The fantasy wrapping the Telectroscope is wonderful on its face. The idea of a tunnel under the Atlantic and a "telectroscope" that allows us to see each other is an interesting thing to ponder.
Even better though, is watching strangers on two continents waving and making faces and writing notes to each other. People who would never see each other in the "normal" world writing notes telling the person at the other end to "jump!" or "touch your nose". The skeptic behind me who kept saying "it's way later over there...it would already be dark" laughing when people waved back at him.
It's not riveting theatre, it is interesting real life. Go, hang out a while. You will get hooked and you might make friends who will let you surf their couch the next time you visit.
You might even see a wedding party making interesting photos. This was my second trip to the Telectroscope and my second wedding party.
I went to the Brooklyn side of the Bridge on Tuesday to the Fulton Ferry Landing and ..... the Telectroscope is emerging. Rainy Day on the waterside, not too many people there but some interesting convergences.. also an article in the NY Times today. The upside-down drill bit .. it is coming up from the tunnel .. is slowly rotating, and just sort of working its way up out of the ground, though it made no progress while I was watching.
It was raining all day and part of what makes New York the best place in the world to live is that serendipity flourishes here. Catch the wedding couple having their pictures taken under a red umbrella behind it. I tried to get them in as much as possible.
I have had several people email me with comments similar to the ones that the Yarn Harlot reports. People tell her that she could buy socks for $1 at K-Mart instead of knitting them - as if she could possibly not know that. People ask me when they read my previous post "You don't really BELIEVE this !(insert worried brow wrinkles) Do you?" or they say "You know this isn't REAL, right?"
Well, it is REAL. The drill bit is REAL and it is REALLY turning. What is the wonder for me, and why I am so interested in this is that seeing it, whatever it turns out to look/work like, is that it requires what I call "a willing suspension of disbelief." I might have read that phrase somewhere, and if you know where, please let me know. The point is that like The Angel Project, which was here several years ago and is a fundamental piece of my art-brain, and like a lot of the work of Ann Hamilton, this creates a space into which you and your imagination can enter and wander about. The fact that Artichoke is involved and how much I loved the Sultan's Elephant is icing on the cake. (By the way, that links to a different video than the one of the Giantess that is here. Suspend disbelief for a little while.
http://blog.telectroscope.org/ It is part of the 125th birthday party for the Brooklyn Bridge and it will allow people in New York to wave at people in the UK.. .... realtime. In London it is on the Thames near Tower Bridge.
Now I know I have reader(s) in the UK.. Does somebody want to try to set up a time and see if it works??? There is a way to email Telectroscope and schedule a time so that you can actually wave at people whom you either know or might recognize on the other end of "the device, which purports to connect New Yorkers with Londoners using giant parabolic mirrors installed in a forgotten Trans-Atlantic tunnel." These are the same people who did the Sultan's elephant http://abovethegwb.blogspot.com/2008/02/artichoke-is-maybe-coming-to-new-york.html that I was/am so enamoured of and wish I had seen.
There is a video on that link if you want to see what I am going on about. I am hoping I can go down on Tuesday when "a gargantuan drill will rise up half-way from the East River near the Brooklyn Bridge. Another drill will rise in the Thames near the Tower Bridge." That should let me scope this whole thing out. Pictures then, if I can get close enough.
