Walking Lines. Drawing by Walking
2026 – ongoing
Walking Lines turns the movement of the body into a drawing procedure. An application uses GPS to record a route on foot and translates it, in real time, into lines, stains and vector forms. The walk is not represented on a map: it is inscribed directly onto a non-cartographic surface. Bends, detours, pauses and variations in the signal cease to be accidents of recording and become formal elements.
Walking art, algorithmic drawing and GPS traces.
Compra, 26.08.2026. Vector drawing generated from GPS data, mixed mode. Barcelona; 310 m, 5 min 49 s.
Brisa, 30.08.2026. Vector drawing generated from GPS data, mixed mode with an anchored word (“Brisa”). Ciutat Vella, Barcelona; 302 m, 3 min 22 s. More on Walking Lines.
The project belongs to the tradition of walking as an aesthetic practice and a mode of knowing territory, but relocates that experience to the mobile device. Here GPS operates not as an orientation technology but as an imperfect sensor. Each accepted position deposits a point, and the receiver’s uncertainty—the metres of error attached to every reading—is not corrected: it is drawn, becoming line weight, a band of stain or disorder in the line.
A filter determines what can be considered walking: it discards readings with more than 30 m of inaccuracy, jumps impossible on foot and the tremor of immobility, while retaining slow drift, which advances even when it is barely perceptible. Precision therefore serves not to reconstruct an objective trajectory, but to determine the drawing’s visual behaviour.
Stopping opens an island. Ground covered during a pause is neither drawn nor counted as distance or time, yet its actual direction and length remain on the paper to scale: white becomes material rather than interruption. With the microphone active, ambient sound is analysed on the phone itself—volume, continuity, spectral texture and impulsiveness—and translated into bodies of varying roundness, angularity or elongation, without recognising speech or retaining recordings. Words may also be anchored to a point on the route, connected to it by a fine thread when the text moves away from the ink.
Each walk produces an autonomous work. Only a flat PNG 2048 pixels wide circulates in the notebook, projected north-up around the centre of the route; the original SVG is reserved for administration. No coordinates, timestamps or original GPS track are shared. What circulates is the form, not the map.
Walking Lines is an ongoing project. The instrument remains in development and group activations are planned. The project originated in Walking Score, the participatory proposal for the Are.na Annual in which each route becomes a score.
Río Alcalá con suspiro, 11.08.2026. Vector drawing generated from GPS data, mixed mode. Alcalá de la Selva; 3.24 km, 51 min 13 s. More on Walking Lines.
Apertura, 05.08.2026. Vector drawing generated from GPS data, mixed mode with a sound layer; 1.01 km, 17 min 30 s.
Playa, 05.08.2026. Vector drawing generated from GPS data, line with a sound layer. La Geltrú (Vilanova i la Geltrú); 1.4 km, 22 min 24 s. More on Walking Lines.
Micro caminata de estudio, 31.08.2026. Vector drawing generated from GPS data, mixed mode. Sant Martí, Barcelona; 11 m, 43 s. More on Walking Lines.
Rutina deconstruida, 31.08.2026. Vector drawing generated from GPS data, mixed mode with an anchored word (“Metro”). Ciutat Vella, Barcelona; 243 m, 3 min 22 s. More on Walking Lines.
Tres cuerpos, 02.09.2026. Vector drawing generated from GPS data, mixed mode. Sant Martí, Barcelona; 272 m, 4 min 55 s. More on Walking Lines.
Fragmentos de un jueves por la mañana, 03.09.2026. Vector drawing generated from GPS data, mixed mode. L’Eixample, Barcelona; 920 m, 10 min 49 s. More on Walking Lines.