Grafarc in Font Magazine

The latest issue of Font Magazine is all about graffiti. The cover is by Daim, and inside is a thoughtful and nicely presented article about graffiti from a typographer’s perspective. The article also features a few layers from Graffiti Archaeology, courtesy of yours truly. As far as I know it’s not available in stores, but you can order a free copy directly from the fine folks at FontShop. Check it out!

Street Animation

“Virus” by Baptiste Buonomo

Check this out: Baptiste Buonomo, an animation student from EMCA in Angoulême, France, has made an animated short about graffiti called Virus. The fun starts with a live action shot of a kid in a hoodie tagging “virus” on an old plaster wall. The kid exits, and the tag grows, multiplies, and morphs into a simple cartoon version of him, which then starts running around the town’s walls making mischief. This may not sound like anything special, until you realize how it must have been done: it looks like every frame of animation was actually painted directly on the wall itself, in the middle of the night. This meant erasing the old frames before painting each new one, a technique also known as “painting under the camera”. You can see the ghosts left behind from earlier frames in the image above. It must have taken hours of work!

If this is what it looks like, it may well be the first ever example of underground, unpermitted street animation. Whatever you call it, it took a lot of guts! Monsieur Buonomo, my hat is off to you. Click here to see the video (RealPlayer format).

For another example of animated graffiti, see: Barnstormers Spread the Know.

Glue Glyph Graf

four layers at once

Originally uploaded by otherthings.

Making my usual rounds last weekend, I stumbled on this glue scar left behind by a fallen parking sign. What a moment of zen: four paint layers all talking at once, and even the glue wants in on the conversation.

Within minutes of posting this on Flickr, a kind soul pointed me to the Glue Glyphs group. Goes to show: no matter what kind of freak you are, you’ll find your kin on the internet.

New layers: cove

Shown here: cove/eastZ layer 34, February 19, 2006. Pieces by Katz and Dest.

I’ve added nine new layers to the “cove” wall, featuring pieces by Aera, Ashes, Dest, Drsk, Flows, Ghana, Grail, Jas7, Katz, Rome, Siez, Skan, Swef, Zel, and a few others whose names are beyond my ken. If you look closely you might also catch a Mear One tag in there. Running 34 layers deep, this is now by far the thickest wall in my archives.

New layers: belmont

Photo by Scott Garner.

Jonathan Tobin recently created a Flickr group for photos of the Belmont Art Park in Los Angeles. Scott Garner added some photos he took during a film shoot he was working on (one of many that used to happen at that location). I thought it’d be fun to show a little before-and-after on one of his photos. Above is the original photo, and below is how it appears in grafarc. The perspective warp, which was necessary to make the front of the building line up with the other layers, ends up distorting the people and equipment quite a lot.

Shown here: belmont/building layer 4, April 25 2004. Photo by Scott Garner.

I’ve also added another of Scott’s photos from the same date to the belmont/tunnel area.

New layers: bluxome

Shown here: bluxome/eastC layer 7, March 2001. Photos by Peter Merridew. Artists, from left to right: QUAKE, CODEAK, APEX.

Going through my archives of photos scraped from the web, I stumbled upon some missing layers from the Bluxome alley. Appearing under “bluxome/eastB” and “bluxome/eastC” are five new layers of photos, courtesy of Peter Merridew, Susan Farrell, and Maseo on Art Crimes (the web’s original graffiti site, an amazing resource in case you didn’t already know about it). The new layers fill in some gaps in the period from 2000-2001 (during which I didn’t take nearly enough pictures) and feature work by BLIS, GIANT, APEX, NEON, CODEAK, SHIME, QUAKE, ZORE, and others.

This brings the site’s total count to 217 layers, distributed among 22 walls from 10 locations. This is still only a small fraction of what I have to share. I’ll do my best to keep updating the site with new material as time allows!

LED “Throwies”

Okay, this may be the coolest little hack I’ve ever seen, and simple enough that even a non-engineer like me could do it: LED “Throwies”, brought to us by Make Magazine. They’re basically little LED lights connected to a battery and a magnet, which you can attach to any ferromagnetic surface simply by tossing it at it. Ever wanted to see your name in lights? Now’s your chance! Be sure to check out the excellent video by Resistor and Fi5e.

(via BoingBoing.)

New wall: bluxome/eastB

Finally, at long last, the middle of the east wall on Bluxome alley is ready! I had the left and right ends of the wall finished a while ago, but this center section has seen a lot of action over the past seven years, and it took some time to put it all together. Hopefully it was worth the wait: this section features not one but six different pieces by APEX, as well as work by ATOM, IVORY, BLIS, ZORE, SEAK, DAIM, MARS-1, PICASSO, PERSUE, QUAKE, AEROE, SPOZE, POSH, and others. That’s fourteen layers of mind candy for your screen-sore eyes.

Watch this space for more updates… now that this wall is done, I can start going through my hundreds of photos from the other wall.

GRAFARC in San Francisco Magazine

San Francisco magazine

Originally uploaded by otherthings.

The February 2006 issue of San Francisco magazine has a nice article about the San Francisco graffiti scene. The cover is a closeup of this piece by Apex. At the end of the article they give a little shout out to some SF-specific graffiti resources including Piece by Piece, Quality of Life, and our very own Graffiti Archaeology. Thanks fellas!

obsess much?

As you can probably tell from looking at this site, I like to take photos of graffiti. A lot. At least once a week. Two or three times if possible. If a weekend goes by and I haven’t visited at least one of my favorite spots, I feel bad about it. It goes like this: “What if something great went up yesterday, but it gets painted over tomorrow? If I don’t get out there right now and take some pictures, it’ll be gone forever. I can’t let that happen!” And so, often against my better interests, I pack the camera in the bag and go. I’ve even considered calling in sick* just to take graffiti pictures.

Some might call this behavior a bit obsessive. I certainly feel that way sometimes. But not anymore. Oh no. For I have seen the work of the true obsessives, and they are mighty. Behold:

The Adaption to my Generation
Roman Opalka
Diego Goldberg’s March of Time
Noah K. Everyday
Alarm Clock Self-Portraits (warning: annoying popup window)
Eyemachine

All these projects and many more can be found on AtmG‘s wonderful links page. (Via information aesthetics.)

*(Um, in case my boss is reading this, for the record, that’s never actually happened… though someday it might.)

Update: Ahree Lee has been doing something similar since 2001, and stitched some of her photos together into a pretty seamless video.
Update 2: Dan Hanna has been doing this even longer, and his video involves a dual-camera setup with a 360-degree annual spin! (Thanks to Emre for the link.)