Visitors might experience some downtime as we get the DNS records established with our new registrar, but hopefully it’ll all be straightened out quickly.

This isn’t the first time someone has tried something like this, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it in North America. A Berlin-based artist named Sweza did something similar last year: Retrieving buffed graf with QR codes

Thanks to Eric Rodenbeck for the link!

The critique calls out several contextual features that are missing from the project. Some of these are missing simply due to our lack of time to implement them. For example, labeling each writer’s work with their street name is standard practice among graffiti photographers, and I always do it when I post photos on Flickr. But implementing a system of artist-name tags would mean adding a host of interface features to make the system truly functional: a way of authoring, displaying and interacting with highlightable sub-regions of each layer, plus features to access the index of tags by artist name, search, etc… the list goes on! It’s been on my to-do list for years, but the implementation is just a bit beyond my present skill set. So yes, it’s a valid critique. And if you have the technical chops to help me make it happen, I’d love to hear from you!

But let’s talk about the lack of maps. This is not “missing” in the sense that it should be there but we haven’t gotten around to it. It is explicitly absent from the project at a conceptual level. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. I touch on this briefly in our FAQ page, but my answer is not much of an explanation. A full explanation would mean a long discussion about graffiti abatement and enforcement, but the short answer is: I won’t tell you because that information is private.

Some of the walls we cover on this site are “legal” or “permission” walls. Others are not. My experience has been that the unauthorized walls are consistently the most interesting to study. On those walls, there are no authorities or gatekeepers. The only force that drives change on those walls is the force of graffiti culture itself. It is on those walls that the “why” questions are most fascinating. However, those walls only persist as long-running graffiti spots because their locations are a closely kept secret, known only among those who paint there and the people they trust.

When a location like that gets publicized, it’s called “blowing up the spot”. The metaphor of destruction is fairly accurate. Blowing up a spot threatens its integrity in various ways: it attracts toys (writers of little skill). Too many toys will drag the quality of the wall down, and discourage the really skilled artists from painting there. Graffiti abatement crews can descend on the spot and whitewash away years of history. Land owners can put up fences, local politicians can try to show they’re “tough on crime” by cracking down. But even tourists and photographers can cause trouble: too many people walking through an otherwise abandoned area can attract attention from police, posing a real physical danger to the people who paint there. Any combination of these things can permanently damage the unique character of a secret spot.

Urban Media Archaeology’s critique concludes with a description of an “ideal world” in which Graffiti Archaeology’s historical layering is merged with the crowdsourced geography of projects like OpenStreetMap and Walking Papers. I love both of those projects, but merging them with this one is a very bad idea. It would mean, essentially, the end of all secret spots. To me, this would be an intolerable outcome. It seems to be trendy these days to assume that sharing everything with everyone all the time is always a good thing. The “end of privacy” is often portrayed as inevitable, or even in the past. Facebook has certainly made a lot of money off of this naive view. I disagree. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I still believe in privacy. And if I catch you putting secret spots on your Walking Papers, we’ll have to settle our beef the old fashioned way too.

and Robo-Rainbow:

Also note our new permanent address: grafarc.org (no longer a subdirectory of otherthings.com!)

(via Art Crimes)

Full article after the jump.

Coverup worse than crime? S.F. outspends other cities fighting graffiti

By Peter Jamison
Published on December 07, 2009 at 4:25pm

The scenery at Warm Water Cove isn’t what it used to be. The aging industrial buildings that front San Francisco Bay along this bleak patch of shoreline north of Hunters Point once teemed with bulging, bright graffiti letters. Now their only distinction is large rectangles of cream-colored paint — evidence of where the city has obliterated the work of artist-vandals.

This is one front in a war city officials have been waging for years — and one that is costing San Francisco taxpayers far more than they might realize. According to deputy city controller Monique Zmuda, the Department of Public Works currently spends $3.7 million per year on its antigraffiti program. That sum dwarfs the $1.9 million spent annually in San Jose, which, with its population of 1 million, is 25 percent larger than San Francisco. It’s also more than twice as much per capita as Los Angeles, a city of 3.8 million people that spends $7 million per year fighting graffiti.

This is big money, particularly at a time when the city is facing an intractable budget crisis. Last month, the Board of Supervisors was desperately trying to scrounge up $8 million to prevent layoffs among public health workers. The Public Works graffiti-abatement program burns through that much in less than three years. Is it worth it?

Officer Christopher Putz of the San Francisco Police Department’s graffiti unit sure thinks so. He acknowledges that the amount of graffiti here has drastically declined over the last decade, as SFPD and Public Works have stepped up efforts to remove graffiti and crack down on vandals. But he thinks this new state of cleanliness is fragile: “I think if the city relaxed on this issue and cut back their spending, it would be horrible. We’re a tourist destination, so we should look nice.”

Others think the War on Graffiti has spun out of control. “I think it’s nuts,” said Steve Rotman, a prominent graffiti photographer who has authored books on San Francisco’s street-art scene. “Here we are during a time of recession. Libraries are being cut back. And meanwhile the city is spending this enormous amount of money to get rid of what little graffiti is left.”

That sentiment might be more widespread than zero-tolerance graffiti opponents would like. Putz says he routinely gets calls from neighborhood groups concerned about graffiti. But according to Paul Henderson, chief of administration in the district attorney’s office, this zeal isn’t mirrored in an average sampling of city residents. Earlier this year, Henderson said, a prosecutor actually went through three pools of potential jurors before selecting a suitable group that thought graffiti was even a crime: “They said, ‘This is a waste of my time, because I think trying someone for graffiti is stupid, and I’m not going to do it under any circumstances.’”

It’s sometimes said that the city’s budget meltdown is a priorities crisis. To judge from courtroom apathy about graffiti convictions, San Franciscans might not mind seeing the $3.7 million campaign to remove this supposed urban scourge deprioritized.

The International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam has selected Graffiti Archaeology to be part of their Doc Lab program for 2009. More about Doc Lab:

IDFA’s Doc Lab investigates the relationship between documentary filmmaking and new media. The program is open to all media that can be used to tell a documentary story. During the festival, Doc Lab presents films, web documentaries, and installations that innovate the documentary genre. Projects are showcased in the Doc Lab Media Lounge and in cinemas during a number of special Live Screenings and events. The theme this year is Live Stories, and the principal guest is Ira Glass.

So, if you’re in Amsterdam this week, stop by the festival and check it out!

Serge Gainsbourg – animation des graffitis sur 5 ans du mur rue de Verneuil from Arnaud Jourdain on Vimeo.

This video, by Arnaud Jourdain, documents five years of the history of a graffiti wall in Paris dedicated to Serge Gainsbourg. What’s brilliant is the way he does it: instead of just playing back the photos in series, he isolates each individual tag, puts it on its own layer, and explodes the whole glorious mess out into space with 3D animation. It’s a beautiful, fresh take on the Graffiti Archaeology meme. The wall itself, with love notes and other hommages interspersed among the tags and wheatpastes, reminds me of the John Lennon wall in Prague.

Updates have been kinda slow on the site lately, mostly due to this new project I’ve been working on (see above). This is not a personal blog, but I had to post this shot here because of the sweet T-shirt Nate1 sent us from New Skool. Go check out his other wares, there are some excellent designs (I especially love the Krylon and headphones shirts!) Thanks Nate!