new city: Olympia, Washington!

Shown here: olympia/capitol layer 29, August 11, 2007. Photos by Jason Taellious. Stencil artist unknown.

I’m happy to announce a brand new addition to the site: the Capitol Theater Free Wall in Olympia, Washington. This wall’s evolution is radically different from the walls I usually shoot in San Francisco. The most notable difference is the rate of change: because it is truly a free wall, there’s something new to be found almost every day. Just as remarkable is the tireless effort of photographer Jason Taellious, who has been visiting this spot every day for several months to document it.

What’s up at the moment is just 29 of nearly a hundred layers I’m in the process of cobbling together from the photos of Jason and other local photographers. But this should be enough to give a good idea of the wall’s unique character. There’s quite a lot of graffiti in the New York tradition, done at various levels of skill. There are some pretty sophisticated stencils, and the occasional wheatpaste poster. High on the wall there are roller tags, and even one made with a modified fire extinguisher. And then there are random messages scrawled, it seems, by passersby who aren’t part of any street art subculture at all. All in all, it’s quite a unique mix. And how it churns. Nothing, not even a masterpiece, seems to last more than a few days, which does prompt the occasional complaint.

If you’re looking for more information about the Capitol Theater Free Wall, the wall has its own Flickr group. Also worth seeing is this chronological slideshow.

new layers: cavern/westB

Shown here: cavern/westB layer 39, October 14, 2007. Pieces by PHAZE, SAGER, AWOL, AVOID, PIERS, BREAK and KEEP.

Added five new layers to cavern/westB, bringing that wall up to date at 39 layers, and the entire site up to a total of 389 layers. This is still only a thin slice of all the photos we’ve gathered for the project. I’m in the process of building montages for several new locations in other cities. Stay tuned for lots of new stuff!

Wilkommen, Bemvindo, Welkom…

In addition to the popular blogs in English, lately I’ve been seeing a lot of links in to this site from foreign-language sites. It’s great to see how people from different cultures respond to the project. Here’s a quick roundup of recent international trackbacks:

Dutch: fontanel.nl thenielsch.web-log.nl flabber.nl

French: uqam.ca canalblog.com 2m3.net gayattitude.com pigtailbou liminarie.fr ecrans.fr fandart disobedience.be fluctuat.net insiturb1 uqam.ca netocean.free.fr

German: bluesbrothers sauglattismus blackbook.de kraftfuttermischwerk.de

Italian: lnx.zigolo.net visionet-art ilcannocchiale.it pimpmytrain.com

Japanese: parks12 designwork-s.com coliss.com bangchoo

Latvian: xlt.lv

Romanian: teoblog.com

Portuguese: agenciaging.com.br followwe e-ventos-tecnologicos perdidonaweb

Russian: visualstyle.ru

Spanish: webonauta inicios.es cuartoderecha revistasebo psicoexcesos.com bullmanu.com

Swedish: iman.se

I’ll keep this updated as new links come up.

Graffiti Archaeology got Dugg…

…and the Digg Effect slammed our server so hard, I couldn’t even log in to edit this blog. Whoops! Sorry folks! One of these days, we’ll get one of those shiny new cold-fusion-powered servers with infinite free bandwidth.