GPS Nüvi Blog

Recently, GPS technology has allowed artists, travelers, and others with lots of free time on their hands to plot pictures onto a map, follow the contours as best they can (by car, foot, public transportation, et cetera), download the data from their GPS, and create “GPS art” — warbling, wavy pictures that are, to tell the truth, often much more satisfying to create than to actually look at.

The technology has not, however, really invented some new form of art — it has merely given an old idea a new twist. Making large drawings on the surface of the planet is a concept that goes back over two thousand years, and doing something on a “ground”, eye-level scale that only takes shape when seen from far above speaks to a conceptual mental ability enjoyed only by humans among the species of the Earth.

So here are highlights of the genre, in no particular order:

 
1. Nazca Lines (Peru) — 200 AD-700 AD

This monkey figure was created over 1500 years ago in the Nazca Desert without aerial assistance. The largest figures are over 800 feet across.
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This impressive, and bafflingly mysterious, collection of huge, sweeping images lies in the Nazca Desert of Peru. Created by removing the dark stones that lay on the lighter-hued earth, these images are astounding for the fact that they were completely conceived, planned and executed on the ground, without aerial assistance. In fact, the creators of these spectacular images never got the chance to enjoy them all at once — we modern humans in our magnificent flying machines were the first.

Some figures are simple geometric shapes, while about seventy depict animals and human forms with varying degrees of complexity. Each one probably took a matter of days to complete. Although the lines are fairly shallow — 10 to 30 centimeters on average — they have survived nearly intact in the ensuing centuries due to the dry, almost windless air and even temperatures unique to the desert.

More than any other on this page, the Nazca Lines are the real forefathers of modern GPS contour art — the creative impulse, the planning, and execution all come from the same areas of the brain.

 
2. Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” (Great Salt Lake, Utah) — 1970

The Spiral Jetty, built in 1970, was submerged underwater until 1999 when it resurfaced, having changed its color in the meantime.
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The Apollo NASA missions, and particularly the successful moon landing in August 1969, transformed the way people saw (literally speaking) the Earth. With humanity’s first look at their planet from space, being able to take in vast geographic features with a simple glance, artists quickly enlarged their own consciousness and began to dream up projects that involved both the natural world and large scale.

Robert Smithson, then 32 years old, imagined and constructed this piece, a striking, visually simple work made of earth, mud and rocks in April 1970 — the same month, not coincidentally, that saw the very first Earth Day. The jetty was built during a time when the lake was low, and the black rocks were a visual contrast against the white salt water.

The water level rose, and the jetty was buried for the decades that followed. (Smithson died in 1973.) In 1999, the water levels fell again, exposing the jetty to a new audience, as it were. Salt encrustation and the changing properties of the water it sits in have changed the black and white of the original to a white and pink.

 
3. Great Serpent Mound (Ohio) — 800 BC-100 AD

The Great Serpent Mound is another example of something built at ground level that looks even more impressive from the air.
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Even older than the Nazca Lines, this large-scale earthwork was completed at an indeterminate time by some native tribe in the center of the North American continent — but its builders, and even the building process, are still unknown. Scholars debate the issue, sometimes hotly, but all evidence is circumstantial at best.

The Great Serpent Mound is the largest effigy mound on the globe. Don’t confuse it with a burial mound — it contains no human remains, and likely had some astronomical significance. The snake, which winds around delicately for 1,300 feet, has an oval head that aligns to the summer solstice sunset. Other theories that the snake’s body aligns to certain lunar positions are more fanciful than plausible.

Although one can appreciate the shape of the serpent from the ground (as its builders would have to have done), it is also striking from above, making its carefully planned construction yet another wonder of large-scale earth art.

 
4. Crop circles

Crop circles have come a long way from their simple geometric origins, to beautiful patterns and even post-modern Pac Man depictions.
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Some of the finest ground-art ever made, crop circles have become an institution in the world’s wheat fields, and the designs have gotten rather complex. Some companies even advertise by having their logo mashed down on an obliging farmer’s land.

The origin of crop circles is older than most people realize — a 1678 pamphlet mentions them, and even has an illustration of a devil (a “mowing-devil” in fact) systematically tramping down a large circle in a field. In 1880, the periodical Nature printed a report that tried to divine the creation of large circles in a neighbor’s field, which the author guessed were created by some unusual mix of meteorological phenomena (he mentions specifically “cyclonic wind action”).

Crop circles went through a popular spell throughout the 1980s and 1990s, with many starry-eyed true believers satisfied that they had come from extraterrestrial visitors. In fact, two men from England, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, admitted to creating a circle (in 15 minutes) one night as a prank in the 1970s, and when the ensuing notoriety proved too little for their tastes, they repeated the exercise, designing more complex patterns to counter assumptions that simple shapes were the result of easily explainable natural forces. The actions of these men sparked the hundreds of examples that (heh) cropped up in the years that followed (and that continue to this day).

Crop circles are still made, and represent perhaps the best modern-day examples of art made to be viewed from afar.

 
5. Man-made things visible from space

The Great Pyramids as photographed from space. Many human creations are visible from orbit, including cities, roads, and yes, Great Walls and ancient pyramids. This image was taken from the International Space Station.
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Yes, the Great Wall of China is visible from space, although it’s usually hard to see (remember, huge sections of it are buried in sand and aren’t visible by anyone anywhere). Many human things, in fact, are visible from space. If you define “space” as a typical orbit 135 miles from Earth’s surface, you can see the pyramids in Egypt, cities (which stick out plainly from the countryside), highways, airplanes in flight — even large vehicles and ships on the ocean are visible with binoculars. All this is even true from the International Space Station, 250 miles up.

It’s worth remembering, if this sounds at all astounding, that “space” isn’t actually that far away. What is far away is the moon, which is probably what many people subconsciously think of when they think about looking at the Earth “from space”. From the moon, nothing man-made is visible; only the vaguest outlines of continents may be seen. (From Mars, incidentally, Earth would appear only as a bright star in the sky.)

 
6. GPS art

Jeremy Wood and Hugh Pryor have several examples of their fanciful, simple GPS art projects on their website gpsdrawing.com
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A recent GPS art hoax thrust the concept into the limelight, and people (like Antti Laitinen) who actually follow routes armed with a GPS device found their work receiving more attention.

There are several approaches to this type of art — you can walk around the forest, or a town, and try to create a relatively small (and simple) picture. Or you can get behind the wheel and follow a pre-planned route around your state or country, creating something on a larger scale with more detail and, if you do it right, smoother lines. Or you can try to capture something more natural and spontaneous — attach a GPS to you dog’s collar, say, and let him go exploring in the woods. His route will end up being a crazy, jagged line; what you do with it, artwise, is up to you.

Note: even fairly simple pictures may take a while to get right. Be patient and enjoy!

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