Mapping the City: AmsterdamREALTIME
Reactivating an iconic work of locative media art
Living Media Art 2026
In 2002, long before smartphones normalised constant tracking, Esther Polak, Jeroen Kee and Waag invited Amsterdam residents to record their daily routes using GPS. Created for the Maps of Amsterdam 1866–2000 exhibition, AmsterdamREALTIME visualised the city as a collective portrait of movement drawn from lived trajectories of the inhabitants themselves. Now revisited, the project reflects on how locative media reshaped our sense of space, authorship and mobility, and how those early experiments resonate in today’s data-saturated urban life.