tomtaylor.co.uk

If you live in London or New York, and been down to either of their most recognisable bridges recently, you’ll have noticed a strange sight bursting out of the ground. The Telectroscope connects the Tower and Brooklyn bridges together through a tube of light, allowing people at both ends to see each other.

Hardly anyone knows that a secret tunnel runs deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean. In May 2008, more than a century after it was begun, the tunnel has finally been completed. An extraordinary optical device called a Telectroscope has been installed at both ends which miraculously allows people to see right through the Earth from London to New York and vice versa.

Of course, the story is great, and along with the fantastic design of the actual devices, helps to add to the magic of the whole experience. In fact, the story isn’t far from the truth - there are tunnels that run between the two cities, and they have been there for over 100 years. The most recent one is called TAT-14 and it carries up to 64×10Gbps of internet traffic over fibre optic cabling.

Obviously, the story has capture people’s imagination, and keeping it alive has been core to the media interest generated by the artist. However, for me, this is the least interesting part of the whole thing. The beauty of the telectroscope lies in the nature of the whole experiment.

The telectroscope sets up a permanent link between two points on Earth, thousands of miles apart, in a manner that is persistent and seamless. There’s no gadgetry to understand - one simply stands in front of the telectroscope and waves. It’s a window into another world, and other lives.

The importance of this clicked when a colleague spotted two people, one at each end of the tunnel, having a conversation over mobile phones. I loved this idea, and I began to imagine how you could expand upon it.

I envisioned a telectroscopic network spread throughout the world, connecting all manner of cities, not just London and New York. I imagined simple devices, without the steampunk-esque glamour, perhaps the size of a bus stop advertising horde. They would stand upright, dotted around parks and public spaces, each one forming a permanent connection to its partner thousands of miles away.

Like all interesting things the technology is simple - a large, relatively low resolution screen, a webcam and an internet connection, built strong to withstand the inevitable onslaught of public life.

They would form a shared public space, enabling people to do anything from casual meetings (”I’ll meet you at the telectroscope in 20 mins”), to lazily lying on the grass watching another world go past.

Maybe they’d give us a finger on the pulse of a distant land, or maybe they’d just be cool for a while and get burned by yobs. Maybe someone should build a few and see.