OPENING 5 SEPTEMBER: 17.00 - 19.30HRS

Upstream Gallery is pleased to present Sightings, a new solo exhibition by Jan Robert Leegte building on his acclaimed presentation at Art Basel | Zero 10 (June 2026). For the gallery in Amsterdam, Leegte expands the work with new works from the series Sightings, and shows the digital work Orbits as a multiscreen installation.

Sightings

Almost every photograph you've ever seen online has passed through JPEG compression: the invisible process, in use since the early 1990s, that shrinks images small enough to travel across the internet. Compression has thus been the invisible infrastructure of the image-based internet; without it, there would be no social media, no photography, no AI-generated images online. JPEG compression was originally invented for photographs. Sightings turns that relationship inside out. Using a deterministic generative system, Leegte produces images that look photographic without being photographs at all: no source photograph, no scene in the world, nothing being captured. And yet the results look unmistakably like something glimpsed: the wavering quality of a telephoto lens pushed beyond its range, the shimmer of Hubble deep fields, satellite reconnaissance stills, extreme-zoom footage always slightly too compressed to be conclusive.

A sighting is what you call an image of something you cannot quite identify, something seen but not confirmed. Sightings generates that condition from scratch. It is not a photograph of something blurry. It is the blurriness itself, given the shape of a photograph. At a moment when AI-generated images have made the question of what pictures can be trusted newly urgent, Sightings is a reminder that the uncanny relationship between code and image long predates it.

Orbits

Where Sightings pulls you into a photographic world, Orbits opens a window onto something that was never captured at all. A 3D scene of spheres orbiting each other is generated and compressed in real time, ten times per second. There is no source file, no recorded footage: the world exists only in the moment the codec produces it, invoked and compressed into existence, frame by frame. The result sits somewhere between a space transmission and a science-fiction memory, a planet glimpsed through extreme signal degradation.

As Leegte describes it: "Endless circular motions in nature are born from two sources: they are either guided by celestial motions, like the sun or moon, or they are made by humans." For the artist, it is this kinship with celestial motion that makes such loops so mesmerising, whether in windmills, watermills, steam engines, dynamos, clocks or the computer processor.

Artificial motion, Leegte notes, kicks in at ten to twelve frames a second, the rate that Plateau and Stampfer identified in the 1830s as the threshold at which the mind constructs continuity from discrete frames, laying the cornerstone of animation and film. Orbits appears as a scene that has never existed: a familiar motion, unplaceable in origin, a world existing only in the instant it is compressed, orbiting only because we are watching.

 

Read our interview with the artist here.