“Famous Brother Kiss as Strava Artwork on the Streets of the Capital”
In recent years a map trend has developed: the so-called Strava Art. Strava, originally known as a tracking platform with over 68 million athletes, can do much more and offers its members the space to let off steam creatively.
Artists among the Strava members use the tracking tool to create so-called GPS doodles – GPS images resulting from the tracked routes. Animals, persons, fantasy figures, lettering or even selfies – maps allow almost any motive. The challenge is to find a suitable route and plan it in advance. At the end the data can be uploaded to Strava and the trip is displayed including further information like speed, time and altitude.
The creation of such Strava works of art requires a lot of time and perseverance. The British artist Gary Cordery, for example, cycled a total of 15 hours for almost 100 kilometers through the whole of Berlin on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in order to trace the famous brother kiss between Gorbachev and Honecker as a polyline via GPS. Cordery needed a total of three days for the Strava artwork. “The kiss between brothers was very challenging for me. With this Strava style, I had to use the start/stop method to create straight lines and thus create the required curves,” says hobby sportsman Cordery. Meanwhile, numerous other works of art can be seen on his Strava profile and blog.
About Gary Cordery:
The 52-year-old graphic designer Gary Cordery is an avid amateur sportsman. Until the age of 25, he was a passionate soccer player until he discovered running. Since then he has run several half-marathons and the London Marathon a full eight times. At the age of 40 he switched to cycling and shortly after that, in 2011, he switched to Strava, where he is networking and exchanging information with friends and athletes worldwide and can measure that he is now even fitter than when he was 43, thanks to his daily cycling. With Strava Art and his corresponding Website he combines the best of two worlds: sport and design.