The Long Road from the Farm

For two years, artist Esther Polak carried a compass to help her find her way around in Amsterdam. Since then, spatial awareness has been the core element in her work. “Was it easy to find?" she asks when I arrive at her studio in Amsterdam. Laughing, I admit having had trouble with the abstractly designed route map I got from her website. Polak, herself obsessed by the experience of space, can relate.

Her interest in the GPS system started with a sailing trip on the Lauwersmeer, a lake in the northern Netherlands. “After the trip you could see by the marks on the GPS meter how big the lake was, when we had taken breaks, and which directions the wind had been coming from," says Polak, 43. "I was fascinated." The result was a GPS art project in Amsterdam. “There was a historiographic exhibition of maps of Amsterdam at the municipal archives in 2002. I wanted to exhibit the latest map of Amsterdam, and so I set up the project Amsterdam Realtime in collaboration with the Waag Society for Old and New Media. We gave GPS units to sixty Amsterdam residents, and for two months we kept track of their routes. Then we used a computer programme to make the traces that resulted from this into a new map of the city."

Personal geographies

Looking at maps makes it easy to see that our relationship to our environment is strongly determined by the way that environment is portrayed, Polak says. “Try using a water map to walk through a landscape; you will be very aware of the water. A map where motorways are clearly visible will make you constantly aware of the noise of cars in the background. And a GPS system gives you another totally new walking experience. Through the forestry commission, I recently made a GPS trip. We walked through the countryside for hours, guided by the unit. Later I discovered that we’d actually been walking in a very small field.

“So really everyone needs their own map: a skater wants to know the quality of the asphalt, a birdwatcher wants to know where to find interesting species. The fact that everyone has their own spatial pattern, their own view of reality, is something I show in my work."

Polak’s map of Amsterdam attracted a lot of notice; one outcome was an invitation to participate in a workshop on locative media organised by RIXC, a new media centre in Latvia. There she worked with the 30-year-old researcher Ieva Auzina for the first time, and together they came up with the MILK project. “We followed milk transport from the cow’s udder in Latvia to the consumer’s mouth in the Netherlands," Polak says. “To do it, we gave a GPS receiver to everyone in the chain, from the farmer in Latvia through the transporter all the way down to the consumer in the Netherlands, and registered their movements for a day. We put all that data together using visualisation software and supplemented it with photographs of the people and comments by them, to make an interactive installation that gives a good picture of the milk’s journey. It makes people aware of the road milk has to travel before it can be drunk."

Landscape’s new dimension

Polak was classically trained as a painter at art school in the Hague, so the move to new media art was not an obvious one. But she remembers well how the seeds of her passion for space were sown at the academy. “The Dutch impressionist landscape painters of the 19th century, including Mauve, who painted heaths with flocks of sheep, really appealed to me," she says. “Mauve shows several dimensions of the landscape in his paintings. His depictions of shepherds, society’s underclass, are evidence of his social-realistic consciousness, and that adds a dimension to the space. I wondered how I could best represent our current economic relationship with the landscape. By sitting on a stool by the side of the road and painting blast furnaces? That didn’t really feel right. And then I realised I could use new technology. Because our experience of the contemporary landscape is strongly determined by new visualisation technologies like GPS. Since then, I’ve been in the new-media and locative-media corner."

Polak doesn’t just incorporate the technological mediation of reality in her art. She also regularly writes about it, and she organises courses in how to look at images. “I want people to look consciously," she says. “We may live in a so-called visual culture, but we have hardly any visual language. Pictures on TV are almost always subtitled, and the camerapeople all too often focus on the mouth, on speech. The wealth of images should get more attention, as far as I’m concerned."