new location: the Undercroft

Shown here: undercroft/panel3 layer 14 of 17, featuring work by BLAM and BONZAI, January 13 2008. Photo by Leeks.

Today Graffiti Archaeology finally leaves the confines of North America with our first international location! “The Undercroft” is a skate park located under the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London’s Southbank. It gets its name from the vaulted spaces under cathedrals, to which it bears a strong resemblance thanks to a series of flared columns that run through it. The spot is frequented by skateboarders, BMX bikers, the occasional unicyclist, and of course, graffiti writers. The wall shown above is just one of about a dozen panels that surround the space. I’ll be building out timelapse montages of the rest of the walls as time allows. Many thanks to Flickr users Jason Delport, Uli Rahms, CourtneyLouise, jessthecat and Leeks for their photo contributions.

See our Flickr group for more photos of this amazing space.

Apparently there is some danger that this cultural hotspot and meeting place may be shut down or made inaccessible to the public in the near future. If you live in the UK and are eligible to vote, there’s a petition you can sign to appeal for its preservation.

Improving the UI

I gave an informal talk about Graffiti Archaeology at Stanford the other day, and the questions from the audience reminded me of some of the limitations of our current Flash interface. For one thing, the list of walls has gotten so long that it bleeds off the bottom of most people’s monitors. Also, there’s a lot of information tucked away in our XML data structure that we could be making better use of at the UI level. As a first baby-step in that direction, I added a new tooltip that appears when you hover over a location, telling you how many walls and layers that location has. (This also gave me an excuse to start cleaning up some of our messy old code. Geek joy!)

More improvements to come, as time allows…

new layers: cavern/westB

Shown here: cavern/westB layer 49 of 54. Piece at left by SILENCER.

Just brought cavern/westB up to date with 15 new layers (one of them courtesy of Flickr user Luba Roniss) featuring new work by SILENCER, SAGER, RYZ, KEAP, MESR, AURA and many others. The buff patrol also made a cameo appearance (20 January 2008), but it took no time at all for the wall to bounce up to new heights, with a CMM blockbuster and some stunning new burners. Enjoy!

Graffiti Archaeology in Architect Magazine

Architect Magazine runs a monthly column called “Screen Grab” that covers websites of interest to their readers. The March 2008 column is about Graffiti Archaeology. It’s a very short read, but it was a fun interview to do, because I got to try to think about the project from an architectural perspective for a change. One minor correction—this quote was taken out of context:

Since its launch in 2002, Curtis says, the site has helped make the urban art form “a more unified global cultural phenomenon” by offering an interactive database for visitors to peruse.

I wasn’t talking about Graffiti Archaeology there, but about graffiti websites in general! Grafarc.org was not the first such site, and it won’t be the last. If anyone should get credit for making graf a more unified global phenomenon, it should be Art Crimes.

We got bombed again…

Sorry for the change in appearance here at Graffiti Archaeology News– our old blogging software got hacked by phishers, and we had to port everything from Movable Type to WordPress, leaving some templates and stuff behind.

Things may be a little squirrely around here for a little while. Stay tuned for updates.

Design and the Elastic Mind

I’m very proud to announce that Graffiti Archaeology has been included in the online catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art’s new exhibit, Design and the Elastic Mind. From the catalogue:

Over the past twenty-five years, people have weathered dramatic changes in their experience of time, space, matter, and identity. Individuals cope daily with a multitude of changes in scale and pace—working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, and being inundated with information. Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of intelligence, but today’s instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity, the product of adaptability plus acceleration. Design and the Elastic Mind explores the reciprocal relationship between science and design in the contemporary world by bringing together design objects and concepts that marry the most advanced scientific research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations. The exhibition highlights designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and history—changes that demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior—and translate them into objects that people can actually understand and use. This Web site presents over three hundred of these works, including fifty projects that are not featured in the gallery exhibition.

The collection is packed with beautiful, thought-provoking work by some really notable artists and designers, and it’s quite an honor to be included. Major props to Eric, Mike, Tom and the gang at Stamen, who also have several other pieces in the exhibit, including the always mesmerizing Cabspotting. If you’re in New York, be sure to stop by the MoMA to see the live installation!

Bruce Tomb’s deappropriation project

If you live in San Francisco, you may have seen a certain wall on Valencia Street in the Mission district that’s been covered with posters, street art and graffiti for the past several years. The wall belongs to designer Bruce Tomb, and he’s been documenting its changes since 2001. His archives are now online at deappropriationproject.net. Needless to say, we love this project over here at Graffiti Archaeology!

Tomb is holding a public meeting about the project at Southern Exposure tonight at 6:30pm. It should be pretty interesting event! Many thanks to Mike K for the link.

Calligraphic Packing

What do you call a pocket full of chisel-tip markers? Calligraphic Packing! It’s also the name of a computer graphics research project from the University of Waterloo. My friend Craig Kaplan, a professor there, is a pioneer of “computational calligraphy”, a brand new research area that’s about to grow in some very interesting directions. Craig’s been interested in graffiti for a long time, for a lot of the same reasons I am. We each have our own ways of studying it, and his way is to take it apart, learn what makes it work, and write software that embodies that understanding. This project, led by Craig’s student Jie Xu, is the first step in what I hope will be a long and fruitful quest, as Craig puts it, “to probe the nature of letterforms and legibility”.

new layers: bluxome

Top: bluxome/eastA layer 9, November 10, 2007, featuring TENFOLD, LANGO, SLOKE, and JIBS. Bottom: bluxome/eastB layer 20, December 9, 2007, featuring RIME, DRSEX, EWOK, LANGO, and STEEL.

Happy 2008! One of my favorite alleys just got a fresh coat of paint. I’ve added two new layers on the first two segments of the eastern wall of Bluxome, bringing that wall completely up to date. Enjoy!

Historic graffiti mural discovered in Manhattan building

Here’s an interesting article about some real graffiti archaeology! Apparently the son of a loft owner in SoHo discovered some old-school tags by some of the greats of the 80’s scene on a hidden wall in his building. Now a team of conservators is treating the wall like an archaeological dig, carefully extracting the portion of wall with the tags on it, which will be exhibited Thursday night in a gallery alongside work by Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, Ero and Fab 5 Freddy.

Click here for video. (warning: opens new window, has ads.)

(Via Graffiti News. Entire article after the jump.)

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