Street Talk: An Urban Computing Happening

I’ll be giving a brief presentation about GRAFARC at Street Talk: An Urban Computing Happening at Intel Research Berkeley on July 16th, 2004. The event itself will have limited space, but everyone is welcome at the Urban After party at Rx Gallery in San Francisco (from 6pm on.)

GRAFARC at SIGGRAPH 2004: date confirmed

GRAFARC will be in the Visualization section of Web Graphics at SIGGRAPH 2004, on Wednesday, August 11 at 8:30am in room 501B of the LA Convention Center.

interesting NYT article

This article kind of sums up a lot of the conflicting factors surrounding graffiti these days: At a Wall That Invited Graffiti, Everyone’s an Art Critic (from the New York Times).

GRAFARC accepted to SIGGRAPH 2004

This just in: GRAFARC has been accepted to the Web Graphics program at SIGGRAPH 2004. I’ll be giving a half-hour talk about it sometime during the week of August 8-12 in Los Angeles. Stay tuned for more details.

Interesting article in Slate

SADDAM WILL RETURN… THROUGH MY ASS! An interesting article about graffiti in Baghdad: The Writing on Baghdad’s Walls by Wendell Steavenson of Slate. Also see this page.

25th and Mission

New wall: 25th and Mission. This is a permission wall on the side of the Golden Gate Market on Mission Street. There was an old mural there for more than a decade (it went up in July 1993), and I believe some of the people who painted the original mural were involved in this new production, which features pieces by TWICK, ZORE, SKEW, and others. I was lucky enough to catch this one as they started it last July, and stopped by several times over the following week to capture the work in progress. (Sorry it took me so long to put together the layers, I had literally hundreds of photos to sort through!)

Psycho City

Today I started work on reconstructing Psycho City. I stopped by the parking lot on Market where this great spot used to be, and grabbed a piece of chipped paint from one of the walls. Check out what it looks like under the scanner:

If you, kind reader, have any old photos from Psycho City, please drop me a line. We have the technology. We can rebuild it.

GRAFARC on CNN Headline News

Today GRAFARC was featured on CNN Headline News. They invited me in to their San Francisco studio for a two-minute interview. It was a pretty crazy experience: the news anchor was in Atlanta, and though I could hear her voice through the little Agent Smith style earbud they gave me, I never once saw her face. In fact, since the camera was robotic, there wasn’t anyone else in the room at all, except Eric, who was there to take pictures and try to make me crack up on camera. Here’s what the studio looks like:

interesting article in WSJ

Graffiti Artists Put Their Mark On War Against Terrorism. “When the government stonewalled efforts by Greenpeace’s Toxics Campaign to find out about the shipment of dangerous chemicals through the U.S. capital, the organization turned to an unlikely source of railway information: graffiti artists.” (From the Wall Street Journal. Here is the original link, but you have to subscribe to read it, so I’ve reposted it here.

Photos from DORKBOT-SF

The DORKBOT-SF event was a blast! Here are some photos:

Also, the fine fellows at False Profit asked me to put the word out: the wall in front of their space is an open canvas for artists. Right now there’s some excellent work up there by D23. Anyone interested in painting there, please contact them.