Peter Mitchell doesn’t use a pen or a paintbrush for his art medium. His medium is his Global Positioning System (GPS). He combines creativity and physical activity with technology to produce huge images drawn on parks, sand dunes, or anywhere there is space to roam.
Peter believes GPS art began in Japan, where people started spelling out words and pictures across the country using GPS; now, he says, with the advent of smartwatches and smartphones, it’s become more accessible and mainstream. Apps like Strava show a diagram of where you’ve been, your activity, and your achievements.
Peter is a member of a running group called The Mornington Misfits. He says, “I’m a runner and an ultra-runner on the Peninsula, and a few of us did a run at Mt Martha. Someone got lost, and we went back and found them, then went back to the café, then up to the mount, and it kind of looked like Big Bird.
Then, for a social thing on Strava, where you follow your friends, and they follow you back, and you can see what each other is doing so we went around the shops and thought if we changed it a bit, it would really look like Big Bird. So, a friend and I went out the next week and reran a similar course. With a few changes, sure enough, it looked very, very similar to Big Bird. A lot of people saw it and wanted to run the course, so we reran it and marked it. Then everyone started running it, and it’s taken off from there.”
“If you run it correctly on the Strava app, it will appear as ‘Bird is the word’ and automatically puts you on a leaderboard. My friend and I ran it in the opposite direction, and he called it ‘Drib Gib’, which is Big Bird spelled backwards. If you run it forwards and then backwards in the same run, he called it ‘Flipping the Bird’. It’s all gone from there.”
Peter and his mates do monthly group runs and a couple of fund-raising events for the Mornington Community Centre, where a lady’s son had a Big Bird costume he’d bought for a fancy dress party. She offered it to Peter, which he wears when he hosts the events.
“It’s a beautiful run,” he says, “with dirt roads, boardwalk and trails, and through the Briars, and it’s a good distance for most people. It’s not super challenging, and it’s not too short. If you can do a 5k park run, you can probably do the Big Bird course. It’s also very undulating, so if you run it one way and then the other way, it would be about 18kms. We’ve also done a marathon and half marathon course on it.”
Since Big Bird, Peter has completed a kangaroo in Frankston South, a dolphin at McCrae, and Taylor Swift! He branched out to bigger and longer runs to suit his ultra-running. There’s a map of Australia, and, as Peter says, “On my birthday, someone challenged me to create a world map.”
Peter’s GPS art is getting worldwide attention, including a spot on CBS in Los Angeles for his 40th birthday GPS portrait of the basketballer Le Bron James, which got over a million views on social media. The State Premier, Jacinta Allan, gave a shout-out on her social media account when he created his world map run.
Peter explains the basic technique is ‘Street Routing’, which can be running, cycling or walking, where you plan the route in advance and set it up on your watch or phone to help you navigate not only streets and roads but paths, trails and parks. Not people’s backyards, though!
‘I’ve been known to jump the odd fence, but I try not to go on private property if I can.
‘I’ve been known to jump the odd fence, but I try not to go on private property if I can. It’s funny. There are quite a few parks where I think, “Oh, I can just go through, and then you get there, and some of them are fenced up. If I’m there at 7 o’clock in the morning, I’ll just find a gap or jump over if the fence is not too high. I will try not to do anything illegal.’
Lately, Peter has been concentrating on freestyle GPS art, which is more spontaneous and intended for big parks, sand dunes, and fields. ‘You’ve got no constraints,’ he says. ‘You don’t have to follow the roads. You can’t really run it because everything becomes quite small and detailed. You can get much better results.’
Peter calls it Park Art. He has done a sequence of works called ‘Moonwalk’, portraying Michael Jackson’s famous dance move, which has been turned into an animation by a fellow practitioner from Canada. Peter collaborates with other international GPS artists in Brazil, America and Hungary. Locally, Peter is partnering with Telstra to develop the form and would like to continue his community involvement and get kids interested.
‘As technology improves and becomes more mainstream, virtually everybody’s got GPS tracking on their phone so anyone can do it. There are different levels, obviously. Moving forward, one of my main things is to try and get people outdoors doing something like this instead of sitting behind the computer screen. I work part-time, but my passion’s always been GPS art, so I’ve decided to take it seriously and see what I can do and, in some way, monetise it so I can keep doing it. I love it.’
GPS Art is an emerging form. It’s not the kind of art you can hang on a wall; it’s ephemeral, but you can access it on Peter’s Instagram GPS Art Guru, the internet or Strava or other sites, and it’s enchanting. Peter did his Australia Map again for Australia Day this year.
Contact Peter for logos, promotions or events.
bigpetemitchell@yahoo.com
P: 0411 073 664