Mapping & Tracking was a participatory, digital performance project undertaken with the Abrupt Encounters group and Artlink Central, exploring GPS tracking via mobile devices as a performative drawing material.

Year: 2013

Mapping & Tracking was a participatory project, exploring mobile GPS tracking as a performative drawing material, blending technology and creativity.

Using the Forth Valley Royal Hospital and the surrounding forest as a canvas, the project was a collaboration between artists Beverley Hood, Sharon Quigley, dancer Skye Reynolds, and participants of the Abrupt Encounters programme. Abrupt Encounters was a live arts programme developed by a collective of creatively engaged participants with learning disabilities predominantly from Central Scotland, coordinated by Artlink Central.

The Mapping & Tracking project evolved over a two week research, development and production period. The project employed a set of iPhones installed with an existing GPS tracking app (Fieldtrip GB app, developed by Edina, the JISC designated national data centre at the University of Edinburgh) and an app developed specifically for the project (by Edinburgh based app development agency, Bluemungus).

The project ethos was an open, collective and participatory group dynamic, where all participants were engaged as active performers and contributors. The group’s activities were structured around daily walks around the Forth Valley Royal hospital landscape, undertaken to generate digital GPS drawings. A variety of approaches were employed to walking with the technology. This varied from passive engagement with the phones, having them tucked away in a mobile phone armband, during exploratory walks and playful, gamified experiences, adopting classic group games such as ‘follow my leader’. More active walks with the technology, included walking to creating intentional shapes, and using other gaming premises as the basis for performative drawing techniques. These ranged from undertaking large-scale outdoor dot-to-dot/person-to-person exchange exercises and a pass the phone version of tig, which playfully evolved into the very fast, very fun GPS drawing game, ‘hot potato’.

The result was a series of personalised digital drawings combining the traced lines of the captured GPS walks, overlaid onto maps of the area. The drawings were published as a printed booklet, which folded out like a map and included notes on terrain (slippery, challenging, accessible, etc), scale, and names (Kyle’s capers, Knotted Tree Route, Paul’s Palace Walk, etc). The publication was distributed locally to encourage the public to retrace the idiosyncratic steps of these performative walks, and make better use of the hospital grounds landscape.

Funded by: Artlink Central

Photography by: Emma Bowen and Alicia Bruce