Watch this shit blow up like skateboarding and eventually become an Olympic sport… or at least an X-Games competition. Behold: looptaggr. The device allows “artists” to leave their spray painted sentiments while on the run. There’s also a handy how-to make your own. Volume alert warning: Soundtrack is not as good as the video.
Fat Tag, an iPhone app just released by Free Art and Technology, isn’t about making colorful graffiti. It’s about making tags, very drippy tags. The “simple graffiti tagging app” is free and now available to iPhone users, though the source code is open for adapting to other platforms. Click the images above for a sense of what the “accelerometer based dripping paint” is capable of. |FAT|
The still active in the streets Smart Crew have come up with a great way to parlay their love of graffiti, piss off public paint hating politician Peter Vallone, and make some money in the process: vending machines that sell fat caps for spray paint. The graffiti collective’s Smart™ cap vending machines began as an art project—kind of like that ‘.50 Ideas‘ gimmick—but evolved into a legal business venture. They’re currently looking for spots that want to carry the graffiti enhancing machines. Why would any store owner want these? Here’s a few reasons via Smart:
Graffiti for Butterflies has to be one of the most environmentally sound ideas for using the outlawed artform, even if it’s still just a concept. Designed to help direct “monarch butterflies to urban food sources along migratory routes in North America,” the project utilizes wall painted plant imagery to alert hungry tired butterflies:
“GFB uses images of milkweed flowers to broadcast the location of food sources to monarch butterflies. In the prototype at left, the graffiti is placed on a wall above an actual milkweed plant in New York City, signaling the presence of nectar to hungry monarchs in the vicinity.”
As the designer notes, it’s basically the “equivalent of a fast-food sign on a highway,” but for butterflies and placed in the city. |Dziga via Kottke|
This past Sunday night, the hacktivists at the Graffiti Research Lab screened their new DVD, “The Complete First Season” at the MoMA. The hilarious, Hip Hop-laced film—a must when making cinema nowadays—detailed the history of GRL, their antics, and the how founders Evan Roth and James Powderly quit their day jobs to give the public tools to hack public spaces. In the true spirit of open source, ANIMAL shot this ugly ugly bootleg of the first five minutes complete with people’s heads, lots of background noise, and from the 2:18 to 2:44 mark, really bad angles.
The Graffiti Research Lab presents their new The Complete First Season DVD at the MoMa this Sunday, May 4th at 8PM. The film documents GRL founders James Powderly and Evan Roth in their ultimate quest for “free speech in public, open source in pop culture, the hacker spirit in graffiti, and not asking permission in general.” There will be a Q&A after the film and a reception on the 6th floor too. Get your tickets here.
Sharing Time’s top stories along with the fate of the polygamist kids, the Dems’ balancing of the Pope’s visit, the increased call to violence from Al-Sadr, and the political problems of Kenya, is a feature story on James Powderly and tag analyzer Evan Roth of the Graffiti Research Lab. They discuss their newly emerging art form among other things, like the impetus for building high tech laser guided writing tools in the first place, “The basic idea for laser tag was to create free-speech machines — to find ways of helping people say things at a scale and in a place where you normally have people controlling speech.” The piece is filled with all sorts of other choice quotes, like this one detailing why they invited over 100 known vandals to the MoMA as part of one of their recent exhibits, “When graffiti writers are arrested, it’s at the judge’s discretion what they are charged with, depending on whether they were acting as vandals or misguided artists. And by inviting all these people to MoMA, now if they ever get arrested, they can point to this video and say that of course they’re artists, they’ve been featured by one of the country’s most prominent institutions.” Read the whole thing here, and check the video too. |Time|
Now the shit is getting interesting. The Graffiti Research Lab facilitated an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art that involved their laser tagging technology and a slew of vandals both active and former, in an attempt to investigate the “malicious intent” stipulation in the New York State Penal Code. It determines whether the graffiti-accused are charged with misdemeanors or felonies. The GRL makes their point with a question that even “typical” New Yorkers should entertain:
“Does another of our colleagues, friends, family members get a fine + community service or a felony and 3 – 12 months in Rikers?”
Although this is totally on the art faggy side of graffiti 2.0, it’s interesting to see the strange twists artists take when it comes to making public art. And this Audiobombing project takes no exception:
Audio Bombing, by Mike Fleming, Kang Chang and Kyle Millns from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, uses magnetic audio tape as its medium. Here’s how the system should work: after having recorded on a cassette any information you want, you remove the tape and cut out the segments to be used. Then take your tape segments and go tag whatever you want in urban space. You can listen to the tag by running an augmented playhead spray over the magnetic tape.
What a great way to send a double fuck you. First with the paint, and then with an audio message. The Vandal Squad will definitely appreciate your personalized message graffiti.
Musical graffiti |Make|
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