Part sport, part art, GPS drawing lets runners, walkers, cyclists and hikers imagine themselves anew, mapping their track lines across cities, roads and farms, and sharing them online. Above, a GPS drawing by a runner.

Three years after moving to Brooklyn from Poland, Tomasz Berezinski awoke after a night of inebriety with a headache and decided his life must change. He started running, bought a GPS device and turned his body into a brush and the city into his canvas.

“I felt bad for my body,” said Berezinski, who works as a designer for a rug company. “I was overweight. I was drinking too much and I felt too much like an office person.”

Since that morning almost a year ago, Berezinski, 40, has run three marathons, lost 16 pounds and taken to creating huge drawings by following routes through city streets in the shape of faces, dogs and anything else that strikes his fancy. After planning a route, he traces it on foot or bicycle carrying his GPS device to record his progress. Then he uploads the “drawing” he has made to a map-sharing site called everytrail.com.

Part sport, part art, GPS drawing lets runners, walkers, cyclists and hikers imagine themselves anew — not just as a collection of burning muscles, sweaty armpits, forward motion; not just as people endeavoring to crest a hill or lose five pounds. Instead, they are neo-cartographers, jumbo-size doodlers and bipedal pencils, mapping their track lines across cities, roads and farms, and sharing them online.

The Global Positioning System, or GPS, is made up of more than two dozen orbiting satellites transmitting location information to GPS receivers in cars, on bikes, in GPS-enabled fitness watches and increasingly in smart phones like the iPhone and BlackBerry.

Some 240 million smart phones containing GPS receivers will be shipped in 2009, up 6 percent from last year despite a flailing economy, according to the market research firm ABI Research. “By 2013 every phone, except the most basic models, will be GPS-enabled,” said Dominique Bonte, the company’s practice director of telematics and navigation.
New GPS software applications like MotionX GPS, RunKeeper and MapMyRun for smart phones make it easy for users to track and share routes on dedicated Web sites and social-networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, making GPS devices viable drawing tools much like a pencil on paper or a stick in sand.

Pedaling the rectangular city blocks in San Francisco, Vicente Montelongo, 32, a graphic artist, realized the street layout lent itself to the pixeled shapes of vintage 1980s video game characters like Pac-Man, Qbert and Donkey Kong.

Back home with a printed-out Google map and a pencil, he drew Pac-Man chasing a ghost over in the Sunset District and then set out on his bike, iPhone in tow, GPS mapping application on. After riding 8.6 miles in an unwavering line, he uploaded the GPS track data from his phone, and had his picture.

“It’s a good way to get exercise and see the city,” said Montelongo, who is working on a series of GPS drawings based on the beloved video games of his youth. “You end up going on these streets that you would never otherwise go down.”

Like Berezinski, Montelongo shares his maps on everytrail.com. The iPhone is the fastest growing GPS tool of the site’s user base, according to Joost Schreve, the site’s founder. “But if you look at the quality of the maps, the best trips still come from traditional GPS devices,” he said, noting that the iPhone tends to draw less precise lines and to lose its signal under trees and near large buildings. (NYT)