During IGWO I had opportunity to meet with one of my idols: Esther Polak. She’s the one who did Amsterdam Real Time – a piece where people wearing GPS sketch a map of Amsterdam in real time, and which I love to bits. She did a lot of other stuff that I admire, visualising travel patterns of fishing ships and milk trucks using locational GPS.  Work that touches the surveyor part in me.

The work she did at Vlieland is a beauty as well: a little robot that draws its energy from a solar cell traces a spiral-shaped sand pattern on the Vlieland church square. Pic shows Esther, who started working at six in the morning, replenishing the sand she took from a Vlieland beach. The elegance of the piece is its simplicity: spiral shape is achieved by a rope unwinding from a pole, lignt  is converted to little bursts of energy to lines of sand; inactivity results in a little sandheap; sandheaps shaping the spiral into a drawing of a mini-galaxy. Nice!

I had little time to sit and admire, as I had an Action Web to weave. Again a very successful day,  to blog about at leasure at a later time. I’m hurrying through the tidying-up-and-packing-up stage right now because I hope to visit Spiral Drawing Sunrise once more before the boat leaves Vlieland.  So: to be continued.

Later: I went back to the Spiral at sundown. It was still there, but the little mounds were kicked about by vandals. Hoofprints of the little devils still visible in the sand. Tried not to be sad, but was.