting images do not have the perspective distortion seen in photographs taken through lenses, rendering the scanning process’s sense of time more apparent.
In Toposcan, a work of videography created using the same method of scanning the plane line by line, space is captured without depth or vanishing point. This produces an image quite different from projections based on linear perspective. Both Topograph and Toposcan let the viewer “see” the world through a digital scanner that captures space in a manner utterly unlike human eyesight or optical apparatus such as cameras based on how our eyes function, creating an entirely new visual experience.