MILKproject

[It] follows the route that milk takes from the udder of the cow in Latvia to the mouth of the consumer in Holland. That route is traced by GPS (Global Positioning System). The MILK project has been visualized by way of an installation and a website. Whoever sees it will from then on realize with every bite he takes that the foodstuffs from which that product is made could come from the most unexpected places in the world and that there in those places, the personal lives of many people are associated with them (Source: Hartholt 2004, np link).

Completed from 2003 through 2005, ‘MILK’ follows the production and distribution of cheese, from Latvian dairy farms to the markets of Utrecht. Following the movements of nine ‘participants’ (selected people involved in the making, moving and consumption of cheese) through the use of GPS devices given to them, ‘MILK’ proposes to give us a glimpse into the social, and spatial, construction of cheese. … press for the project positions it as a ‘locative art – mapping project, that explores visual and documenting possibilities of GPS technology’ (Source: Griffis 2010, np link).

MILKproject tells the personal life-stories of these very different Europeans, from the Latvian farmer to the Dutch open-air market salesman with his clients, who are all connected by one thing: the milk from a truck of one Latvian milk collector (Source: Polak 2008, np link).

The structure of this work is simple enough. For instance, the content of the work depended on how people deliver milk, and the short stories involved. The stories were documented in both text and images, presented in the form of a video installation. It is concerned with what was happening on the route which had been derived from and defined by spatial practice; the route does not exist if there is no milk delivered, and it is a site defined by actions and culture. Also, it is meaningless not to just read the stories as a whole as coherence will not be achieved, and as a result, one may not understand that the work revolves around the delivery process of milk. In other words, the entire entity was made up of connected stories that happened along the milk line, and these constructed the spatialzed narrative, which was specific to the line. The art group regarded the work as landscape art instead of addressing any cultural and political statements. The traces of movement depicted the activities of the participants involved, and none of them was omnipresent. Their collaborative force and technology facilitated the digital landscape art (Source: Wan 2010, p.31 link).

All this data, the GPS tracks, sound and images, was edited for each participant for both the installation set-up and the project website. The edited stills with the corresponding soundtracks are experienced in the installation as a narrative and are played in ‘cartographic’ order from east to west, thus following the path of the milk (Source: Anon 2005, np link).

[Both] frames currently shifting EU terrain: from a destitute Latvian corner – Latgale, where the milk is produced as far as Netherlands and other EU countries, where the same milk is being consumed (Source: Anon ndc, np link).

[The] Milk Project [website] … reveals different disparate elements keep together and forms a unique world. Participants from different locations along the milk line told stories about how milk was delivered and these stories rewrote meanings of locations. One of the stories told by Janis Simsons (one of the participants), who is a milk farm[er], showed his work schedule in a particular day. On the web archive of this project, artists chose not to show the names of participants’ locations (e.g. Janis Simsons’), instead, they showed their GPS coordinates, animations of their recorded movements and their stories in text. The audience perceive participants’ locations as spots along the milk line, and these spots are spots of memories and cultural practice in this project. The names of locations are no longer important to audience. Meanwhile, all spots are bonded through actions and movements of the participants, and this bonds are invisible and inaudible (Source: Wan 2010, p.31 link).

[The project was also presented to the public via a] multimedia installation that imaginatively shows how milk from Latvian cows eventually ends up being sold as Rigamont cheese on a street market in Utrecht. But it’s not so much about the cows and the cheese as the way the persons concerned (the farmer, the truck driver, the consumer) relate to their environment. … A forty-minute show simultaneously shown on two screens that is exiting, funny and surprising is the result. Visitors can sit on one of the comfortable sofas with flower motif. An LCD screen shows how a little dot draws lines (tracks) through the landscape. These are the tracks of the person that has spent a day wearing a GPS tracking device. Next to it a large projection screen shows portraits of the participants of the project. On an audiotape we can hear how they react to their own tracks. … The project produces nine personal portraits of people or couples from Latvia, Italy and the Netherlands. In one of the portraits the tracks show how the participant drives a rotunda the wrong way round. Another funny moment is a couple writing down the coordinates of their encounter with a rabbit during a forest walk. In seeing his tracks farmer Janis Simsons is surprised at how fast time passes (Source: Anon nda, np link).

When artist Esther Polak and researcher Ieva Auzina discovered that much Latvian milk is transported to the Netherlands, they decided to follow its progress from the cow’s udder to the consumer’s mouth using GPS navigation (Source: Krabbendam 2006, np link).

The MILK project was launched as a small-scale workshop in the summer of 2003 during the ‘locative media’ symposium (organized by RIXC), involving GPS technologies and two Latvian dairy farmers in a small village in south-east Latvia. During 2004 the project was developed as a cross-disciplinary research undertaking both in Latvia and in the Netherlands, involving 9 participants (4 Latvian farmers and 5 Dutch city-dwellers), as well as the whole trade network between them (Source: Anon 2005 np link).

We had this workshop situation concept where everyone that had participated would be gathered (even their families were welcome). It took a whole evening to watch their routes and get them to comment on them. We reported the reactions associating them to their tracks on the basis of a portrait (Source: Polak in Urlberger 2007 np link).

In this project a European dairy transportation was followed from the udder of the (Latvian) cow, to the mouth of the (Dutch) consumer. All people who played a role in this chain received, for a day, a GPS-device that registered their movements. The team developed a lucid visualization-software for these traces, and let the participants react upon them in their own kitchens or living rooms (Source: Polak 2008, np link).

Each of the participants carried a GPS receiver, which recorded his position at five-second intervals, around with him for a whole day (Source: Ander 2008, np link).

[They used] various techniques associated with such media as GPS, photography, video, field recording and commentary (Source: Ander 2008, np link).

Software prepared especially for this purpose allowed to prepare visualization of the whole event, thus giving the participants a possibility of watching it with them in it from the perspective of their own, home surroundings (connection between private and public space). The whole project gave the direct participants a possibility to transform throughout the process their social status: from an individual into a member of transnational community that eventually brought an experience of participation in collective, global event to all those engaged in the process (Source: Kluszczynski 2010, p.22).

By turning collected GPS data into an on-line atlas of maps, Ieva Auzina and Esther Polak in collaboration with software developer Markus The (NL) and RIXC would like to discover this peculiar milk net, its explicitly local stories and complex euro-global dimensions (Source: Anon ndc, np link).

Using software specially developed for the project, the data was displayed in the form of graphic drawings on contingent geographical maps of the areas the project was based in. These drawings were later projected and discussed with the participants in small, informal workshop situations in their homes (Source: Anon 2005, np link).

Some participant of the project moves either from pasture to home or from barn to toilet. His/her story on this route is heard and corresponding photographs taken by the artists are projected synchronically (Source: Klavina 2004, np link).

Already during the shooting of material, Jānis Simsons [owner of the farmstead Kundziņi in Vidridži Parish, Limbaži District,] remarked that he would readily attach the small locative media – GPS devices – to each individual cow (Source: Ozolina 2004, np link).

The “MILKproject” experienced seven on-site installations in the Netherlands, Austria and Latvia (Source: Zarina 2023, p.360)

[In 2005, i]t was Bruno Latour, author of Actor-Network theory, who first exhibited MILK … in his Making Things Public exhibit at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe (Source: Strazdina 2019, p.43 link).

[Here, there were] a minimum of installative elements: stools resembling milking stools, living room lamps, a carpet, a piece of Rigamont cheese, a 1950s-stye monitor, a video projection. The settings: Riga, Limbazi, Ittervoort, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Slolwijk. [Here, w]e meet Latvian dairy farmers and t heir cows, accompany the milk float driver, kake the acquaintance of an Italian cheese specialist, Dutch wholesalers and finall a cheese vendor at a market stall in Utrecht with his customers (Source: Ander 2008, np link).

The two main ‘participants’ in the project— – milk from Latvia and its final product “Rigamont / Monte Rigo / Paisano cheese ”—were observed to be constantly exposed to the passions of human interaction and changing international trade (Source: Zarina 2023, p.359).

One of the most tempting and motivating aspects of MILK for us is to develop a medium where [Latvian] farmers can visualize and comment on their own relation to (usage of) space. Interaction between the hi-tech GPS device and the countryside situation will most likely lead to unique narrative possibilities, which will be completely different from an, for example, direct documentary approach (Source: Anon ndb, np link)

The project shows that the three segments of GPS – —space, control and users – —can
visualize emotional human story. Collected data spoke about the meditation on time and space telling a story about people, daily efforts, movements, and lives. On a more universal level, the “MILKproject” created a collaborative space where information is visualized using locative media, along with documentary images and videos, forming extension of conceptual language in Latvian contemporary art (Source: Zarina 2023, p.359).

By charting the path of milk, [Auzina & Polak] … depict landscape in a new way, entirely different from that of paintings in centuries past. In a painting, the course of a road and the movements of its travelers were determined by the artist. In MILK, those who use the road mark it out themselves. These are the people who collect milk and the drivers of the tanker trucks that transport it. With a turn of the steering wheel, they determine whether the art observer sees the path bend to the left or the right. What has for years been their anonymous labor suddenly becomes a worldly affair, their routine actions grown profound and the product they transport assuming the wiught of liquid gold. Each step they take is observed from the heavens, by satellite, recorded onto a hard drive and projected onto screens and monitors all over the world (Source: Bierens 2005, p.494 link).

MILKproject, however is meant to show that you can actually use this modern technology that at first may scare you off. Today’s technology makes it possible to have food from all over the world available and there is no reason why this technology should not tie you closer to the origins of the product. The lack is only there because the ultimate consumer doesn’t ask. There is no reason why you shouldn’t know where in the Philippines that mango comes from – you could for example, install a Webcam etc. (Source: Thiel 2005, np link).

Seeing the installation that resulted, you can feel how it sometimes presents the same thing, but also how sometimes the comments and tracks seem to come from different planets, how single-dimensioned realism is totally disappearing. At the same time, I felt as though I had never experienced anything more realistic, for I not only saw the portraits of these people, but I also saw the limitations of every one of the media we had used (Source: Polak 2005, np link).

Whereas activist media projects frequently criticise GPS as a surveillance and monitoring technology, MILKproject focuses on its imaging potential: the imaginary view of the earth from a satellite, of a continuously growing map of its own traces. Objective technology is linked with subjective experience, thus becoming an emancipatory, enlightening medium (Source: Ander 2008, np link).

[I]t was the commentaries that made the digital maps come alive, for instance when the dairy farmer’s wife Zaiga Treimane from Pociems tracked her husband, amused: ‘But tell me, what are all those dots? – I know what it is! It is not Martin’s! He put the GPS on the dog, and then Reksis went running on loops.!’ (Source: Ander 2008, np link).

The artists’ intervention in the everyday life of these people is so tactful that this reality seems uncontaminated and purely authentic when shown to other people as well: individuals’ stories are open and free, captured situations are natural. The subtle technique of sound recording and photographing has captured the events so serenely that they seem to materialise by a single touch. Not in vain several visitors have perceived the installation as a film (Source: Klavina 2004, np link).

Now that the MILKproject is finished, I can proudly state yes, we managed. We developed a tool that is clever and sensitive, one that is realistic in a double manner, about both its subject and itself. As we hoped and expected, this tool shows the story of landscape, space and people, in a way that would not have possible with another means. This keeps fascinating me, every time I go over it again (Source: Polak 2005 np link).

Bruno Latour suggests that things are a focus for our time, in particular, a focus that demands the attention of the arts: ‘’Things’ are controversial assemblages of entangled issues, and not simply objects sitting apart from our political passions. The entanglements of things and politics engage activists, artists, politicians, and intellectuals. To assemble this parliament, rhetoric is not enough and nor is eloquence; it requires the use of all the technologies – especially information technology – and the possibility for the arts to re-present anew what are the common stakes.’ We can get a sense of what Latour means by this by looking at ‘MILK’, a project by Ieva Auzina and Esther Polak exhibited by Latour in his ‘Making Things Public’ exhibit at ZKM that also won the 2005 Golden Nica at Ars Electronica. The work of a group of Latvian locative media artists, MILK is clearly indebted to more traditional aspects of the movement in that it uses GPS trace-routes. But instead of seeking a phenomenological regrounding of the self, the MILK team traced the path of milk from its origins in the udder of a cow in rural Latvia to a cheese vendor in the Netherlands. To be sure, this project is still more suggestive than fully realized: MILK’s artists are not terribly interested in Latour’s reading and instead see their work more as a form of romantic landscape art. Nevertheless, MILK suggests a powerful vision of how locative technologies could allow one to more fully understand how products are commodified and distributed through the actions of global trade, thereby making visible the networked society. Here Fusco’s anti-mapping diatribe runs aground, for when tied to a materialist vision, the recent turn to maps is among the strongest critiques of globalization available to us. Recognizing this, philosopher Alain Badiou referred to the maps of power drawn by artist Mark Lombardi as ‘the creation of a new possibility of art and a new vision of the world’ (Source: Tuters and Varnelis 2006, np link).

[The MILKproject] installation was positively received among many artists, critics and the public alike, winning the Golden Nica new-media prize, and it was also part of Latour and Weibel’s ‘Making Things Public’ exhibition [see Bierens 2005]. While the artists never envisioned their project as aligning itself to Latourian ideas, it did allow for a strong representation of how locative technologies can help make the networked society more visible by revealing how products are commodified and globally distributed. Despite these interpretations, Auzina and Polak still think of their project more as a form of romantic landscape art rather than an example of invisible networks being made public (Source: Fliervoet 2012, np link).

Conceived in the romantic tradition of landscape art, … MILKproject is nevertheless something of a riposte to the romantic idyll of nature, augmented as it has become though the locative apparatus (Source: Tuters 2011, p.10).

To me it was interesting that you kept the visualisation of the routes and tracks that you found very abstract. There is a green grid and the lines which slowly form in time. This all becomes only complete and clear when you include the stories of the participants. Only they know what the point on the map means. I wouldn’t understand it without their help and the photographs. There are also no interviews, so the participants explain themselves their landscapes and their activities (Source: Thiel 2005, np link).

I have learnt the following sentence from the Dutch philosopher Petran Kockelkoren: ‘Technology allows you the possibility to establish a new intimacy with the objects.’ I like this idea and that is what I wanted to achieve with the project – creating a new intimacy with the objects. There is no reason why an immediate experience with technology shouldn’t be possible (Source: Polak in Thiel 2005, np link).

After doing … MILKproject in Latvia, [Esther Polak] decided she wanted to work with people for whom mobility is an intrinsic part of their daily life. This brought her to Nigeria, where both nomadic cow herders and truck drivers can be found, connected through a mutual involvement in milk transportation (Source: Anon 2010 np link).

That [the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality] policy wants to give artists a place and that it is important for the way we work is evident in the fact that [it] has incorporated Esther and Ieva’s MILK project in the programme for the upcoming conference on Changing Land Use in Europe. This conference will be held here at Kasteel Groeneveld from November 10th to 12th in association with the Dutch Presidency of the EU. At the conference, with a presentation by Esther Polak, the national policymakers for the countrysides of the various member states and the European Commission can acquaint themselves with this way of looking, researching and communications (Source: Hartholt 2004, np link).

The MILKproject [was] … awarded in Ars Electronica competition in Linz in 2005, [but] contrary to other works of art rewarded there, was only presented in form of documentation. In case of works of this kind there is no form of dispositive that could be placed in the gallery environment as a whole and then become a place of existence for an
artwork-event. For its complete development, they require public spaces. This also means actual, final for this strategy, doing away with the role of a receiver-observer of the event; participation is here the only form of a genuine, full experience (Source: Kluszczynski 2010, p.24)

It became evident that the participants had not only a personal or artistic interest in the partnership, but that the project publicity was also seen as an opportunity to promote their own country and trade. Latvian dairy farmers in particular addressed this aspect (Source: Zarina 2023, p.360).

In later incarnations, the project evolved to an African version where local Nigerian herders were communicated with by robot-drawn sand maps. In its installed form, a projection shows Dutch artist Esther Polak standing at the edge of a dirt road, holding a microphone toward Mr. Idiris, a Fulani herder. Between them is a translator. All three are watching what looks like a toy, a plastic water bottle on wheels as it moves about jerkily, spitting out sand. Idiris gestures toward the robot as he talks animatedly. The right screen shows him guiding his herd along the road. For the project NomadicMILK (2006–2010), Polak worked with a team of researchers including an anthropologist and a robotics engineer, in order to explore milk distribution systems in western Africa. In Nigeria, they used GPS technology to track the paths of Fulani herders, and truckers transporting the imported Peak brand milk from the harbor in Lagos, where it arrives from Europe to the capital Abuja, and from the city to the outlying suburbs. The data was fed to a custom-built robot that used sand to draw the recorded routes, allowing the participants to see and comment on their own tracks. The nomads, the artist says, ‘immediately recognised themselves in the sand routes as the robot carried them out. It let people look at the patterns they made based purely on memory, based on their own route’ (Source: Rieser 2020, p.400).