Touching the Telectroscope

In May 2008, two enormous drills burst upward through piers on the South Bank, London (Figure Via the magic of satellite video conferencing, spectators, for a small fee, could wave and dance and scrawl messages to their counterparts across the pond. The massive faux-Victorian viewing tubes were only the tangible manifestations of a more elaborate fiction. On an accompanying web site and blog, the artist tells the story of his (imaginary) greatgrandfather, Alexander Stanhope St George, who began construction of the 3460 mile tunnel in the 1890s but was forced to abandon the dig because of a series of disastrous mishaps. Lost from history, the project lay dormant until Paul St George 'rediscovered' his fictitious great-grandfather's plans and set out to complete both the transatlantic tunnel and the Telectroscope (see Figure

Haptic technology · Simulation · Computer Science · Teleoperation and Haptic Systems