From 23 April - 8 May Upstream Gallery presents in it's private viewing space Fronting Motion, an online installation by PolakvanBekkum.

The artist couple Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum have built an extensive oeuvre around their research of movement in time and space. In their work the use and shape of landscape and infrastructure play an important role, as do vehicles for movement (from bodies to cars and planes) and traces of movement. Their work used to be presented under the term 'locative media art', when the GPS systems they used were still relatively new in the public domain. However, PolakvanBekkum, as they named their collaboration, create highly diverse works, from drawing machines working with sand to interdisciplinary works combining Google maps with field recordings and animation.

The work Fronting Motion we show here was initially produced as both an online and live installation for the exhibition Internet of Cars in Southampton, UK, in 2014, then using live data from around Southampton. Two different websites each show a different data feed: one shows boats moving through the harbor from AIS ship monitoring data, while the other shows the highway through registration plate data.The current work runs on the archived data from 2014, restored especially for this occasion.

http://frontingmotioneast.net/
http://frontingmotionwest.net/
https://www.polakvanbekkum.com/

Text: Josephine Bosma on the occasion of the online show Appearances on our online platform upstream.gallery (26 September - 24 October 2020).