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The Museum of Hoaxes is dedicated to promoting knowledge about hoaxes. (Click here for opening hours, etc.) On our blog we post about whatever dubious-sounding claims come across our path on a day-by-day basis. In our archives we have hundreds of articles about the most fascinating and notorious deceptions throughout history, from the middle ages to the present.
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The World’s Largest Drawing
Status: Hoax
I'm very late with this one, but I thought it was worth including on the front page. I'll defer to David B. who posted about it a few days ago in the forum:A Swedish artist, Erik Nordenankar, recently made more that a few waves by claiming to have drawn the biggest picture in the world, a portrait of himself constructed of a single line 110 thousand km long.
Nordenanker said his amazing drawing had been sketched out, not in ink or paint, but by the movements of a special briefcase fitted with a GPS tracker. This case, he claimed, had been given to DHL along with a precise itinerary detailing the exact coordinates the package was to be taken to. Once it had completed its world-spanning round-trip, Nordenanker simply downloaded the route from the device’s memory and set about publicising his achievement.
Nordenanker said his amazing drawing had been sketched out, not in ink or paint, but by the movements of a special briefcase fitted with a GPS tracker. This case, he claimed, had been given to DHL along with a precise itinerary detailing the exact coordinates the package was to be taken to. Once it had completed its world-spanning round-trip, Nordenanker simply downloaded the route from the device’s memory and set about publicising his achievement.
Nordenankar now has a notice at the top of his website acknowledging the drawing was a hoax: "This is made as my graduation project in Advertising and Graphic Design at Beckmans College of Design. I think it's possible to realise the project for real, but due to my extremely limited budget (about 20 000 SEK = 3 370 USD) that was not possible. Therefore, I have realised the idea in a fictional way."
Some other links: An article in The Telegraph, Wired's article about the hoax, and Nordenankar's youtube video.
The question I have is, What is the world's largest drawing? I've found two possible candidates, after searching the Google News Archive:
1) In 1991 thousands of volunteers drew on an 800-pound, 7-mile-long-when-extended roll of paper. According to a July 11, 1991 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the plan was to completely roll out the paper and take an aerial photo of it when it was done, but I can't find any articles indicating if it was ever completed.
2) According to a Feb 4, 1996 article in the LA Times: "In a project cooked up for the Los Angeles bicentennial, [the artist Tom Van Sant] and a crew set up mirrors in the shape of an eye across a 1 1/2-mile stretch of the Mojave Desert to overexpose sensors in a satellite passing overhead. The result was the world's largest drawing." But again, I can't find any pictures of Van Sant's drawing.