Artist in Residence February – October 2009

Nomadic MILK is an art project that is executed by artist Esther Polak and a small team.

From January 2-22 the NomadicMILK project by GPS artist Esther Polak traveled to Nigeria. There she used the satellite technology to track both the distribution of “Peak” brand milk from harbor city Lagos to the capital of Abuja as well as a nomadic Fulani family of cow herders in Abuja’s vicinity. By showing the people involved their own tracks and videotaping their responses to it she creates a reflection on current nomadic life.

A custom built robot accompanied her to Africa. Once fed the GPS data it draws the people’s recorded routes using sand, allowing large groups of people to gather around the image and reflect communally.

Esther Polak has been following the dairy economy for some time now. During her previous MI LK project she tracked how milk from Latvian farmers ended up in Dutch cheese, earning her a Golden Nica award at the Arts Electronica festival. Milk, she says, has always been a fundamental part of our diet and as such has sculpted our lives and our landscapes.

The NomadicMilk project is on show in Kasteel Groeneveld www.kasteelgroeneveld.nl

Her activities can be followed live on the www.nomadicmilk.net blog as well as via a twitter account she updates via SMS.

Esther presented on October 6, 2009 her research at the NIMk at a special evening called ElasticMapping.

The project is produced by foundation Beelddiktee, in co-production with NIMk Amsterdam. Esther Polak is a new media artist working in the field of ‘locative media’. She is best known from her earlier projects AmsterdamREALTIME and MILKproject

Production: www.beelddiktee.nl

Article Berliner Zeitung by Sebastian Preuss:
http://www.berlinonline.de/berliner-zeitung/archiv/.bin/dump.fcgi/2009/0130/feuilleton/0013/index.htm