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| Traversing the route: From MediaMarkt to Cameroon |
Esther Polak develops her projects around the notion of space. By using new technologies like GPS and simple robots she aims to re-orientate and shift perspectives on issues of cultural and technological development. Traversing the countryside is an important aspect in your work. How do you see the relationship between the urban and natural? I think that as a “city person” you always have to create a construct for experiencing the countryside, because it is not your “home.” My relationship with the non-urban has been a strange one. My fascination for “the country” began when I was growing up in Amsterdam, where we lived in a top-floor flat. My mother found city life particularly condemning, and jumped at any opportunity to escape to the country. The flat did have a small balcony where we tried to grow all kinds of plants, but with very mixed results. To escape the city we would rent a house in the country, go on walks and bike rides, and inevitably we had to join the NJN (an association for young people interested in nature and biology). The aim was to discover nature, and we would work and sleep in a cow shed full of all kinds of apparatus, microscopes, dead birds hanging on the wall, pieces of wood, leaves and all kinds of other paraphernalia. We felt as if we were working at a cross between a science laboratory and a working farm. These experiences were seminal to my experience of the landscape. At the NJN we always carried a little box with us when we went out to collect samples. The group was divided up in to various teams—the moss team, the plant team, the bird team, amphibians, insects, fungi, and so on. The groups were very much linked to the seasons, of course, so you had to switch around to some extent. The important thing was that each team had its own way of looking at the landscape: one group would use binoculars, the other an identification chart. This way of mediating the landscape—taking a microscope to open up the world around you—is a strange way of doing things. It creates a tension between, on the one hand, the primal directness nature as the place we all come from—and on the other hand, nature as something that is overly organized, at least in the Netherlands. Everywhere you look there are signposts and information plaques telling you how to experience the natural world around you: all kinds of signs telling you how to look. In addition, I have a very poor sense of direction, and I am pretty much dependent on maps to find my way around. This also affects the way you experience the landscape, depending on the map you are using. For example, if you’re walking in a wood with a map that clearly indicates where the nearest motorway is, you’re bound to keep hearing the cars, whereas if the road is barely visible you’re less likely to hear them. Each time you use a different map your experience is different, because you experience the surroundings differently. That moment and that experience are like a machine that is set in motion, and this is what fascinates me: It’s what I’ve always been looking for. I am constantly in search of new ways to experience the landscape, especially in my work—from identification charts to microscopes, to binoculars, to nature maps, to GPS. The experience of doing it yourself is often very hard to recreate. How do you deal with this in your installations? How do you translate that moment of amazement for the audience? That is a big challenge; I try to make my installations more physical by creating a sculptural, spatial experience. For example, by making a network of sand prints in the space. During one of my presentations I explained very briefly what it was about and then got a robot to spread out the sand, making a drawing. The resulting sand drawing and the way the robot scattered the sand drew an immediate reaction from the audience: Right away they envisaged how the cows in Cameroon behaved. People then come to me with more detailed questions, but I am not sure whether to respond, because in doing so I think I’m breaking with that moment of amazement, and the work turns in to an almost anthropological or social research project. My interested is more in the experience than in the idea or the issue of authenticity. I find this way of presenting very useful at the moment. The robot itself is also much more physical than the way I used to work. A robot might seem very practical and considerate, but in fact it is extremely stubborn and often refuses to do what you want. But for me that’s the power of the artistic dynamic. For me it’s a challenge to make the static digital technology more unpredictable and physical. You studied Fine Art at The Hague School of Art. How did you make the step from painting to new media? It was an interesting journey. At the time, I started painting because I had a rather naive love of the landscape. In the Netherlands the landscape has always held a special position in the Fine Arts due to the long tradition of landscape painting here. At art school a lot of emphasis was placed on the autonomy of the image. The image should speak for itself, and my idea of mediation did not fit in very well with this. At the Rijksakademie (for the Arts in Amsterdam) I studied in the Graphics/New Media Department. I found it hard to relate to the autonomous ethic of fine art. However, working for a few years as a DTP worker for various newspapers was an eye-opener for me. I discovered that a story's meaning could change completely depending on the photo you published next to it. Essentially you can use a random picture with any story, as long as the caption is right, but the meaning of the photo and the text will change each time! This fitted well with my idea of transformation, how different technologies can change our experience of the same thing. In retrospect the objective facts and reality that come along with every new invention turn out to be subjective after all. That is what makes working with new technology fundamentally different for me from working with oil paint. I was interested in GPS from the first moment it was introduced to me, because it seemed to be extremely realistic. It told an almost technological truth about an event that had not existed before it was made visible with GPS. This stems from the fascination I have with microscopes and binoculars. Suddenly you experience things on a different scale—what you saw just as a plant suddenly becomes much more, it's own biotope—it's a scale-changing trip, an overpowering machine that makes visible new possibilities and avenues. Working with new technologies is still contested in the traditional arts. Do you believe that “new media” have their own status? The arts have always had an obsession for new technology, and that will never change. I think it’s important that this new art form has a relationship to established art history, but I would not claim that working with oil paint, photography and GPS is all one and the same. Because it is not: Artists have been experimenting with oil paint for centuries; photography has just ceased to be a new technology; and GPS and all sorts of other technology are just on the crest of the wave. For me the essence of a new medium or a new technology is about developing a new way of looking at the world and how you experience it. In ten years time I might not be interested in GPS anymore, because a new technology will turn up that deals with mediating information in a different way. More importantly, I believe that working with new media really is different because it comes from the “normal” world and was not specifically developed for artistic production. There’s a big difference between going to an artists’ supply shop and going to an electronics store like MediaMarkt to buy your materials. In the artists’ supply shop you are among (amateur) artists, but at MediaMarkt you are surrounded by regular people with all kinds of jobs and interests: You are at the center of society. If you take the materials and their origin seriously, the work you make will also have a relationship to that society. I am interested in the impact of new technology, particularly in terms of how we experience space. The social or political consequences of surveillance technologies (such as GPS), for example, are part of the work, but they’re not my primary interest. As a “new media” artist I try to develop a relationship to the place of technology in society. This involves developing a certain level of engagement, but that doesn’t always entail being critical. It is essential, though, to avoid negating your audience’s critical position. In my work I offer an open approach that gives the audience a great deal of space to draw their own conclusions. Your work is often cited as exemplary of a politically and socially critical approach. Andreas Broeckmann, for example, posted the following on a locative media mailing list in 2004: “I have always understood the term 'locative' as pointing in both directions, the potential for enriching the experience of shared physical spaces, but also fostering the possibility to 'locate,' i.e. track down anyone wearing such a device. This does turn the 'locative media' movement into something of an avant-garde of the 'society of control.' I believe that people are aware of the ambivalence, but I am wondering at which level this critical aspect is brought into an arts project.” He goes on to mention your Milk project as an example: “This is not to say that artistic work in this field is impossible. I believe that, for instance the Milk project by Polak/Auzina might be a clever way of approaching the issues by simulating the tracking of trade routes.” What do you make of this? What do you think about a comment like this that would appear to go beyond your primary goal of portraying how the perception of space changes with new technologies? It’s true that many people interpret the project this way. That is fine, because it is an important element, but for me it is secondary. This is even more apparent in the NomadicMILK project that I am currently doing in Nigeria. I tell a story about a locally produced product versus global trade, and of course that is politically loaded. But whether global trade systems are good or bad—apart from the issue of whether I can judge those criteria—is something I don’t think you can predict. I find it fundamentally impossible to come to a conclusion on this. I am well aware of the journalistic approach, and I see the importance of explicit opinions, but for me this obscures the advantage—or the open space—that art entails. I believe that an open stance offers much more space for other meanings. For example, my research into the way we experience space opens up other layers. I don’t believe in making moral statements in my work: this suffocates the work and makes it impossible for people to draw their own conclusions. A lot of artists who work with GPS and location-based technologies are less interested in the technology than in the stories that come about when people have followed a certain route. In your work the interaction between the map visualizations and the participants has often been a point of departure for telling stories—the result is above all a living portrait: of a landscape, of stories and people. Yes, I have used locative media as an interactive and storytelling tool, although that was not the initial goal. With Amsterdam RealTime, for example, the main goal was to give people a sense of their own perceptions. We did not want visitors to adopt the “surveillance” perspective or the voyeuristic gaze, but we wanted them to try to identify as much as possible with the participants. We used a theatrical method: namely we conveyed participation in the project as a very special, even enviable opportunity. People really got involved and immediately became part of the project—the machine was set in motion. The point of departure was not to emphasize the interaction between people and the traces they leave behind, although we did print out the individual routes and hand them out to each participant as a souvenir. Looking back now, I think it was a rather naive decision: We had absolutely no idea how much impact the printouts would have on the participants. People pored over their printed-out routes in utter fascination and couldn’t wait to share their stories. The same thing happened in Cameroon too: people immediately recognized themselves in the sand routes as the robot carried them out. I think it is important to realise though that not everyone uses maps or that everyone reads or draws a map in a similar way. I let people look at the patterns they made based purely on memory, based on their own route, it is not about how people read or use maps. For me it’s all about revisiting spatial experience—as a way of bringing about a new perception. Annet Dekker Thanks to: Fonds BKVB
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