new layers: ghost/house

Shown here: ghost/house 18, December 26, 2005. Pieces by 4GETS and GERMS, throwie by DEON.

Playing the catch-up game on the Ghost/House wall. I added eight more layers to this one, bringing it up to January 2006. Thanks to Flickr user San Francisco Graffiti for filling in a missing spot in the record. The new layers feature work by NOVAK, UNITY, 4GETS, GERMS, DEON, FICKS, GHANA, PHADE, EURO, ZEROS, FEYN, DAGON, KAIZER, and others.

The wall has seen a lot of action in the last year. To bring it completely up to date, I’ll need to add at least thirty more layers. Here’s a little taste of what’s to come:

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I’ve had to turn off comments on this blog for now. I’ll turn them back on later, once I’ve had a chance to upgrade the CMS that runs this thing. Apologies to any actual human readers who may have tried to leave a comment in the past year– your comment is buried among some 25,000 pieces of robot spam, and I haven’t had time to wade through it all.

Also, apologies to any robots who had something interesting to say in the comments. Your day will come.

new layers: cavern

Shown here: cavern/north 8, January 20, 2007. Throwie by Sager.

Added some new recent layers to the Cavern, a once-great spot that has been mostly dormant since it got buffed in 2003. There’s some interesting back-and-forth going on between a few different writers (SAGE vs. SAZE, for example). Time will tell whether the spot grows back to its former glory, or gets buffed again.

I also made some minor changes to the interface today: there are now keyboard shortcuts for panning (the arrow keys), zooming (+ and -), and centering (0) your view of the wall. There are some bigger changes I’d like to make soon, and this was a nice way to refresh my memory of Flash.

new layers: bluxome

Shown here: bluxome/eastA 7, January 14, 2007. Pieces by Neon and Apex.

Catching up on San Francisco walls again, this time the eastern wall of the alley at Bluxome. Featuring fresh work by APEX, NEON, RIME, RUETS, LIONS, STEEL, STEREO, BEGR, and others. Follow the link above, and select “bluxome/eastA” (or eastB) from the menu to see the new stuff.

New wall: candle/west (11 Spring)

Shown here: candle/west layer 30, January 4, 2007. Photos by Adam Lawrence.

Finally, the western wall of 11 Spring Street is up and running! There’s four years of history up there in a nice tidy package. This is the most collaborative wall I’ve assembled yet, featuring photos by no less than ten other photographers: C-Monster, Jake Dobkin, Goggla, guy_on_the_streets, ireallylovecake, Adam Lawrence, Rion Nakaya, Nicholas Noyes, Luna Park, shoehorn99, and myself. The wall itself tells quite a story, which I can only show you the highlights of at this point. There are many more in-between layers for me to add, particularly from the crazy weekend of Wooster on Spring. I just didn’t want to wait any longer to share it.

To give you a sense of how huge this event was for Graffiti Archaeology, let me drop some statistics. Flickr users shot, uploaded and tagged more than 5,000 photos during the open-house weekend. Of those, I have culled and downloaded over 800 exterior shots, coming to a total of 1.1 gigabytes of unprocessed photos. I’ve merged about a hundred of these into the 30 layers you see here. The rest I will continue to sift through for interesting moments over the coming weeks.

In the meantime, enjoy!

new layers: candle

Shown here: candle/south 16, November 29, 2006. Photo by C-Monster.

Just starting to put together the photos from my trip. So far, three new layers from the south wall of the Candle Building, including some fresh new work by Skewville, Mark Jenkins, and Celso. Also, if you look closely, you might catch some tags by Stay High 149. Thanks to C-Monster for the most recent flick!

New location: the Candle Building, NYC

Shown here: candle/south 11, November 6, 2006. Photos by Nicholas Noyes.

At long last, Graffiti Archaeology hits New York! As I mentioned earlier, we’ve been covering the Candle Building (11 Spring Street) for a couple of years now. But the pace of change has picked up sharply in the past week thanks to our friends at Wooster Collective. The south wall now features fresh work by artists Michael De Feo, Above, Elbow-Toe, WK Interact, and The London Police. Earlier layers include the work of Judith Supine, Shepard Fairey, Empte Eyes, and more.

I’m happy to be able to show some different styles of artwork on the site. Graffiti Archaeology was originally inspired by the aerosol arts of San Francisco, but the idea is not bounded by style or location. Many thanks to the New York-based photographers who contributed to this montage: Nicholas Noyes, Sam Horine, Jake Dobkin, Luna Park, and guy_on_the_streets.

I’ll be in New York next week to get one more layer of shots. I’m already working on a montage of the much larger western wall of this building, but it will have to wait ’til I get back. Stay tuned.

Update: check Gothamist for the inside scoop on the Candle Building (literally!)

new layers: harveys

Shown here: harveys 6, September 24, 2006. Piece by Apex.

Catching up on some long-running classics: the wall at Harvey’s in SoMa has some fresh paint on it. Two new layers, from 2005 and 2006, featuring work by APEX, JASE, NEON BA, plus CHORBOOGIE, PARISYTE, BLATE, and more. Follow the link above, and select “harveys/north” from the menu to see the new stuff.

new layers: cove

Shown here: cove/eastZ 48, June 24, 2006. Pieces by Begr, King157 and Kiroe, and characters by Twick.

A dozen was a pretty good esimate: it turned out to be 14 new layers on the cove/eastZ wall, bringing the total up to an amazing 48 layers. That is a lot of paint. The new layers feature work by ADAPT, AERO, AMEND, AREN, BABYD, BEGR, BURY, CAMOE, DISEK, DOLE, EAROK, FUNDS, KELOE, KING157, KIROE, MBSF, MESR, MILE, MYST, NOSER, PAYDIRT, PAZT, PLEASE, POLAR, PONCE, RMY, RUSTO, SEKO, SIEZ, SKAN, SPIROE, TWICK, WHORE, and as always, a few others that I can’t quite make out.

Coping with Too Many Layers

Some of the walls are starting to get pretty thick. Cove/eastZ, for example, is already clocking in at 34 layers, and that’s only in the range from September 2004 to February 2006. I have another dozen or so layers still to add before I can bring that wall up to date. This is great for the project, but not so good for the user experience.

The problem is that Flash starts to really bog down and get slow when you have too many objects visible on the screen at one time. So I made a quick little alteration to the code: now it only shows you at most 20 layers at once (15 if you’re viewing the low-res version). The overall effect should be pretty seamless: you might notice a few little corners disappearing from the very bottom of the stack, but it shouldn’t interfere with the experience. If you’re curious exactly which images are currently visible, direct your attention down to the timeline: invisible layers have their timeline icons dimmed, whereas the visible ones are bright white.

Timeline example: only layers 17 and up are visible.