new location: ghost

Keeping up with the fast pace of the San Francisco scene is not easy! Today’s new spot, aka ghost/house, is what you might call a “dirty” wall. This is not your typical permission wall or hall of fame for the bright and shiny, it’s just the gritty reality of graf in the raw. In the past year, it’s been a tagging scratchpad, a practice wall for toys, a windowbox for wild fennel plants, and a picture frame for full-color pieces. I’ve added 11 layers so far, featuring work by Orfn, Zeros, Aydo, Seko, Twick, Aim, Aren, and Unity, among many others. No doubt there will be more to come…

new layers: cove

Just added five new layers to the “cove” wall, featuring new pieces by Zel, Drsk, Skew, Buter, Riel, Cake87, Jime, and many more. Most of these pieces are already gone in the real world, of course, but their ghosts are preserved here for your enjoyment.

Quality of Life: review coming soon…

Just a quick note to say that I saw Quality of Life tonight, and found it very very good. It’s a terrific story, told with grace and style and a lot of heart. I’ll give it a proper review when I have time, but for now I’ll just say this: this is not just a movie for graffiti heads. Anyone with a soul will enjoy it. Go see it while you can!

It’s playing through Sunday at the United Artists Galaxy 4 Theatre (at Van Ness and Sutter) in San Francisco.

barnstormers spread the know

Spread the Know is the latest project by the amazing timelapse painting collective The Barnstormers. This one’s for the good cause of promoting HIV testing and AIDS awareness. They took over a whole city block and part of a subway station, with splashes of color and layers upon layers of styles, and captured the whole process on film with slick motion-control camera moves. There’s no way I could not love this, since it brings together three of my favorite things: street art, timelapse photography and activism. But on top of that, they do it with tremendous amounts of style. Also see their Motion Paintings page for examples of their earlier work, like We Love Music and Scrounge.

Be the printer. It’s all in the wrist.

Vincent Leclerc’s FatJab is the latest in a series of painting machines (like Applied Autonomy’s GraffitiWriter and StreetWriter, and Joshua Kinberg’s Bikes Against Bush.) What they all have in common is a linear array of nozzles that sweep out messages, dot-matrix style, across a surface. But what’s different about FatJab is that it’s not something you drive– it’s something you wield, mounted on a set of brass knuckles, like a cyborganic paint-ninja. How hot is that?

Unfortunately the site has only a handful of pictures, and no examples of anything painted with it yet, but I’m hoping that will change very soon, once they find some people with enough skill to test the thing.

(via Protein Feed, via Kevan. Thanks Kev!)