[Synapse elist] to look at your own or to other peoples tracks: thats the question

[Esther Polak]

Dear list:
Herby a reaction to Asta's question about the farmers engagement:

"Esther Polak's farmer-tourist project is fascinating. The engagement  
of the farmer community is also very interesting and like Simoen  
pointed out I'm curious on what level they engage."


This is an important question: the motivation for continuing to work  
with GPS visualization for me lays in the fact that by designing a  
special visualization and context, I can evoke different kinds of  
interactions ore engagements between people and GPS tracks.

In the case of the Souvenir project the interaction is more intended  
to be between the local tourists and the visualization than on the  
farmers and their own tracks.

The track we use is as said that of a crop farmer on the field, and  
during one week we will make rather abstract monoprints of that  
track, and fill the exhibition space all over. The space again  
becomes a landscape, in with the visitor  can dwell and make his/her  
pick: for that reason we make a lot of prints and have them all for  
sale.

This also has to do with the fact that this track is rather abstract,  
an visible in the real world as well as tractor-marks in the field,  
so there is not a real privacy issue for a change.

The exhibition space is situated in a village that in summertime is  
crowded by tourists. The piece is really mostly aimed at the  
interaction between agricultural landscape and tourists an old  
fascination of me. In other projects I did (and do) focus on farmers  
and the ralation they have with their own routes what does it do to  
them to see this: www.milkproject.net and www.nomadicmilk.net In  
those projects I totally focus(ed) on the interaction between the  
participants and their maps and that is definitely a differed  
approach. That was again motivated by AmsterdamREALTIME project  
experiences, only during the execution of the project I found out how  
strong the effect is on a lot of people to see their own tracks!

This difference: seeing ones own track, or looking at somebody else’s  
track, the differed reactions and effects that evokes in the audience  
also is a matter to take in good care for each project again. In  
AmsterdamREALTIME we designed the project so that the audience,  
although mostly not participating themselves, still was more in the  
position of identification with the participants than in the position  
of “spying on them”. We made all kinds of big and small design- 
decisions based on this goal.

For the occasion of this list I did translate (with the kind aid of  
Vicki) an early “making off” text I wrote even before I started  
working on REALTIME, I had not read it in years! But I found it  
interesting to read how many topics that are also mentioned in this  
list feature in this 2002 text already!

http://www.beelddiktee.nl/tekst/JournalForInsiders01.pdf


Another really inspiring text that I like to mention is:
Wright, John K. 1947.  Terrae Incognitae: The Place of Imagination in  
Geography
It is a fascinating passionate plea for subjective mapping for 1947.
I posted a link to the file via my website:

http://www.estherpolak.nl/text/TERRAE INCOGNITAE.doc


Best, Esther


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