From the S-Bahn, through shuttling latticework of tree branch and bridge truss, you glimpse it just below Tiergarten as you travel east-to-west, or west-to-east: a five-storey blue hulk. The building levitates unnaturally above the ground, jacked up on two giant, tubular pink ducts that protrude and curl downward from its sides then join together at its base, as though it were a crab reared up in fear, or anger, or some kind of mating ritual. What is it? It’s the Versuchsanstalt für Wasserbau und Schiffbau, Research Institute for Hydraulic Engineering and Shipbuilding, outpost that Technische Universität Berlin has maintained, through a royal lease that’s somehow weathered wars, land-value hikes and all the rest, on this small, elongated island around which the Landwehr Canal bifurcates into sluiced sections before merging back into a single flow out of whose grain all knots, spirals and other traces of past interruption or obstruction have been smoothed.
Or, scanned at a res higher than most S-Bahn riders have at their disposal: it’s a complex of buildings, slotted into one another. The eye-catching, crustacean one’s the Umlauf- und Kavitationstank UT2, its looping claw a conduit capable of pumping 3,300 tonnes of water round and round at nine metres per second – perfect for wake field and cavitation research, forced motion and propulsion tests and like manner of fluid-dynamic enquiry. There, amidst the roar of a two-megawatt ship diesel engine and vibrations of the vast pump’s switch blades that shake wall and floor’s sheet panels, dramas of rarefaction and compression, cyclic stress and supercavitation play themselves out on demand, putting model hulls, rudders and propellers through their paces, coaxing from these inception numbers and erosion-progress rates. Below this towering monster, strewn about its feet like strips of food or half-spawned offspring, lie a series of long, flat hangars. It’s in one of these, the one housing the Seegangsbecken, the Seakeeping Basin or wave generator – intermittently replenished, like the UT2, by the same liquid mass diverted from and, eventually, released back into the Landwehr and thence onwards to the Spree – that today’s action is taking place.
Here, Neptune’s wrath is about to be unleashed on a platform supply vessel, an anchor handling tug and two oil rigs. Resident technician Arda Gökçek, Dipl.-Ing., VWS’s Keeper of the Sea, stands at the basin’s absorption end, moving his thumb and fingers round a MacBook’s glide-pad, scaling metrics, modifying ratios, adjusting up or down wave height and stroke length, characteristic and gravitational velocities. When the profile on his screen, the rhythm of its curves and intervals, aligns with that of today’s target values, Gökçek’s hand breaks contact with the laptop, hovers an inch or two above its keyboard while his eyes cross-check the graphic contours one last time, then falls decisively back down on the space bar. More than a hundred metres away, at the basin’s far end, the wave-generation mechanism groans; drive arms, pulleys and linkage arms, drive pegs, flange bearings and connecting rods stir, clasp and thrust, shunting a slanted flap repeatedly against the water’s bulk. And then it comes, down the long, narrow stretch, peak doubling the ceiling’s intermittent strip lights one after the other, raising each inverted, spectral light-line up towards its source before the trough swallows the reflection once more in its darkened vortex: the first wave. It’s followed by another, and another, and another, soaking the green tiles along the basin’s sides, redrawing the same high-water mark over and over with complete precision.
Do the boats and platforms sense them coming? Of course not; all propagation vectors of the medium they sit in have been plotted here, phase boundaries and resonant frequencies rendered transparent; there’s no wiggle room for ambiguity, and even less for fantasy – yet Gökçek still, each time he watches replica cities, dams or cruise ships, harbour walls or wind farms in the propagation section in the last, contracting moments just before the first wave hits, fancies that he senses, in the models’ very composition, the clinging together of their atoms, an increased level of concentrated stasis; a tensing almost, as though they were bracing themselves; as though, somehow, they knew …
Now the waves are among them, tossing and convulsing them, sending them veering – laterally and vertically, longitudinally, transversally and every which way in-between – down paths that seem quite random but in fact are not at all, that’s the whole point: cameras at the basin’s sides are tracking and translating every heave and surge and sway, identifying, within the furious tangle of the lines, some kind of pattern to be viewed both retro- and prospectively, its fuzz transmuted into clean parameters that, once modelled, can be not only scaled back up for the benefit of future offshore installation planners but also, traversing their own vectors of circulation and displacement, transferred and extrapolated and fed into who-knows-what. Over the next sixteen months, today’s worked-through data will be brought to bear on fields as variant as infrasonics and seismocardiography, the study of germ convection around airline cabins and the spread of rumour over social networks. Things are connected to other things, which are connected to other things. Yesterday, one hundred and three Asian miners died in a methane explosion; a small South American state underwent a coup; a large pod of whales beached itself off Western Europe’s coastline. The pages of Gökçek’s newspaper, lying open on a stool beside a half-drunk coffee cup, rustle as he climbs a nearby stepladder, borne upwards in his slipstream. From on high, the technician watches the boats lurching and bobbing drunkenly amidst the swells and currents, hurtling past the battered reefs of the oil platforms’ legs and anchors. The elevation calms him; he’s above the struggle, uninvolved. Visions of the Bosporus drift across his mind’s back reaches, morphing through various formations – less a place glimpsed from car windows and mosque terraces on holidays, extended family visits, than a vague ancestral memory, an idea …
The wave-generation mechanism groans; the flap shunts on to the same rhythm. The pillow-block journal bearings holding the driveshaft in place need lubricating: Gökçek can tell that from the note of irritation in its tone. On the smooth stretches of the basin’s water, before the models break its surface, there’s an outer coat of oil and dirt, a no man’s land littered by corpses of the insects lured there by the mirrored swathes of airspace and bright rafters, the false promise of companionship. The anchor-handling tug, its prow of hardened paraffin, has got itself wedged in one of the oil rigs’ leg struts. Computer modelling won’t show you everything. Sometimes you have to actually do it, make a little world, get down amidst dumb objects and their messiness. From the basin’s exterior, where it rests on J-hooks beside coils of hosing, wiring, torn canvas and string, Gökçek lifts a pike pole and leans in over the edge, trying to prise the vessel free. His right foot, raised behind him for stability, nudges the stool; coffee slops out, blotting the news pages. On a worktable beside the stool are an isopropanol spray can, a CD-ROM, a roll of toilet paper, an ice-lolly stick, a crumpled plastic glove of the type used for washing up, weights, floats, a fire extinguisher, an off-cut block of wood, a fold-out ruler, a hand-held torch, a tote bag, an external hard drive, a red marker pen, a plastic cup with small screws in it, a blue case of cross-point screwdrivers, a grease tin and a scrunched-up piece of tissue paper stained with a red substance. Further back, against the wall, models superfluous to today’s scenario are stacked: a submarine, an ICE train, fifteen wind turbines, a life-sized emperor penguin and the city of Mumbai. In front of them stands a new prop, delivered to the Institute an hour ago from London in an outsize box, the unpacking of which has strewn about the floor styrofoam plugs and wedges that, being moulded to fit tightly round the model while it was in transit, now inversely (and disjointedly) repeat the outline of their precious cargo, also styrofoam: a spaceship with distributed, partitioned fuselage- and wing-configuration and a kind of half-detached, golf-ball-like annexe teed up just above its highest section. Gökçek’s pike pole, finding its sweet spot on the tug’s hull, prods it loose. The tug capsizes momentarily, spins on its side through a full clockwise circle and a third of an anticlockwise one, then, righting itself, glides round the leg struts to find open water. The flap shunts; the wave-generation mechanism groans. Gökçek returns the pike pole to its J-hooks and moves off in search of engine oil.
Alone among the props, the emperor penguin is not only replicated at a scale of one-to-one, but also (since the effect of turbidity on shallow-substratum colour was a subject of enquiry in the session in which it recently starred) painted black, yellow and white in the appropriate places. It’s been cast in ‘porpoising’ mode: wings folded into torso, head held up in alignment with the body’s central axis, feet wedged together and pointed down vertically to form a rudder. The meticulous streamlining has been undone, though, by its positioning: to stop its out-of-water bulk rolling across the floor, its neck has been rested across the roof of a train carriage, which (since the carriage has been cast at 1:22.5) not only makes the bird seem monstrous, gargantuan, but also angles it unnaturally, un-aerodynamically upward. Made to focus on the building’s ceiling, its painted eyes seek out the skylight. Beyond this, the outside air is brisk, flushed by light breeze. Higher, much further up, two intersecting vapour trails have carved a cross against the blue – a vote cast on a ballot slip, the signature of an illiterate, an X marking the spot: Here.