Glacial Pace

A fascinating art commission – one of two at Calgary’s new Brookfield Place skyscraper – blends the surprisingly engaging groans of the Bow Glacier with downtown sounds.

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How does time sound? Or data take form? These questions are posed with the debut of Brookfield Place, a 56-storey office tower in Calgary, and its two fascinating information-based art commissions. One is an outdoor sound and light installation, Herald / Harbinger, by Ben Rubin and Jer Thorp. The other takes the form of a gridded interior wall sculpture, The Forest and The Trees, by Micah Lexier.

Both works are interesting in their own right. But they also bring rich context to a building envisioned by Calgary architect Martin Sparrow as a marker of a specific time and place, one that’s sensitive to both the larger environment and the site’s storied history. The city’s daily newspaper, the Calgary Herald, once occupied the site, across the downtown transit line from the historic Hudson’s Bay building. Sparrow’s design offers generous public space on the building’s southeast corner, where a gently sloping plaza is paved with granite in a pattern that conjures topographical maps, a fitting introduction to the multifaceted Herald / Harbinger.

Passersby may notice the burble of running water near 16 stone benches and seven sets of vertical lights that shift in colour, speed and orientation. Their underlying logic is based on data collected and transported electronically from the Bow Glacier in Banff National Park. The glacier feeds the Bow River, which passes through Calgary several blocks to the north.

For the project, Rubin, director of the Center for Data Arts at the New School in New York City, teamed up with Edmonton-born Thorp, the 2017 innovator-in-residence at the American Library of Congress. Both were excited to try something so new they weren’t sure it could be done.

They devised a way to monitor the glacier’s movement and then imagined how to give aural form to that data. The glacier is actually eerily silent when you stand on it. But a solar-powered seismic observatory they built near the edge of the glacier uses probes to feed data about the shifting ice to Brookfield Place, where it is translated into sound and played from speakers under the benches, all with a mere five-minute delay.

Warm days and long summer evenings are optimal listening times. The range of sounds is surprising: gurgles, drips, cracks and metallic shots, even long groans that sound almost like the songs of humpback whales. They meld with the screech of CTrain brakes, accelerating car motors and the percussion of high heels. Last week, I sat entranced by this medley for four minutes and 33 seconds in homage to John Cage’s famous composition, 4’33”, which is based on a similar idea that ambient sounds constitute a kind of music.

The real-time audio mash-up in Calgary is nourishing: beautiful, always fresh and hauntingly poignant. Sadly, the glacier’s noisiest moments signal its decline. Thorp says in 50 years the ice likely will have receded so far the probes will no longer transmit data.

Thorp writes eloquently about the project in the online magazine Medium. “Standing in the centre of the plaza … you are in a place that shouldn’t exist, a somewhere that is at the same time 2,450 metres up in a 60 million year-old mountain range, and in the centre of Canada’s fastest growing city.

“It is a kind of rift in public space. You are at once at the edge of the ice of the Bow Glacier, and in the midst of tall skyscrapers filled with oil and gas company offices. You have one foot in the Pleistocene, the other in the Anthropocene. In this strange, improbable space, the everyday gains new meaning as the ring of your cell phone is answered by the sharp crack of the glacier.”

Another component of the installation, a frieze of LED lights just inside the building’s south entrance, interprets activity from three sources: the glacier (seen as horizontal movement, coloured blue for slowness); the flow of pedestrians across the plaza (a vertical feed, most energetic as the work day starts and ends); and a composite of data from 15 commuter routes through Calgary to Brookfield Place (vertical, with red indicating the highest congestion).

Brookfield Place’s other commission, Lexier’s monumental wall piece, The Forest and The Trees, functions as a sculptural amalgam of information. Winnipeg-born Lexier, the winner of a 2015 Governor General’s Award for excellence in the visual and media arts, is known for his fascination with time, numbers, increments and systems, as well as his intuitive and unerring ability to give material form and human connection to abstract ideas.

The project’s ambitious scale and square format suits the lobby’s proportions. Lexier, who is based in Toronto, created a modular construction that uses 269 tile patterns in a grid of 1,225 tiles, a design so complex it would defy even an expert Sudoku solver from sussing it out.

His creative process weaved together digital, mechanical and manual work. The source of the tile designs is a series of black-and-white cross-stitch patterns of flowers from a book he found in a secondhand store. He transformed the diagrams by cropping, rotating and flipping them to create an overall design. That design was then broken up into square tiles that were printed in low-relief plastic with a 3D printer.

The next step was to cast the tiles in aluminum and coat them with bronze. Then dark patina was applied to the top and sanded down to reveal the gleaming bronze lines. Ambient light from the building’s north-facing windows illuminates the bronze, creating gradual colour shifts. From afar, the work has the gravity and subtlety of a grand medieval tapestry. Up close, it’s a puzzle as playful as a homemade crazy quilt.

Seeing humble cross-stitch patterns as building blocks for a complex corporate commission and transforming them, one step at a time, into elegant and engaging work, is the kind of thinking we’ve come to appreciate from Lexier.

Both commissions for Brookfield Place stand as important works in the artists’ careers and are key signifiers embedded in an architecture of openness and innovation. ■

Brookfield Place is located at the corner of 7th Ave. SW and 1st St. SW in Calgary.