Every new technology changes our perception of the world. Different technologies open up new experiences of our apparently “real” world. In the early 2000s, a wave of artists began experimenting with GPS, mobile technologies, and location-based media to explore how digital tools were transforming our relationship to space and movement. AmsterdamREALTIME emerged from this moment of locative media art. For the “Maps of Amsterdam 1866–2000” exhibition, Esther Polak, Jeroen Kee, and Waag Futurelab created AmsterdamREALTIME, a pioneering media art project that used GPS to explore how Amsterdammers move through and shape their city – years before smartphones and commercial navigation. The seminal work began with a simple proposition: what if a city's map could be drawn not from satellite imagery or surveyor's measurements, but from the accumulated traces of people moving through it?

In 2002, Amsterdam was a different city – both physically and digitally. The idea of tracking one's daily movements felt experimental rather than ubiquitous; smartphones didn't exist and locative tracking was still new enough to feel revelatory. That same year, Polak handed GPS trackers to Amsterdam residents and asked them to record their daily routes. The resulting map emerged from below: a collective portrait built from individual paths, personal rhythms, and everyday choices. Some documented their commutes, others their wanderings; one radio reporter famously drew a pigeon. Together, these individual trajectories formed a collective portrait: part land art, part social experiment, part prophetic glimpse into our data-saturated present. 

As the artist duo PolakVanBekkum, Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum explore the poetics of movement in time and space. Polak has long been fascinated by landscapes, trajectories, and routes, investigating how people, products, and natural phenomena shape everyday life. Using locative technologies, particularly GPS, she examines these flows in detail. The history of locative media art is also the history of our evolving relationship with spatial data. When artists like Polak began experimenting with GPS in the early 2000s, they were exploring uncharted territory: What would it mean to visualise movement? How might tracking technologies alter our sense of place? Could location data become a medium for collective creativity? 

Two decades later, AmsterdamREALTIME seems to have anticipated an era of ubiquitous tracking while preserving a moment when mapping still felt poetic. The project’s afterlife continues to unfold through new collaborations. After presenting and discussing strategies at Transformation Digital Art 2025 and with insights from LI-MA, Amsterdam RealTime enters a new phase. The City Archives of Amsterdam, which originally hosted the live presentation of AmsterdamREALTIME in 2002 and hold a print of the cumulative route data in their collection, will once again play a central role. Over twenty years later, the work is being restored and presented at Waag Futurelab – the site where the work was first conceived and developed – with a public screening, archival materials, and a conversation between Polak and designer Bert Spaan on GPS, digital mapping, and their cultural impact. 

At Waag, visitors will encounter the newly restored online animation and hear from the artists and collaborators who helped bring it back to life. Simultaneously, the animation will be displayed as an installation at the City Archives, where it will remain on view for several months, extending the project’s dialogue with the city that inspired it. While the Amsterdam Museum, a long-term partner in the project, is currently closed for renovations and unable to host exhibitions, its archive remains accessible for study purposes at its depot on Backupweg in Amsterdam-Noord – fittingly, a place named for preservation and recovery.

With LI-MA serving as the work’s official distributor, the work gains renewed visibility and authority – a crucial step toward its canonisation as a landmark in digital art history. In this conversation, Polak reflects on its origins, its uncanny prescience 20 years later, and why tracking cows might be the contemporary equivalent of what once felt revolutionary about mapping human movement. During Transformation Digital Art 2026, Polak and Bente van Bourgondiën, who made the original animation visualisation, will discuss the work and the process of reactivating it.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

LI-MA: The project encouraged a kind of cognitive play: viewers and participants pieced together invisible routes, patterns, and stories. For example, Chris Bajema’s pigeon became the most memorable drawing. Was that active reconstruction something you envisioned from the start, or did it emerge organically?

Esther Polak: To be honest, I had expected way more people to do things like Chris did. It has been, as you say, the most memorable drawing, but for me it was more interesting that people found it so relevant to make a recording of their daily life that they preferred that over making a GPS drawing. So I thought that for people, making a self-portrait is more interesting than drawing whatever else.

GPS tracking was still a novelty at the time. How aware were participants of being “seen”, and did that awareness change the way they moved or behaved?

I think it didn't change the way they moved or behaved, but the hassle of turning the device off and on did for sure influence the amount of trajectories they recorded. And I think it differs very much between participants. For example, Peter, the taxi driver, very deliberately chose specific routes because he wanted them to be on the map. And other people just recorded their daily life as a reflection of their own personal lives and movements.

It shows that humans react differently in different circumstances depending on their personal context, and that shows the beauty of the project as it tapped into the subjectivity of people's lives and experience of space.

AmsterdamREALTIME can be compared to land art or process art, where the path matters more than the endpoint. Did you see yourself working within that lineage, or were you more interested in how technology was reshaping our sense of place?

For me it was both. As an artist, I was super interested in landscape depiction. There was such a huge variety of landscape painting, especially in the Netherlands, and then there was this whole body of land art that also covered a lot. We had conceptual artists like Stanley Brouwn, for example, who was always a big inspiration.

For a long time I felt that there was nothing more to add to that field, until I encountered possibilities of experience of space and landscape through recording one's routes and making them into an object instead of something that was irrelevant. As soon as you can visualise or you could even hold the route for the first time in your hands – that's why I also found it very important to give those prints to the participants, and to make them available in the installation as a growing archive.

The project existed through many people at once. How did that multiplicity influence your understanding of what the work could be?

This multiplicity also consisted of it being teamwork. So it was very much the work of a team – me, Jeroen Kee, and the people at Waag, and also the people from the Amsterdam Archive who were involved. They all together shaped the project with the participants. And we also had a super nice intern then, Kari Anne Bakker and I like to mention Ina Arends who designed the constellation around the tracer that made it into a friendly little cute bag. And that was also a collaboration. So there is collaboration on many layers. Then later there was the collaboration with Bente [van Bourgondiën], who made the animation visualisation.

Although I'm the core artist, it was very much a team effort, and I think therefore the project also has a theatrical aspect to it where you have a director or somebody who is a writer of the play. The project has many mothers and fathers, but I'm the most important.

Two decades later, AmsterdamREALTIME feels strangely prophetic. How do you think today’s audiences – used to constant tracking and data visualisation – read the work differently? 

I think people read the project completely differently. There's really the need to explain the newness of the experience to younger audiences. They feel like, okay, what's so exciting about this? And I always explain it by comparing it to the first photograph. If you look at the first photograph, then you can try to identify with somebody who has never seen an automatic image of the world. Of course, there was camera obscura and you could kind of approximate that by tracing the image. Or people made cutouts of shadows, but that was as far as it went. A visualisation made totally automatically creates a totally different relationship with memory and memorialising one's life.

In journalism also you see that trajectory of, for example, in crime situations, the fact that one can trace the route of an automobile. That was something that, shortly after the project, I fantasised about, and then that also became a reality.

People don't even think anymore about the option of using paper maps, but depend on satellite navigation. So that is also totally different. As a result, the experience of space becomes way more tunnel-like than bird's-eye view-like. 

Flash (used for the original animated video) is now obsolete. What challenges does this pose? If you relaunched the project now, what would it look like? Would smartphones and AI mapping change the meaning of the work?

If I would relaunch the project anew, the whole idea of making a new map of the city with a group of people, then it would also be a totally different project. Yeah, I would really need to think twice about making a project based on the same idea. What would it mean to create a map of a city that consists of actual routes only, with a new group of participants? I don’t feel curious after re-doing that now. Everybody by now, at least in the Western world, who owns a smartphone and who has an interest can record and see their own trajectories. An art project that is not exploring a new experience of space. 

At this moment, I find it more interesting  to draw cows' patterns in a meadow, by hand – a series that Ivar [van Bekkum] and I have been working on for a couple of years now. I don't think there was ever any research done on how cows explore their meadow, and I'm fascinated by offering new experiences of space and making people aware of the multiplicity and different possibilities of that experience.

I always emphasise also that a city is basically a totally different territory  if you explore it on a bike, if you explore it with public transport, if you explore it by foot or car – those are four different cities. So the city is not an objective entity that lives its own life and that you traverse. I would rather approach it the other way around. By visiting, you produce a city, and by choosing a means of transportation or a mindset of mobility, the kind of city that emerges depends on that choice.

The city itself has changed; our movements are now mediated by phones, apps, and algorithms. Could Amsterdam RealTime be reframed as a way to think about today’s urban rhythms and digital mobility?

Yes, I totally think that is the case. If you look at AmsterdamREALTIME, hopefully – that's my hope and desire – that people start to mentally apply a change of experience of space to their own mobility, their own mobile lives. Imagine that they start to make some realisations about the power or agency of their mobility as a creative force that produces a different city each time.

What have you learned from revisiting the original participants and how have their stories influenced your thinking about the work now?

That influence was that I now see it even more as a project about the  subjectivity of  experience of city space. I became even more convinced that it would never make sense to redo the project, not literally, in its literal form.

The project was recently acquired by the Amsterdam Museum. What role do you see for institutions in safeguarding not only the “object” but the participatory and ephemeral aspects?

Amsterdam Museum has acquired the work, and it feels really good because the whole archive of press, of email conversations we had, and everything is now in their depot – accessible for research, and much safer than in my studio. Everything is together and categorised, and that gives me peace of mind. 

Collaboration with institutions is key. LI-MA is also going to play a role in the future in terms of distributing the project. The fact that LI-MA is the official distributor gives the project authority. I'm very interested in the canonisation of the project; I think it should really have that status.

So I'm trying to establish all kinds of collaborations with institutions to accomplish that goal, because I believe that a project needs – or should have – that position in the world, so that it is an object in the world, not only as a physical object or a video or an interactive experience, but also as an artistic step for humanity.

Finally, what does the reactivation of Amsterdam RealTime look like? Are there plans to translate it into a new technological or participatory form?

Well, Bente is going to restore it with new technology. The experience will be very much the same. I don't know if Flash really is key to the project. Of course, the possibilities of Flash helped Bente make her design decisions, but with the current technologies you can rebuild it so that you don't see the difference.

We are making some slight improvements. I am updating the information layer around the project with new texts, and also Alain Otjens, who works at Waag, found a good solution for making it accessible for tablets and mobile. That was also something that we hadn't anticipated back in the day, because there weren't even smartphones, let alone tablets. So an horizontal, landscape visualisation was very logical. Alain found a really nice solution to make the new website responsive, but not the animation itself, because its original form is horizontal, and we have to accept that we cannot change that.

For now, I think it functions best as a source of inspiration for new and other performative approaches to mobility in the city. 

Header: Drawing of AmsterdamREALTIME, courtesy of Esther Polak.