World's biggest drawing created with the help of GPS and DHL
By Joshua Fruhlinger 
posted May 25th 2008 1:31AM
posted May 25th 2008 1:31AM
[Via Hack a day]
Update: Ah, well that explains why DHL went out of its way to do a bunch of backtracking loops over the ocean -- it was an ad (supposedly in the name of art). From the "artist's" site: "The best advertising is developed with society. using [sic] a GPs [sic] and the express shipping company DhL [sic], i [sic] drew a self-portrait on our planet. i [sic] used the technological aids of our time to make the world's biggest drawing, along with advertising adapted to the contemporary era. a [sic] campaign the recipient wants to see and which is interesting enough for people to want to share it with their friends."Way to sell out, Erik. [Thanks, Chris]
WOT?
The Firefox add-on?
They should have drawn a gigantic dong.
That's what I would have done.
Last I checked,
thats no where near the caribbean
N41
Also, the thing looks like a freaking bomb with that switch. How the hell did it get through customs? Seriously.
N41
it's a young steve jobs showing his master plan. probably has several copies for motivation, maybe a wallet size and a large one over his bed.
@BananaBoat: Well, he might have planned to do that, except that Mother Nature beat him to it: http://www.snopes.com/photos/risque/rita.asp
obviously Rita loves the cock!
@all you people saying there's no island down where that big loop is: HELLO!! this is DHL we're talking about. driving/flying a boat/plane to the middle of nowhere seems like something they'd do.
@Hraefn Notice how when you put your cursor over the picture it says "Click photo to enlarge"....
DHL can't get anything anywhere on time so the chances of this happening are as likely as him shitting on the moon.
I have also created an art piece using GPS and advanced delivery methods. It is a direct reply to this artist's original artwork.
http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/4220/fingerxv9.gif
@Number_41 you obviously dont know where the caribbean is.
fake to the bone
Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-faaaaake. I'm calling shenanigans on this one.
That gigantic loop in the Southern Atlantic Ocean seems strange. No islands there at all...
The Azores islands.
You might want to learn where the Azores islands are before making such a suggestion.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Azores,&sll=33.961586,-13.425293&sspn=6.940428,15.512695&ie=UTF8&ll=57.891497,-15.820312&spn=75.246829,248.203125&t=h&z=2&iwloc=addr
Although there appears to be nothing there, the closest islands would likely be Tristan da Cunha. Azores is wayyyy off.
I was going to say Gough Island but Tristan da Cunha is pretty much the same thing. Neither is close enough though, still a good 1000 miles off.
Btw I think they misunderstood which loop he was talking about and gave the location of the bow-tie thing above it, just a simple mistake anyone could make.
who cares! he can however a big a loop he want between points! And no one cares how much gay island knowledge you have! Besides i think it's closer to the Krenitzin Islands! So there!
Yikes, some people need to stop taking things so seriously.
I'm talking about the loop in the SOUTHERN Atlantic Ocean. The Azores are to the north. Off the east coast of South America.
It's obviously fake, folks.
I just accidentally a big a loop he want between points!
is this dangerous?
ugh... a self-portrait. "world's biggest ego" is more like it.
oh, the carbon footprint of it all!
I'm glad someone said that before me! First thing I thought when I saw it. Then the idea that he did a giant self portrait sunk in... oh dear.
I work with GPS a lot and I have some serious doubts that the created image looks anything like this. Since this box was transported inside an aircraft cargo container inside an aircraft so GPS receptions was probably poor to non existent most of the time... lets see the raw data.
all you have to see is the video. he's not connecting the dots.
Quoting Stan Marsh: "Holy Sh*t, It's Jesus!"
That's what I thought when I saw it too . . . arms outstretched, beard, some weird "hair" loops that might be a crown of thorns.
Then I read it was a self-portrait.
The man makes the very first "global artwork," an opportunity to make some kind of grandiose, all-encompassing statement, and it's just a damn portrait of himself. Nice ego.
Thats the South China Sea, not the Caribbean...
WTF? If this is real then it's proof that some people have too much damn money and time on their hands.
I dunno about this (fake or not) project, but it's always "too much money" when about Art and never enough for war or human stupidity.
So great mentality!
Do you mean South of the North Atlantic Ocean or South of the South Atlantic Ocean?
I'm surprised that's briefcase (considering this all checks out) traveled all over the world considering a first glance under the hood looks as though it's rigged with enough plastic explosives to blow Mr. Outstretched-Arms-Hinting Christian-Implications-I-Was-Created-By-A-Guy-With-Much-Too-Much-Time-And-Money-on-His-Hands-Man's nose from its current locale into Australia.
Why would they turn a ship for him? Is he really rich? Oh wait, no, he's an 'artist.' And I suppose if his job is basically to stimulate the human sense, co-ordinates are about as cold as it gets.
With DHL its air transport .... but as I stated in my previous post the whole thing seems rather unlikely that if you plot the data points. That the image created would look anything like this.
I've never seen an airplane make such pretty curves. It's usually waypoint to waypoint, pretty direct, without big graceful circles over the middle of the Pacific...especially when they're trying to do it on a timeline.
Agreed I call BS, I am willing to believe parts are real, but he then 'enhanced' it liberally (or should I say republicany), no way DHL pointlessly makes 50 loops above the atlantic not to mention over russian airspace, not even if this is a (semi-)covert DHL ad.
Oh and incidentally, DHL trucks are metal all around aren't they? and that would shield the GPS, not to mention that freight in airplanes is also contained on all sides by metal.
Okay, turn a plane. Regardless of whether it's real or not, it's an irrelevant piece of work. Even if it's an ad it doesn't really extol to virtues of Air couriers, this is more like an elaborate explanation of why your package was delayed.
@ Bob.
If you watched the video, you would see that the plane didnt do fluid curves, but they did small point to point lengths, just when you zoom out, it looks like a fluid curve
I don't like being negative but this has fake written all over it. I can see lots of ships looping out to sea just to create this picture. Not.
Fake and meaningless. I'm sure he had couriers obeying his every request in deepest Africa (and I've been there around DR Congo, there ain't straight roads and there) and couriers drawing fingernails in East Timor and North of PNG, out at sea amongst the pirates. Not. Bollocks.
What a waste of money. Donate to charity.
Of Course they would never do such a thing....
Then again money makes people do anything...
shut the F up! Nobody cares that you've been to the Congo! For Christ's sake he can make whatever loop he wants between points, it's art! Stop taking shit so literally and being a hater! Guess what... I've been to your Mom's house but no one cares!
So that's why my Dell laptop took so long to get to me from DHL!!
fake and incredibly stupid
God?
I am very willing to belive the fact that the drawing he sketches in the video is nearly exact to the "path" his package takes, and that the video shows him being transported by a small personal watercraft in the Maldives...but he drew a self-portrait of himself? I would make the worlds largest drawing of boobs if DHL were willing to do my bidding.
Totally fake. Nice try, though.
Nice ad for DHL. That's what this is. It's not even a "fake" per se, it's just a viral DHL ad. Watch the video on the hackaday site. Sheesh - if that's not product placement, then I've never seen it.
Well, the WHOIS/DNS data checks out. The site is owned by a photographer from Sweden, and is registered there. The journey as indicated on the pdf starts in Stockholm.
There does not appear to be any connection between his hosting service and that used by DHL, or dhl.se
I suppose that this doesn't rule out viral marketing, but it probably makes it a little less likely - I don't see why they would have chosen him, or started there, given that DHL is a German company and presumably have their head of operations/marketing there.
Agree, just a viral ad for DHL...
definately fake. no shipping company would make circles in the middle of the ocean
Are you kidding? Diverting a couple of flights off course onto slightly more loopy paths is really inexpensive marketing if it makes CNN and you're only going a little ways off course.
WHAT A LOAD OF SHIT!
Yes, DHL is going to spend tens of thousands of dollars in extra fuel costs not to mention shipping delays so that it can entertain the whim of an "artist". That is exactly how corporations, especially shipping corporations that rely on every second and every fuel efficiency (such as only making left turns in delivery trucks) operate.
Besides, this guy looks like a douchier version (if such a thing is possible) of Justin Timberlake
well, they aren't worried until oil hits $200/barrel.
LIARS
I work at dhl and this is totally fake.......
this actually makes sense when you watch the video...he simply mapped the stops of the package and then connected the dots by drawing curves. He did not trace the trajectory of the package...so he could've drawn anything really...
then, why the hell he needs to use the GPS then? just send an empty box to some specified destinations, and map the picture himself. the GPS coordinates are not used in this so-called art.
@ abib:
Because following a GPS into the ocean is the new big thing.
The overall idea is nice but it would have been much more believable if he'd done over a certain continent - the way the hair is done is just a little too much "artistic freedom" fro my taste - no way would an aircraft or a ship do such circles.
ok, so you all have decent points. But hey he got all of you interested, pissed off or otherwise flaberghasted enough to write a comment about it right? So mission accomplished. Wether or not he actually did what he claims is besides the point. Art is about provoking emotion, good or bad, so i must give him props!
What have the rest of you done with your life? Can any of you claim to have affected or at least aggrivated people all over the world? Pretty impresive if you ask me.
Which is exactly why no one asked you.
Do you seriously think it's an accomplishment or even difficult to aggravate a large group of people?
A: this is a public comments post so no one had to ask me
B: why dont you try and doing something big enough to make Engadget write an article about it and get thousands of people from all over the world pissed of enough to respond to it?
C: Evidently I"ve managed to piss off two more people. Yes!
If he had GPS data (unlikely), why would he draw the thing by hand? As opposed to plotting it in some mapping software? I call bollocks.
if he used fedex i might have believed.
this total bullsh*t wan.k is the first thing thats pissed me off today.
more annoying than the loose claim by such a generic looking, no laces, gap wearing bas tard, that he has invented a gps device that works in a package in a cargohold and al the rest of it (like that interesting rout in the atlantic forming the back of his neck/hair), is that irritating whiney music he's got playing in the background.
he is so 'art aschool typical' it hurts.
hence the effort to do "the world's biggest..."
no brains, no ideas, no style.
i hope he gets ritually humiliated for it, can we play along for now so the kunt gets on tv then expose him?
Fed Ex Lover!
@UPS
how ironic.
Fed ex-lover?
Ha Eric made it to engadget!! :) Believe it or not guys this guy is a friend of a friend of mine and this is his exam project on Beckmans school of design in Stockholm. I have seen the map in real life and it had all the route coordinates printed on the backside I didnt really believe it myself, but except for the sea points, all the rest are valid cities or places. I also got some inside info that it was uncertain into the last moment whether or not DHL would let him do this thing. So anyway I hope he gets the credit he deserves.
That's another useless school where cheaters are rewarded, apparently.
It's a fake. 15. stop is said to be Yli-Li, but actually the town's name is Yli-ii ;)
umm is it just me or does that youtube video above prove absolutely NOTHING. it just shows him drawing the picture. what the hell was the point of that?
umm...regardless if the GPS module is surrounded by metallic skin of the plane, truck or ship, due to the high frequency nature of the radio signal for GPS, it is very weak and cant even penetrate trees (dense foliage). as long as the GPS module can't 'see' the sky, it's just a useless piece of plastic
Given the amount of time the package spent in Europe, wouldn't it make a few stops at DHL's Brussels hub? It looks like it barely grazed Brussels on one occasion. And wouldn't DHL put the package on a flight from its Brussels hub to its Hong Kong hub in order to get it into the right general locale for Oceania?
I once ordered something that DHL shipped from the seller, to Wilminton Ohio, shoved it on a boat?!? through Canada then down the east coast. No way you could predict the routes a package is going to take.
And if he didn't use the GPS information, why didn't he get a big map and put numbers next to each dot to make the "world's biggest join-the-dots puzzle"? Does that make you an artist or just someone past the age where you think that crayons are edible?
He used a Mercator projection - an unrealistic representation of the earth which overstates the importance of the northern hemisphere - so in reality even if he did this (can't believe he did - what sort of a budget does someone like this have for an art project? Does a GPS work hidden inside an airport/ship hold/plane?), his face would be all screwed up and he'd have the biggest chin ever.
Actually its a Equirectangular Projection... If it were a Mercator, it would have skewed the North and South of the map a whole hell of a lot more.
It is entirely possible that this is legit. Especially since there are some scenes in the vid where the GPS is outside. Since we don't know the GPS's datalogging frequency, or when he turned the GPS on or off, it does tend to discredit it a bit.
Also, if this was legit, it could, and should be, imho, re-projected on a Lambert Conformal Conic Projection, which is the "industry standard" when it comes to aviation. In order to do this, the raw data would need to be seen and re-projected.
Come on Captain Lingonberry, release the hard data!
/I hold degrees in Geographic Information Science
The web site is registered by Sthlm Design Factory, a "Brand Identity" firm in Sweden. This is quite obviously a paid promo for DHL.
Well, okay, maybe I'm being a bit cynical here, but you'd have to have a very special relationship with DHL to get them to waste thousands of dollars worth of fuel sailing around in circles while transporting your parcel.
I think Engadget needs an atlas before claiming there are circles in the 'Caribbean'. Looks to me like circles all over Europe, not even the right continent.
If you look at all those way points like 400+ it would have taken a minimum of 315 days to get to those destinations if those air bills are correct. He says that all those stops were covered in 55 days. Impossible! No way to clear customs that fast. Secondly, if the GPS never got off the plane and this is a semi truth about getting close to the destination point no DHL plane would fly direct to these destinations(even the nearest airport to the destination) they have to backtrack through the lines to get to certain hubs. The pilots are not the package handlers.
This is such a viral ad campaign by DHL but it makes them look like complete idiots in this time when they are complaining about fuel prices.
dont be mad because you wish you thought of it 1st
simple
Why is a monkey kissing a guy in the ear?
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa HA!
At the end of the day, the "art" may be the whole idea/video/trip/webpage package, and the "world-sized drawing" all of us, responding to it.
Personally I would have gone for tracing the constellations across the Earth's face using snail mail. Easier, original enough for an art project, and inexpensive.
wt holy f??? he went WITH DHL on the flights and on the trucks?? FAKE FAKE FAKE FAKE FAKE or he paid DHL WELLLLLLL
That was a spectacular waste of money...then again in todays world art could be $hit on a stick....go figure.
This is soooo fake. DHL would not waste there time or fuel making circles out in the Atlantic ocean for one package... stupid!
Seems to me this has been done (bigger and better) since the dawn of humankind using the ultimate navigation system. We've been finding pictures (and meaning) in the stars for thousands of years. This guy plotted a picture on a terrestrial map, but the pictures we've been plotting on the celestial maps are quite a bit larger and pay homage to more than one man's ego.
All the people claiming that this was a big waste of money are making me laugh.. Even if this was an ad produced for DHL, there is no possibility that they actually did this. It's much cheaper to just claim that you did it and you get the same reaction. Cut together some generic shots from around the world, and you got yourself a viral ad campaign that will likely make the front page of Digg as well as many Main Stream Media outlets.
I'm not even a cynical person by nature, but this just stands out as complete load of bollocks. For the same dozens of reasons already mentioned in other people's posts.
I think this routing is 100% accurate, however I think that the package was originally scheduled to go only from England to Scotland. DHL probably lost the package in their "network" and by the time they found it it had gone on a little joyride. Typical DHL.
even if this weren't fake, what a gigantic waste of energy and other resources
As anyone who's shipped a package via ANY courier knows, the line between origin and destination is never a straight line. There is no way that a package from the Caribbean to the Fiji Islands goes direct- for sure it would be routed through gateways and hubs, probably in Singapore or Hong Kong or Australia. The artist has taken too much umm artistic liberty to depict the journey and if he was going to do that, why put a GPS in the bag in the 1st place. It's not the real journey because the real journey would have zig zagged all over the place and never provided such clean lines for the final image...
Does DHL not use hub and spoke shipping? If you've ever tracked a shipment, it doesn't go from A to B. Often it will go further away from the destination to a hub before shipping out to the location.
Hmm... maybe I could arrange one for UPS... and have the new biggest drawing in the world be the UPS logo...
No... they'd miss the pickup, deliver it to the wrong address a few hundred times, lose it, find it, and charge extra for after hours travel. The logo would come out looking like a blurry EXXON logo.
The "sic" stuff is a bit much, isn't it? I know that blogs do not equal journalism unless they want to, but standard journalism practice is to clean up quotes so you don't make your subjects look like idiots. The other thing you could have done was posted the entire quote with some pithy Engadget-esque disclaimer warning how terrible the artist's grammar is.
But I guess that wouldn't be the most demeaning way to quote someone.
The entire update to the post seems unnecessarily harsh. "Way to sell out, Erik"? Whether you think the concept is clever or not -- the question of being "real" is somewhat beside the point as it's the concept that's garnering publicity -- don't trash a guy for making some scratch with his idea. Besides, he's right, this art-ad hybrid _is_ more interesting than your typical advertisement, or why would Engadget give it such prominent play?
As far as the notion of "selling out" is concerned, as far as I can tell, Engadget happily takes money from a wide array of advertisers. It's not selling out; it's making a living. Give the guy a break.