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YesYesNo Visualize The Art Of Running

Creating dynamic paintings by going for a run.

If you go for the occasional run to help balance out all your excesses, chances are the last thing on your mind as you’re pounding the pavement is making art. You’re probably just concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other and keeping yourself from face-planting into the sidewalk as you slog out your journey. But interactive designers YesYesNo have used the act of running as a way to generate visual art. Firstly, by taking a year’s worth of data from the Nike+ website for the cities of New York, London and Tokyo, they created an installation (above) where the city maps become decorated with thousands of illuminated veins—the routes of all those different runners.

They also ran a workshop where runners could create dynamic feet paintings with the data from their individual routes. The workshop, run by Nike, asked participants to record their runs using the Nike+ GPS, allowing them to then play around with different variables like the speed, style and consistency using custom software built with openFrameworks to create their dynamic paintings. You can see the resulting selected prints that were made below, in an interesting use of data that primarily gets analyzed for athletic, rather than artistic, reasons.