Cascading time slices

Here’s something new! A few years ago (checks notes… uh, 9 years ago!) I started working on some different ways of visualizing the changes on the walls I’ve documented for this project. Some of the walls are very long, and fit dozens of burners end to end. If you stitch together a slice for each moment in time, you can stack up the slices and get this interesting cascading effect. Some pieces get gone over quickly, while others (like this one by TWICK from 2005) stay up for months. The long-lasting pieces become stalactites of color dripping down through time.

I’m working my way through some of my favorite walls now. Ultimately the goal is to print these in the biggest format possible, so you can step up close and appreciate the details, and then stand back and grok the whole history at once, like an all-seeing graffiti god.

The Curious Frontier of Red

UK-based stencil artist Mobstr noticed something odd about the way a wall in his neighborhood got buffed, so he decided to do a little psychological experiment, with hilarious results. I went ahead and grafarc-ized it into an animated gif.

Restoring a mural using QR codes

Wooster Collective reader Jason V. shared an interesting series of photos of a mural in Vancouver. After the mural was tagged with a big red anarchy sign, someone went over the tag with a giant QR code, apparently painted by hand. The code leads back to an image of the original mural. I went ahead and made an animated GIF of the whole repeating cycle, for your recursive pleasure:

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!