[ISEA2015] Artists Statement: Esther Polak & Ivar Van Bekkum (PolakVanBekkum) — The Mailman’s Bag: 250 Miles Crossing Philadelphia

Artists Statement

KML Code Converted to .mov File (2014)

The film follows a mailman’s bag during its daily routine. The bag becomes the protagonist. The recording engages the real-life moment to moment activity of mail delivery and charts the interactions between humans (postman and citizen) and objects (mail and mailbox).

The work uses an innovative way of binaural sound recording: the mailman’s bag becomes equipped with „human” ears, and thus the protagonist. As the bag never parts from the mailman’s body, the recording stays very close to the moment to moment interaction of mail delivery. An interaction that both takes place between humans, the postman and the citizen, and between objects, mail and mailbox.
Because of the limitations of the Streetview 3D algorithm a constant machine-world like glitch is produced. Two worlds, the realistic sound and the weird automated 3D glitch, never totally meet. What happens in the gap between those two worlds is in the mind of the beholder.

Patrick Lichty, Artist, Curator and currently Visiting Assistant Professor at American University of Sharjah (UAE), (02/10/2015) reviewed The Mailman’s Bag as part of the  ISEA2015 exhibition in Vancouver:

“Back on the SFU campus, my favorite piece in the festival was Polak and Van Bekkum’s piece, The Mailman’s Bag. This impressive piece is constructed from several directions; a GPS-enabled sound recorder is placed in a mailman’s bag, giving the bag the capacity of hearing. The GPS data is then used to drive a Google Street View animation that extrudes into pseudo-3D neighborhoods with the sound of the bag in the background. The neighborhoods morph and undulate as the eye moves through the space, creating an effect somewhere between a cheery Inception, Dark City, or Scanner Darkly. The Baudrillardian hyperreal becomes evident here, and becomes disturbing in its distortion of the mediated real overlaid upon surveilling data politics.” [source: Vimeo]
Link to entire review

  • Esther Polak & Ivar van Bekkum (The Netherlands) have been working together as artist duo PolakVanBekkum since 2010. Esther Polak is educated in fine arts and painting at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam. Ivar van Bekkum was trained as a journalist but shifted his field to visual arts. Since 2002 their work focuses on landscape, mobility and mediation.  They search for different ways to look at landscapes and how this influences their understanding and perception. PolakVanBekkum have worked and exhibited internationally at Transmediale (Berlin), Ars Electronica (Linz), ZKM Karlsruhe (London), IMAL (Brussels), and Rento Brattinga (Amsterdam).

Text with images (PDF)  p. 95