Running Stitch is a 5m x 5m tapestry map, created live during the exhibition by charting the journeys of participants through the city.

Visitors to the exhibition took a GPS-enabled mobile phone to track their journeys through the city centre. These walks resulted in individual GPS 'drawings' of the visitor's movements that were then projected live in the exhibition to disclose hidden aspects of the city. Each individual route was sewn, as it happened, into a hanging canvas to form an evolving tapestry that revealed a sense of place and interconnection.

Running Stitch explores how a track made with a GPS device changes our awareness and experience of place through the new vantage points and perspectives afforded by the use of satellite navigation.

The GPS and the data it provides can be used to track a walker. Being aware of, or seeing the resulting track changes the way that we experience the spaces and places we have travelled through. The GPS device can give a walker the viewpoint of both insider and outsider, or in other words the perspective of the view from a tall building that is combined with actually being immersed in an environment at street level. The walker was aware that their movement was being viewed at a distance, both a subject of surveillance and as a participant in a community. The walker, who is aware of the line they are producing and of the audience at a distance, also becomes a performer of their relationship to a local place. It is only through being live and participatory that the audience perceives the push and pull of the relationship between themselves, the stitcher who sews the route onto the canvas, and the viewer at a distance and sees the city emerge from the canvas.

A video of the artists flying a power kite was playing at the bottom right corner of the tapestry. They are physically dragged about an empty beach by the kite, and are at once puppets and puppeteers. The kite strings and the kiter’s line-of-site extends off screen up into the canvas as if this movement, this push and pull with the wind, is figuratively powering the stitching.

This work uses Landlines software created in collaboration with Onteca Ltd, UK. (www.landlines.org) and was exhibited at Fabrica, Brighton, UK (www.fabrica.org.uk).