Documentation of Workshop 1 (April 2008)
Research Theme 2: Investigating Complex Systems
Members:
Brian Dillon, Jeremy Millar, James Dixon
Synopsis of Group's Discussions:
We appreciate that, with reference to Bruno Latour, any event enrols an emergent network of people, things, places, ideas and so on. At Bletchley Park, the network involved in the decoding of a single message is impossible to analyse as each is directly related to real world events (as both cause and effect) that are unknown within the bounds of the site. In effect, although a bombe decoding machine can analyse 150 million million million combinations of letters, incorporating the contents of these coded messages and the consequences of their unravelling involves an equation whose variables have infinite possible value.
How to configure, describe or even simply appreciate such an immensely complex system is at the centre of our work. We aim to display Bletchley Park in terms of the coded messages that are its reason for being.
However, as stated above, the network surrounding the process of making, decoding and disseminating information from messages is, in Bletchley’s case, unknowable. What we aim to do is take a contemporary perspective towards this historic complex system by thinking about coded messages in terms of their post-emergent qualities. By this we mean the network’s implicated properties rather than those enrolled during the actual process of decoding.
In doing this, we are investigating complex systems semi-archaeologically, working from the contemporary properties of historic code sequences back to their origin.
James Dixon
I aim to look at the decoding of a message in terms of its spatial configuration. Functional buildings and sites are often described in archaeology in terms of the process they enable or contain. When, as in the case of Bletchley, the incoming material is an unknown and the destination of ‘the product’ is an unknown, the process flow within the site cannot be rendered simply. My input to this case study will be to investigate, through archaeology, how to depict and spatially analyse a process with infinite variables and within which the only known is a machine with 150 000 000 000 000 000 000 possible combinations. I will draw on work surrounding ‘writing event’ and on scientific models for graphically depicting infinite equations.
Brian Dillon
In the context of this case study, my interest in Bletchley Park has first of all to do with the extent to which the systems and structures imagined and realised there may be seen in the context of a culturally Modernist moment. The complexity and immateriality of the labour undertaken at Bletchley are more than analogous to the experiments of writers, artists and musicians in the immediate pre- and post-war years. The avant-garde novelist Christine Brooke-Rose, for example, has written of her work there as an education in complexity itself, and in the possibility of conceptualizing ‘the other’. I would propose to reconstruct some of the Modernist history of Bletchley Park, with specific reference to Brooke-Rose’s time there, but more broadly also to set this specific history in the context of a cultural history of complex systems in Modernist literature and art. Given the very immateriality and evanescence of the systems being reimagined here, it is to be expected that such a project would also involve a certain fictional element.
Jeremy Millar
to follow
Before the next session, we will aim to incorporate a mathematician into our group.
Outputs
It is hoped that this case study will contribute towards a funding proposal and it seems that a project of this kind would be eminently fundable as an AHRC or even Arts Council project.
Although this will likely be the principal direction in which we take the project, we also believe that the project has the potential to contribute directly and innovatively to the AHRC/EPSRC Heritage Science agenda.
