On my way to meet artist Wesley Goatley, I accidentally wander into the Colossus Building somewhere behind Bletchley Park, where a perfect facsimile of a Bletchley debutante, transported into 2016, greets me with a cheerful hello. This is Margaret Sale, who, with her husband Tony Sale, entirely rebuilt the Colossus codebreaking computer after Churchill had ordered the machine to be broken apart after the war. As Sale fiddles with a huge wall of wires, like something out of the sweaty scene in Lethal Weapon, I realise that I am in the presence of an engineering genius, on a site of significant historical importance.
It is beside Sale’s creation that Goatley and his partner Georgina Voss are building part of their own piece of tech beauty, an artwork called Ground Resistance commissioned for the IF: Milton Keynes International Festival from 15-24 July. This installation is part soundscape, part data map, and part flightpath, pulling together much of the technology created and still used in the area today. The UK Air Traffic Control, Open University’s MK Smart hub, and those stone age computers screwed into being in Bletchley Park are all just a circuit board’s throw from where I’m standing now, listening to Goatley talk about aerials.
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Wesley Goatley at the National Museum of Computing. Image: Nell Frizzell
Ground Resistance is a two-part installation exploring the concept of the “smart city” and how Milton Keynes—one of Britain’s most famous “new towns” and close neighbour to Bletchley Park—appears through the data that it generates. As part of the installation, Goatley and Voss will run a cable out of a nearby window and collect a “full bandwidth” of all the data swarming above our heads, using a 30cm antennae bought off Amazon and attached to a USB stick. “They’re basically a radio interface with laptops—you can buy them for a tenner,” said Goatley. “But someone discovered a couple of years ago that they’re not hard-coded into certain frequencies so you can use them as full band receivers. So you can demodulate any kind of encoding.”
Once the data has been collected, it will be interpreted, live, into a constantly-updating map. Visitors will put on headphones to listen to the transmission of that data and watch as it gets translated into a spread of rolling figures, land maps, and moving parts. “People will hear a rhythmic pattern of high frequency beeps among static,” explained Goatley. “You might even be able to match the live data you’re hearing with the way it’s encoded into the visual map. So it’ll be nice to compare how minimal that data actually is, as a sound, with how maximal the output is.” A beep to a plane perhaps, or a low hum to a weather front.
This part of the installation will sit in the National Museum of Computing, right beside the clicking, blinking, clattering maths engine that is Colossus. It is a perfect situation for the work: Next door is a room of early computers that looks, to be honest, like a launderette from 1974. There is also the strangely musical Harwell Dekatron Computer or Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell (WITCH), the oldest known computer in continual use. While wandering through the small, strangely municipal museum, Goatley and I found ourselves standing beside a thigh-height metal disc that can hold, wait for it, a whole 4MB of data—about the same as a single high-res JPEG. Suddenly, the “smart city” seems a very long way off.
Wesley Goatley at the National Museum of Computing. Image: Nell Frizzell
The second part of the Ground Resistance installation will be in a retail unit, literally next door to Greggs, in centre:mk, a modernist retail wet dream in the middle of Milton Keynes’ grid of a city. In this unit, Voss and Goatley are creating a 4 m x 22.9 m interactive data map of the city, from Newport Pagnell at one corner down to Bletchley in the other, projected straight on to the shopfloor.
Each data point will show the decay from a different API—i.e the gap between uploads from a different sensor—as a fading light and sound. Each will be at its brightest and loudest at the point of update and then fading into black. Some of them will be very slow—over 30 minutes—with others flicking on every second. (There will also be gaps for where we have data dead zones—entirely sensorless and unrecorded spots in the city). Goatley is even considering using bells from local churches to provide the soundtrack for each API, a hint at his background as a musician and sound artist. “Church bells are considered the earliest form of industrial technology,” he told me over a cup of coffee in a nearby Costa. “In the 11th century, churches were synchronising a large number of people for the first time. When the bell rings, that’s when you wake up and go to wherever you’re working.”
“As the principal planner for Milton Keynes said, you can’t build a city for a determined future, because there are only indeterminate futures.”
Wesley talks about history quite a lot, especially for a man who’s dedicated his art to exploring man’s interaction with technology. When I asked what a “smart city” actually is, he gave this response: “‘Smart city’ is building on a very long human history of top-down governance. In this country we can look back to the Doomsday Book as an institution that thought, ‘How can we make sense of populations?’ Suddenly, the value of having data on what your population were doing—their name, movement, income activity—was incredibly valuable. We’ve seen that through the history of the census even since Roman times. Data is not a new thing, especially as a tool of governance.”
There are, of course, several smart cities already in existence; most notably the Songdo International Business District next to Seoul where, Goatley argues, the technology is “baked into” the infrastructure. But could Milton Keynes ever become the same? Could this “new town” really use all that data to predict and adapt to changes of population, economy, climate and behaviour?
“In terms of closeness, it’s hard to say,” Georgina told me over email. “Urban spaces are already threaded with data-gathering devices—for example, the thermal sensors used to track foot traffic in Olympic Village, Stratford, or the hundreds of thousands of CCTV cameras across London. These devices and data-streams aren’t necessarily seamless, ubiquitous, or integrated; with material from them consolidated from disparate sources, owned by different bodies with varying intentions, and operating under different degrees of openness and control. Even with ramp-ups in processing power and security needed, there’s no definite end-point to make a ‘smart city.’”
Cities are already smart, argued Goatley. We can record movement, weather, communication, finance, heat use, what television programmes are getting watched, who has a smart electricity metre and on and on. But why? Why do we bother?
“Because of our faith that data will help us to make objective decisions for the future,” said Goatley. “So we keep collecting data, even though we don’t yet have the capability to analyse it at scale. In truth, as the principal planner for Milton Keynes said, you can’t build a city for a determined future, because there are only indeterminate futures. We don’t know where it’s going to go. So all we can do is use data from the past and imagine where things might go.”
