Graffiti’s Digital Exploits
Posted: May 28th, 2009 | Author: graggregator | Filed under: Graf | No Comments »Coincidence is a myth. I’m not a great believer in fate as such, if anything, for me it’s more the result of a lot of effort or lack thereof, depending on its nature i.e positive or negative, but either way there’s one small element of fate that does seem to nip at my ankles (proverbially speaking) from time to time and that is synchronicity.
There’s an old saying in Britain ‘you wait all day for a bus and then three come at once’, well first of all that’s another myth, usually it’s one, sometimes two (and one is most likely heading back to the station), but the sentiment does head in the right direction at the very least. Anyway, I won’t burden you with the bizarre inner workings of my mind a moment longer, it’s probably the result of extreme lack of sleep, it seems our street has turned into a building site, the British obsession with D.I.Y has definitely trumped the long dead fervour for buying and selling property.
So, without further adieu, here’s a double combo of digital graffiti stories for your delectation, please keep it down whilst you read these though, I need to catch up on another forty winks :/
Graffiti Timebomb
This story was sent to me from Carrie at Chunnel.tv – an interesting name for a new media site – they’re not an Anglo-French operation, it just happens to be a funky name for a platform that connects art and artworks from around the world. They’re currently featuring a video of a digital graffiti exhibition in Sydney Australia by the collaboration of digital artist Lukasz Karluk and sculptor Sydney Maddi Boyd (aka StupidKrap & Holler).
Timebomb offers a fascinating insight into the cultural geology and real-time evolution of the art of graffiti. Take a trip through any major city, New York City’s urban landscape, or the miles upon miles of art-lined train tracks leading into Paris and you’ll already have an idea of what these two artists are trying to achieve with this innovative digital installation.
We could get into all sorts of sociological and cultural arguments that flit around the subject, the signs of social degradation versus the expressive freedom of the people in a world where everything and everywhere is but a canvas waiting to be painted, but Timebomb simply circumvents the discourse and offers an alternative and pixelated view of the technical and artistic processes involved, rather than merely getting bogged down in the politics of graffiti.
For me personally the archaeology of graffiti, the exposition of layer upon layer revealing a timeline of cultural and social expression, a truer record of a moment in time than anything produced by the mainstream media definitely draws my eye, and steers me towards the artistic intentions as opposed to pretensions of many creative minds in the scene. Graffiti continues to hide and reveal its multifarious personalities, styles, forms, techniques and even political messages through the continuous interaction of a community of competing and co-operative artists. Time Bomb offers a means of interactively incorporating all underlying layers into a single composition, in essence offering a way if preserving both the end result and the history of any single piece of graffiti art space.
Over four days nine urban artists contributed to the TimeBomb piece: DMOTE, Ben Frost, Kid Zoom, Numskull, Roach, Creon, John Doe, Bennett and KissKiss. The process involved painting layers upon layers in different styles, whilst documenting their work through time-lapse photography to create an animated film of the whole process. Shots from the work can be seen here.
The final installation will feature two giant graffiti walls suspended in the museum. One wall will be the real painting, the other a projected film double. The visitors’ physical movements in the museum can then control this film, going backwards in time, revealing the now-covered layers of graffiti.
Time Bomb – Interactive Graffiti (StupidKrap & Holler)
If you’d like to see the exhibition in Sydney Australia click here for details.
Virtual Graffiti City
The team at Venturebeat.com pointed me towards Earthmine which has unveiled a 3-D mapping application called Wild Style City that captures the real world and then lets artists draw graffiti all over it. Wild Style City is a kind of 3-D recreation of the world that faithfully reproduces every street in cities such as San Francisco, much like Google’s StreetView application. The twist being that it adds a virtual layer on the buildings upon which users can draw legal graffiti.
This application is a great example of a growing trend toward mixed reality, or a hybrid of reality and virtual environments that make the real world easier to decipher or more entertaining. Earthmine’s use of navigation and mapping technologies in this digital application offers users who view Wild Style City maps online to see and create infinite examples user-generated graffiti. Users can easily annotate any site with messages or art using interactive geo-tagging tools. The Earthmine applications gives users a 3-D view of streets with Adobe’s Flash animation tools.
Apart from offering a way of producing legal graffiti as well as a chance for architects and town planners to work out the ramifications of the effects of such a culture on their local environment it does bring in to question the idea that graffiti collectives may in fact use the application to plan a ‘bombing campaign’ of street art in a local area, if there’s a street art equivalent of Wargames then this has to be it!
Perhaps it will encourage local bigwigs in town planning and local government to allow free space for graffiti art in the future but I very much doubt it. Still it’s a lot of fun, see some examples in this video:-
If you fancy painting the town red (or any colour) then visit Wild Style City.
Tags: digital art, digital graffiti, earthmine, graffiti, graffiti application, graffiti apps, graffiti timebomb, SF, Sydney, wild style city
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