Twice per year, the Art Gallery of Calgary organizes a guided walking tour of several art galleries in the city's downtown core. On Saturday, March 20, a balmy and blue-skied first day of spring, I joined a group of enthusiastic art lovers led by Jaime-Brett Sine, Manager of Public and Education Programs at AGC, and set out to see what Calgary's art scene had to offer. The tour was comprised mainly of visits to commercial galleries and after exhausting myself trying to explain the monetary value of minimalist painting to my not so art savvy companion ("Ok, so tell my why this costs $40,000!") it was a relief to finally arrive at TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary, a small and dynamic artist-run centre located in the heart of the city.
TRUCK is an active presence in the Calgary art community aspiring to present innovative and experimental contemporary art to incite local dialogue. Their current show, Open Tuning (WaveUp) is an electronic installation by Halifax-based computer and creative electronics artist Stephen Kelly. The installation consists of four kinetic sculptures mounted with speakers and motors to produce mechanical movement and a variety of low humming and clicking noises. These four components are accompanied by two maps showing the location of buoys on the Alaskan and Canadian East coasts. Having a keen interest in new media and robotics I eagerly entered the small space of the TRUCK main gallery. As I moved into the room the noises became clearer and I could distinguish the various sounds of ocean waves coming through the speakers.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada maintains several buoys in areas along the coast of Canada, which collect real-time ocean wave data available via the Internet. For Open Tuning (2008) Kelly draws on this service to obtain accurate, real-time information about ocean swells. This information is collected by a computer permanently connected to the Internet which acts as a main controller for the installation. This computer automatically downloads new buoy data every 15 minutes which is then analyzed by custom software designed by Kelly. The software translates wave characteristics into sounds that fluctuate in pitch, volume and timber in direct correspondence to the various characteristics of ocean swells; ocean waves are recreated as sound waves. These sound waves are projected into the gallery by the speakers mounted on the four kinetic components.
Each speaker is connected to a motor which allows the speaker to be physically animated in a variety of ways. The speakers oscillate, vibrate, and swing side to side in real-time synchronicity with the ocean swells. When the sea is calm, the sounds are low in pitch and volume and the movement of the speakers is slow and subtle. When the sea is rough, the sounds are more varied in pitch and volume, and the movement of the speakers is faster and wider.

Like many such immersive installation environments, the experience of the work is influenced by the viewer's previous experiences, preconceptions and state of mind during the interaction. I have never fully experienced interacting with the ocean; I found the bustle and chatter of the other members of the tour group distracting; I was drawn to the maps and their legible data and topographical markings; I was fascinated by the mechanical behavior of the kinetic sculptures independent of the sounds they were emitting or the corresponding ocean data that dictated their movement. Meanwhile my companion excitedly theorized about how the different movements of the machines must correspond with different forces and depth of waves; he was right. Having spent most of his life close to the ocean, Open Tuning allowed him to effortlessly connect to ocean waves even in the middle of landlocked Calgary Alberta.
Mediation through virtual environments largely depends upon the ability of the viewer to reference, in some way, real world environments; as much as I enjoyed the computational and robotic environment of Open Tuning, for me, the mechanized experience of the ocean remained as abstract as minimalist painting.