Baltic Sea Radio is an art project that makes use of the Baltic Sea traffic for artistic purposes and offers a novel sonic experience to the audience. The artwork reflects the local ships’ movements in real-time and applies marine traffic as a score of a sound composition. The boats that can be reached by the AIS-receiver, which is installed in Sopot, right on the coast of Baltic Sea, are affecting and determining the score of the soundwork in real-time. Hence, we have given away the control over the sound composition to the marine data. In other words, the sound work is in a constant flux and reflects current activity of Gdansk Bay.
The artwork uses indirect post- participation concept developed by Varvara, which applies certain human or animal activity for artistic purposes without awareness of the subject in real-time. It means, the artwork is based on real life events at the moment. In the case of Baltic Sea Radio, the sound installation is affected by the ships’ movement in Gdansk Bay in real-time.
Baltic Sea Radio consists of 3 parts: the AIS-receiving station that is installed near the beach of Sopot, Poland; the listening station at the exhibition Baltic Goes Digital in the Gdansk City Gallery in Gdansk, Poland; and online radio stream that is accessible virtually to everyone during the exhibition period (14.09-04.11.12). The AIS-receiver forwards current marine traffic from Sopot to the exhibition space in Gdansk, where the listening station is installed. In the gallery space the audience is invited to take a seat in the half-boat and experience the real-time composition.
Concerning the technical realization, listening station is made out of old fishing boat that was cut into two pieces, equipped with a seat, computer and headphones. AIS-receiver is connected to a second computer, the received messages are decoded and sent to the computer in gallery space in Processing. The sound part has been realized in Pure Data.

Exhibited:
Baltic Goes Digital award show, Gdansk City Gallery, Poland (14th Sept-04th Nov’12)