Draw your Landscape

A new GPS drawing project by Jeremy Wood (earlier on uT with the dog drawings and the dragon) has hit the online news. A contextual landscape map drawn by walking the landscape and tracing it with a GPS. Couldn't be more simple as engadget points out: "walk around in the defined area with a GPS unit and end up with a 1:1 scale map of where he walked."
The concept is very similar to Open Street Map (OSM). Take a GPS and with the recordings you can trace landscape features, OSM traces the streets and a visualisation of the data collected produces a map.
However Wood's approach is interesting in so far as that he attempts to already process the landscape features in regards to the output map by using the trace to mimic mapping symbols. This provides an enhanced readability of the outcome.
Did he actually climb over fences and invade peoples gardens to achieve this? The map covers the Campus of the University of Warwick with some 238 miles of path over 17 days. Wood recalls: "Security was called on me twice on separate occasions and I lost count of how many times I happened to trigger an automatic sliding door." More images on the artists page.


Image by Jeremy Wood taken from GPSdrawing.com / Traverse Me is a map drawn by walking across campus with a GPS device to invite the viewer to see a different landscape to that which surrounds them. It questions the possibilities of where they are and inspires a personal reading of their movements and explorations of the campus. Commissioned by the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre.

Tanks for the link to Ralph Barthel, via engadget and infosthetics.