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Jan Robert Leegte: Sightings, and a Wanderer Loose in Groningen

Jan Robert Leegte is showing photographs of nothing at all in Amsterdam while an algorithmic walker drifts across Groningen, logging every turn on a blockchain.

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Jan Robert Leegte, who has been making art on the internet since the late 1990s, has work in 3 exhibitions this autumn. The centrepiece is Sightings, his solo show at Upstream Gallery in Amsterdam, open until October 24. It builds on his presentation at Art Basel's Zero 10 in June and adds new works to the series. Every image in Sightings looks photographic, yet none is a photograph: a deterministic generative system produces the wavering look of a telephoto lens pushed past its range, a Hubble deep field or a satellite still, always slightly too compressed to be conclusive.

The real subject is JPEG compression, the process in use since the early 1990s that shrinks images small enough to travel across the internet, and which was invented for photographs. Sightings turns that relationship inside out. "It is not a photograph of something blurry. It is the blurriness itself, given the shape of a photograph," the gallery writes. Alongside the series, Orbits plays as a multiscreen installation: a 3D scene of spheres circling each other, generated and compressed in real time 10 times per second, with no source file and no recorded footage. "Endless circular motions in nature are born from two sources: they are either guided by celestial motions, like the sun or moon, or they are made by humans," Leegte says.

In Groningen, Wanderer has been walking since September 12. Leegte calls it an autonomous digital flâneur, a server application that roams OpenStreetMap after the Situationist dérive. At every junction it sends a transaction to itself, and the resulting hash decides its next turn, so the whole route is logged on the blockchain and could be replayed step by step. This version, developed with Jasper van Loenen, is a time limited performance for Thinking Hands, a group show at Noorderlicht about the knowledge held in the body, on view until November 1. When Wanderer premiered with Office Impart at Paris Photo in 2025, viewers could collect its junctions on Forma as NFTs, each an on-chain SVG poem made from its navigation lines.

Further away, Walled Garden (2025) is in Criptoarte: Territorios Latentes at Fundación Paiz in Guatemala City until December 12, the first cryptoart exhibition in the country. It is a digital garden of trees and overgrowth enclosed by a high circular wall, with a sculptural scrollbar at its centre, visible only through 150 openings, each matching 1 NFT in the collection: a sanctuary that can be looked at, even owned, but never entered.

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