#SandMapping and its relation to the work of PolakVanBekkum

by Ivar Van Bekkum

The idea of #SandMapping goes back to our project NomadicMilk where we developed a GPS-robot cart that made drawings of GPS routes in sand: with just a plastic bottle filled with sand and a hole in the lid. An instrument or tool to make temporary drawings in public space.

#SandMapping in its first phase was just drawing circles around objects in public space. In that way it related to our work as being:

• a form of landscape depiction – by creating a circle around an object, this object is highlighted, its status in the landscape is emphasized, altered, the sand circle acts like any medium does, it changes the reality of what is mediated.

• attention driven – rather than commenting or criticizing this project is like all of our projects about giving attention in new ways, provoking not the obvious but the non obvious.

• filling the gap between the physical and the digital world (when stretched to the photographing and posting of pictures)

• a location based art project

It seems to depict no movement, like much of our work does, but it does suggest a process of making, which is a coming and going of the maker.

The way it does not directly relate to the physical outcome of our former work, but rather to the field of media-art, new aesthetic and ‘open’ environment in which we operate:

• It is an ‘open’ art work: anyone can contribute, it is collective.

• It is a tangible but ephemeral art work that only last for a couple of days in its physical state, but each circle will live on forever in its digitized (photographed) and distributed (internet) state.

• By having a short life in the physical world and the almost improbability to create the same circle at the same place, it holds its unicity on the one hand whilst it loses this immediately by the reproduction over the internet.

• Its simplicity but beauty combined with the spreading over social media, rises the question what the aesthetic of the project is and why. Is it the physical form? Is it the digital distribution? Or is it the “openness” of the project? Is it a way to communicate, to create a community? Or is it a question about the beauty of simplicity?

As Claire Bishop writes in Digital Divide Artforum September 2012 http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201207&id=31944

“At its most utopian, the digital revolution opens up a new dematerialized, deauthored, and unmarketable reality of collective culture; at its worst, it signals the impending obsolescence of visual art itself.“

“Faced with the infinite multiplicity of digital files, the uniqueness of the art object needs to be reasserted in the face of its infinite, uncontrollable dissemination via Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, etc.”

Or Lev Manovich in “Culture without Objects, or Representation versus Telecommunication” http://www.manovich.net/IA/telecommunication.html

“IT culture asks us to reconsider the very paradigm of what an aesthetic object is. Is it necessary for the concept of the aesthetics to assume representation? Does art necessarily involve a finite object? Can telecommunication between users by itself be a subject of an aesthetic?”

SandMapping dance notations

SandMapping Dance notations takes the project a step further and also back to our main track: movement. Can we visualize different kinds of movements, being mathematic pendulums or human gestures?

This also has a data-conciousness aspect to it, like working with gps does, or working with social media etc. Every movement may seem gracious, fluent, repetitious, but it is hard to remember the traces it leaves behind – the ‘data’, every single moment of the movement vanishes. But using only a bottle filled with sand, these ‘data’ can be visualized.

Relation to The End of Maps

#SandMapping being only the sand circles in public space have a magical resemblance to the gps-icon on your smartphone that point out your location, the circles also seem to suggest that  ‘you are here’. They are in fact a small personal map. In that way the circles also claiming territory, but more in an aesthetic way then being possessive. They emphasize space, whatever connotation the space has, it becomes more special. In that way they have a neutral character and are able to underline the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ without judging.

Becoming digital they will form a new network of locations, a new personalized distributed map, represented by circles of sand made by all kinds of people.

SandMapping Dance Notations will create however another kind of personal map: a map of motion, an itinerary.

Though not high tech, #SandMapping makes existing (location based) high tech more tangible and also derives its meaning from those technologies.