Showing papers on "Graffiti published in 2008"

Mobile virtual and augmented reality system

Abstract: A method and apparatus for messaging within a mobile virtual and augmented reality system is provided herein. During operation a user can create 'virtual graffiti' that will be left for a particular device to view as part of an augmented reality scene. The virtual graffiti will be assigned to a particular physical location or a part of an object that can be mobile. The virtual graffiti is then uploaded to a network server, along with the location and individuals who are able to view the graffiti as part of an augmented reality scene. When a device that is allowed to view the graffiti is near the location, the graffiti will be downloaded to the device and displayed as part of an augmented reality scene.

Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution

Abstract: Street Art - art made in public spaces and including graffiti, stickers, poster art, stencil art and wheat-pasting, but not corporate-sponsored advertising or "public art" - has become one of the most popular and hotly discussed areas of art practice on the contemporary scene. Developing out of the graffiti writing tradition of the 1980s, through the work of artists such as Banksy and Futura 2000, it has now reached the mainstream, the subject of bestselling books and commanding high prices at auction.Up until now there has not been a measured, critical account of the development of Street Art as a global phenomenon within the context of the history of art. This book defines Street Art as a genre related to, but distinct from graffiti writing, tracing its history from cave painting through to the Paris walls photographed by Brassai in the 1920s and on to the often witty, sophisticated imagery found on city streets today.The book will feature new and exclusive interviews with key figures associated with street art of the last thirty-five years, including Henry Chalfant, Lady Pink, Lee Quinones, Jenny Holzer, Blek Le Rat, Goldie, Mode 2, Barry McGee (Twist), Shepard Fairy (Obey), Futura 2000, Malcolm McLaren, Miss Van and Os Gemeos. Neither just another picture book showing one particular time in one particular city nor an argument for the supremacy of one particular artist, Cedar Lewisohn's book will reveal the extent to which the streets of cities around the world have become the birthplace of some of the most dynamic and inspirational art being made today.

Linguistic landscapes and the transgressive semiotics of graffiti

Abstract: Graffiti is a transgressive global art. An element of worldwide hip-hop culture, it is part of both global transcultural flows and local subcultural practices of place. As the most visible element of hip-hop culture, it is viewed by many as inherently anti-social and thus is transgressive in two important ways: First, since it is often viewed as little more than vandalism, inconsiderate doodling on the bourgeois facades of society, it is seen as transgressive social behavior. Second, because hip-hop graffiti is aimed not at the conveying of messages to a broader community (as common graffiti texts may do) but rather at the creation of a subcultural community, its use of language as style rather than communication may be seen as semiotically transgressive. This chapter argues that an understanding of graffiti as transgressive urban semiotics opens up important directions for an understanding of linguistic landscapes (LL) more generally. By looking at current theories of urban space, time and semiotics, this chapter argues that we need to understand how graffiti writing is about space, naming and style; it is about place, pride, rebellion and appropriation. And, as a vicar of a local Anglican church recently put it, graffiti may be the stained glass windows of the twenty-first century.

Placing post-graffiti: the journey of the Peckham Rock:

Abstract: This article is about the intersections between contemporary forms of urban inscription, art and the city, as they come to be configured through an emergent `post-graffiti' aesthetic practice. Exemplary of this movement is the self-proclaimed `art terrorist', Banksy, who has earned a reputation recently for his audacious interventions into some of the most significant art institutions in the western world, as well as for his politically charged stencil and sculptural work in the everyday spaces of the city. Focusing on the artist's Peckham Rock, a fragment of concrete that he surreptitiously stuck to the walls of the British Museum in May 2005, this article uses the methodological device of `the journey' in an attempt to place the connections and disconnections between a series of elite and institutional spaces, social relations and mediascapes through which `the rock' passes as its `life' as an artwork unfolds. Existing research, including that by geographers, has examined graffiti in terms of urban iden...

Graffiti vs. unistrokes: an empirical comparison

Abstract: Unistrokes and Graffiti are stylus-based text entry techniques. While Unistrokes is recognized in academia, Graffiti is commercially prevalent in PDAs. Though numerous studies have investigated the usability of Graffiti, none exists to compare its long-term performance with that of Unistrokes. This paper presents a longitudinal study comparing entry speed, correction rate, stroke duration, and preparation (i.e., inter-stroke) time of these two techniques. Over twenty fifteen-phrase sessions, performance increased from 4.0 wpm to 11.4 wpm for Graffiti and from 4.1 wpm to 15.8 wpm for Unistrokes. Correction rates were high for both techniques. However, rates for Graffiti remained relatively consistent at 26%, while those for Unistrokes decreased from 43% to 16%.

An Ethnography of Iconoclash: An Investigation into the Production, Consumption and Destruction of Street-art in London

Abstract: In the following study, I will be investigating the distinct Iconoclash made manifest on our city streets, exploring the various discourses and themes raised through the clash over graffiti. Conducting an analytic account of this conflict, it will be suggested that the images possess both a potent and multifaceted form of agency and are physically embodied by their patients; it will equally be implied that their efficacy is advanced through the explicitly performative nature of the graffiti act, the images' evident ephemerality and the specific character of their medium. Subsequently, through an investigation into the discourses of dirt and deceptiveness, the various rationales assumed for the images reviled nature will be discussed, and finally, utilising notions of appropriation and detournement, the particular nature of the graffiti-artists engagement with their environment will be examined.In concluding, the evident similarities between both graffiti-artists and graffiti-removers will be analyzed, and...

The Making of Space, Race and Place: New York City's War on Graffiti, 1970—the Present

Abstract: ■ This article examines New York City's war on graffiti from 1970 until the present and the ways in which the city's reaction to the popular youth practice was largely shaped by the neoliberal restructuring process occurring throughout the same period. It explores the racialization and criminalization of the youth who practiced graffiti, and the ways in which this process manifested itself as a contestation over the use of urban space. Finally, it explores the practice of graffiti and the role of cultural practices more generally in relation to an anti-racist discourse.

Self-Regarding Art

Abstract: This Introduction to the Biography Special Issue on "Autographics" maps a field of texts and critical practices which are emerging in the rapidly changing visual and textual cultures of autobiography. Beginning with a survey of current thinking about the comics, it argues for autographic criticism as a practice that engages with new modes and media, such as graffiti and online social networking, where autobiographical narrative proliferates through fusions of the visual and the textual.

Urban Wall Languaging

Abstract: Graffiti constitutes a medium through which the youth express opposition to authorities, as well as desires, dreams, and hopes. Graffiti shows many of the linguistic characteristics of youth language, including playfulness and, first and foremost, polylingual languaging. Graffiti in almost every city, at least in Europe, uses English and one or more local language, and almost everywhere additional languages are involved. The relationship to North American urban graffiti culture is obvious, but at the same time there is clear evidence of the graffiti writers’ affinity to their locality. Examples are included from Estonia, Greenland, Denmark, Catalonia, Germany, Turkey and elsewhere.

Slogans and graffiti: Postmemory among youth in the Italo–Slovenian borderland

Abstract: In this article, I look at the ways in which contested memories, imagined communities, and social ressentiment are embraced and filtered by Slovenian and Italian youth as postmemory and transformed into symbolic weapons that exclude, make demands, or simply provoke. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the Italo–Slovenian border area of Trieste, I analyze two settings in which these symbols are used: a soccer match between Slovenia and Italy played in the summer of 2002 at which a mysterious banner provoked diplomatic tensions and the everyday graffiti war waged on the walls of the city of Trieste. [political symbols, memories, youth, Italy, Slovenia, soccer match, graffiti]

‘On of the Princypalle Havenes of the See’: The Port of Famagusta and the Ship Graffiti in the Church of St George of the Greeks, Cyprus

Abstract: In its 1000-year history the port has been the source of triumph and tragedy for the city of Famagusta, being the conduit through which flowed both enormous wealth and destruction. Today the French medieval and Greek Orthodox churches, and the Venetian walls, though ruined, still carry physical traces of this turbulent society in the form of ship graffiti. Though such images are often classified as ‘low-art’, they are nevertheless imbued with a deep social significance, which the maritime historian can yet use to get a glimpse of an important, though virtually-forgotten, heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean. © 2007 The Author

Hard-Core Members’ of Consumption-Oriented Subcultures Enactment of Identity: the Sacred Consumption of Two Subcultures

Abstract: This study investigates how hard-core members of two nonbrand focused consumption-oriented subcultures enact their identities. The authors analyzed data collected from prolonged investigations of the North American organized distance running subculture and the Australian Hip Hop culture. Results suggest hard-core members enact their subcultural identities through reverence to sacred objects, times, people, and places. In addition, drawing upon the properties of sacredness outlined by Belk et al (1989), hard-core members experience a sacred-like lifestyle through objectification, commitment, sacrifice, mystery, and ecstasy and flow. These findings imply that sacred subcultural experiences can be enacted in domains traditionally conceptualized as profane. “I have run on average 39 out of 40 days for 20 years solid. So at one level it fits into my lifestyle, but I absolutely have to do it now. It’s ingrained in my lifestyle so now, it’s my outlook. It still is a bigger chunk of my life than it ought to be because it is a totalizing kind of pursuit, because it is about pursuing absolute limits, and that always involves a very significant emotional and mental and physical commitment. For the vast majority of my life it has been at least the number one or two priority in my life.” [Bryan, male runner aged 42] “I’d spend every weekend passionately driving with friends or catching trains to get every single photo of graffiti I possibly could. Ended up with six/seven thousand photos of graffiti. That was from Australia, and now I’ve got thousands from traveling the world a couple of times. And I’ve continued to do that.” [Simon, male graffiti artist aged 25] Leisure and non-work activities are important and at times obsessive elements of consumers’ lives, with several researchers espousing the benefits of exploring these kinds of consumption domains (e.g. Holbrook and Hirschman 1982; Kozinets et al. 2004). One interesting facet of this type of consumption is leisure activities taking on extreme levels of importance for an individual and becoming the dominant aspect of the individual’s lifestyle and social identity (Borgmann 2000, 2003; Donnelly 1981). This is the case for the runner and graffiti artist in the opening narrative. The collectives that form around these kinds of focal activities are referred to as consumption-oriented subcultures and those individuals for whom the activity is the dominant aspect of their lifestyle are referred to as hard-core members of the subculture. Extant research has documented, in a variety of contexts and academic domains, the high levels of commitment exhibited by hard-core members of a subculture. The purpose of this study is to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of these commitments. Through a detailed analysis of two consumption-oriented subcultures, we explore the behaviors of hard-core subculture members to uncover the theoretical character of their identity enactments.

Transgressive decor: Narrative glimpses in Australian prisons, 1970s—1990s

Abstract: This article presents a number of examples of prison inmate graffiti photographed by the author in Australian decommissioned prisons. The images are examined with regard to aspects of the sociology and social psychology of the prison environment. Abiding themes of prison life are identified and discerned as factors contributing to the content of the graffiti. These include especially power relationships, sexuality, revenge, violence, boredom and the simple desire for some form of entertainment, however fleeting.

Pecking orders Power relationships and gender in Australian prison graffiti

Abstract: The article examines male and female inmate graffiti in a decommissioned Australian jail, a holding facility attached to the former Melbourne Magistrates Court. While male graffitists were preoccup...

From graffiti to the street art movement : negotiating art worlds, urban spaces, and visual culture, c. 1970-2008.

Abstract: This thesis provides an analysis of the New York Style letter-based, signature graffiti subcultures as well as the contemporary international street art, or post-graffiti movement. The primary intention is to explore the function and meaning of graffiti traditions as they exist in the context of cities, art worlds, and urban visual culture. During the 1970s, the letter-based signature graffiti style exploded as a movement on New York City subway trains. By the mid-1980s graffiti subcultures were developing in numerous urban centres throughout the world. In my assessment of traditional graffiti writing from the 1970s to the 1990s, I focus on key issues that sustain this cultural form, including motivation, identity, criminality, gallery exhibitions, subcultures, and style. By reviewing the graffiti's genealogy, its formal composition, and its evolution into a complex art form practiced in cities around the world, I emphasize its function, namely as a tool for identity negotiation and visual subversion. By accessing graffiti's problematic history both as a sub and a pop culture, unpacking its difficult relationship with galleries and legality, and countering its incessant association with hip-hop, I insist upon graffiti's role as a long-standing and culturally relevant pictorial tradition. While signature-based graffiti subcultures continue to thrive today, the second part of my thesis, shifts focus onto international street art practices. I evaluate urban painting's role as a public art, scrutinize the work of some artists as both performative and at times site-specific, and address the contemporary debates regarding post-graffiti exhibitions and the movement's livelihood on the Internet. Through this analysis, I describe post-graffiti practices as thoroughly connected to graffiti writing, yet ideologically and visually separate. Because of the prevalent use of figuration, legibility, and frequent socio-political relevance of street art, these art practices are constituents of the urban landscape that artfully communicate with both the citizens and the material structure of a city. The overwhelming pervasiveness of these coexisting art genres confirms that urban painting is a quintessential art movement of the twenty-first century. My project explores how signature graffiti and street art contribute to the experience of the urban environment and to the history of art.

Complex Relationships between Detournement and Recuperation in Melbourne's Street (Graffiti and Stencil) Art Scene

Abstract: The Society of the Spectacle, written by Guy Debord in the late 1960s, critiques the commodification of the post-industrial city, with its seductive spectacles that induce citizens to increasingly passive consumption. This article will argue that in the 40 years since Debord first developed his theories, it has become apparent that the relationship between ‘spectacle’ and ‘commodity’ is more complex and nuanced than he originally envisaged. It will focus specifically on the critical urban practice of street art in Melbourne and the discursive power plays that occur between street (graffiti and stencil) artists, authorities and commerce.

Documenting Illegal Art: Collaborative Software, Online Environments and New York City's 1970s and 1980s Graffiti Art Movement

Abstract: in a \"tagging\" tradition?labeling public or private property with a graffiti pseudonym?but the aging, complex intercon nected landscape of the subway system, new materials, media attention, law enforcement, and a vibrant social scene combined to foster a graffiti boom. Graffiti \"writers,\" as these artists prefer to be called, were swept up and promoted in conjunction with nascent Hip Hop culture and New York City's New Wave/ Downtown art scene, all while engaged in illegal activity and the resultant ongoing conflict with city authorities. It is well within

Graffiti Detection Using Two Views

Abstract: This paper presents a novel video surveillance approach designed to detect vandal acts occurring on the background of the monitored scene, such as graffiti painting on walls and surfaces, public and private property defacing or etching, unauthorized post sticking. The aim of our approach is to detect this class of events rapidly and robustly. We propose to use two synchronized views to deploy synergically depth and intensity information concerning the monitored scene. Our system can work within unstructured environments and with geometrically unconstrained backgrounds.

Patterns of text layout in Pompeian verse inscriptions

Abstract: This article explores patterns of formal text layout of the metrical graffiti of Pompeii. After a brief discussion of the importance of formal text layout for linguistic research in general (and its relevance for poetic texts), a representative sample of poetic graffiti is discussed and analysed in detail. It is argued, then, that nature of the surface and sentence structure in particular can take precedence over the ‘default solution’ (coincidence of verse and line structures).

Ship graffiti from akko (acre)

Abstract: Graffiti of several vessels, dated to the second half of the thirteenth century, were found on a wall in the Southern Street of the hospitaller compound at akko (acre) in the north of israel.1 the most complete and clearest depictions are presented here. the graffiti represent small warships equipped with one mast and a lateen-rigged sail, about 56ft (17m) long. they may have been of the galliot type.

The drying behaviour of building materials treated with anti-graffiti

Abstract: Anti-graffiti coatings are often used to protect facades against unwanted graffiti. Despite the fact that anti-graffiti are widely used, their effect on the drying behaviour of the materials is not well known. Recommendations on their application as well as product documentation generally only considers their water vapour permeability without taking into account that the drying behaviour of a material is largely governed by liquid water transport. The paper reports the findings of a research on six types of anti-graffiti coatings (permanent and sacrificial, water repellent and not) applied to two substrate materials (fired-clay brick and calcium silicate brick). The effect of the anti-graffiti coatings on the drying behaviour of these materials is evaluated by means of drying tests performed at different RH. The drying behaviour of the same material impregnated with different types of water repellent products is given for comparison. The obtained results are analyzed as a function of product composition and the properties of the substrate materials, such as porosity and pore size distribution. The possible consequences of the application of the tested anti-graffiti coatings on common damage processes, such as frost and salt crystallization, are discussed.

Public and private spaces in adolescent girls' lives : school graffiti, sexualities and romantic relationships

Abstract: The thesis investigates a number of girls' writings as they occurred in the form of graffiti in a sixth-form College in Malta. It develops an analysis of these graffiti texts, which are mainly concerned with how their authors try to make sense of their gender identity and involvement in sexual activity and romantic encounters. The analysis examines possible reasons why a number of female students resort to writing graffiti. It highlights the ways through which the acquisition of sexual knowledge occurs informally outside the formal curriculum, through spaces created and struggled over by the informants. The study interrogates the emotional, social, cultural, personal and political worlds as described by them. This includes a discourse analysis, aimed at providing a deeper understanding of ignored emotional and social perspectives. In the absence of sexuality and relationships education in postsecondary education curricula in Malta, this study challenges silences surrounding these matters. The study documents the graffiti as subversive processes of learning, which reproduce and resist dominant discourses. It regards the graffiti as constituting a discourse in itself, understood as possibly promoting agency in some of the informants' lives. A reflexive approach was adopted to arrive at the research aims. Poststructuralist feminist and queer theory perspectives locate the study's theoretical positionings. Ethnographic observations and informal conversations with nineteen female students were employed to assist the data analysis. The findings show that some informants question the ways they relate to their gender identity when confronted by hetero, lesbian and bisexual social relationships. Heteronormative dominance and familiarity are actively reproduced, contested, disturbed and resisted. The findings suggest that the informants seek a safe school environment, where they can discuss sexualities and relationships' matters in a context of empathy, caring, understanding and support. They request detailed information about decision-making processes related to conflicting emotions about romantic feelings, relationships and interpersonal communication skills with their partner/so The study points to the need for a deeper understanding of the emotional and overall wellbeing of teenagers with respect to romantic and sexual relationships. The study aims to contribute towards academic debates and knowledge about teenage perspectives on sexualities and romantic relationships and towards the planning, discussion and design of future postsecondary sexuality education curricula in Malta.

La Pared Que Habla: A Photo Essay about Art and Graffiti at the Border Fence in Nogales, Sonora

Abstract: Despite being visible across a wide expanse of desert, for many newcomers to border country the steel fence that separates the United States from Mexico is an apparition—an unsightly phenomenon sprung up from the earth without warning. But truth be told, despite the otherworldly rhetoric frequently imputed to the borderlands, there is no ghostly presence here. What can be found here instead, quite literally and materially, are the Machiavellian games of state powers splicing the land and the people into experimental oddities that, were they to be left alone, would cook up their own mundane versions of the strange (as people here have done for generations). The power that wills the fence into being is the same power that hails us to submit to a higher order of things, so to speak—a vision of the world as a place where things stay in their place. Yet, there is no denying it: the border stages a drama with highly melodramatic appeal. Many of the local folks are quick to note the absurdity of the geo-political setup: for people who became bi-national by decree of war and live their daily existences “contaminated” by bi-national interactions, the orderly and sanitary aspirations of the fence make no sense. Neither does it make sense to label as disorderly “the way things are done around here.” The favored North American discourse of site bifurcation—the idea that “on the other side” bodies, cars, objects, and houses reproduce infinitely while resisting the “discipline” of advanced capitalism’s efficiency, law and order, strategic planning, and muted colors—has become increasingly irrelevant. Neoliberal contamination has upstaged the pictorial dividend of day-trips to the curio shops across the line. Border tourism is dead; globalization killed it.

Powloki ochronne antygraffiti

Abstract: The problems concerning graffiti phenomenon (Fig. 1 and 2) were discussed on the basis of literature review. The techniques of graffiti spread and materials used were described shortly. The methods of protection against graffiti and their removal from various surfaces (e.g. porous or non-porous) were presented. The varnishes forming anti-graffiti coatings were presented in detail. Directions of their applications as well as the methods of graffiti removal from substrates protected with such varnishes were discussed (Table 1).

Expression as vandalism: Asger Jorn's "Modifications"

Abstract: In a 1962 painting, Danish Situationist and artist Asger Jorn declared in a graffiti-like gesture that "the avant-garde won't give up/' The phrase appeared not in a theoretical text as was his usual practice, but as a gestural scrawl behind a painted girl in a confirmation dress, in I!avant-garde se rend pas (fig. 1). As part of the series "New Disfigurations" exhibited at Galerie Rive Gauche in Paris that year, the work resumed Jorn's "Modifications," first shown in May 1959. These works developed directly out of Jorn's participation in the Situationist International (SI) group, which Jorn cofounded in 1957 along with Guy Debord, Michele Bernstein, Ralph Rumney, Walter Olmo, Piero Simondo, Elena Verrone, and Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio. In the "Modifications," Jorn added grotesque imagery or abstract painted or dripped additions to amateur academic-style paintings found in flea markets.1 Here, Jorn has added not only the scribbled text, but also crude drawings of a bird and a stick figure, a simulated street wall behind the figure, and finally, a Duchampian moustache and goatee to the girl's face. In classic avant-garde provocation, Jorn lampoons the bourgeois propriety of the girl by vandalizing her portrait. He accomplishes this both through the facial additions and the vulgarity of the graffiti text, applied in the high-art medium of oil paint, appearing behind the girl as if out of the repressed unconscious of the history of painting. The graffiti scrawl is no more an authentic message than the image of the girl, however, because its juxtaposition with the found painting exposes graffiti itself?and by extension, all avant-garde provocation?as a convention. Jorn's invocation of the avant-garde reads less as a declaration of his own sentiment than an assertion that

Jovens pichadores: perfil psicossocial, identidade e motivação

Abstract: This study investigated the psycho-social profile of adolescents involved in the practice of illegal graffiti (“pichacao”). It refers to a subculture linked to hip hop movement, present in medium and large cities in Brazil. The objective of this study was to describe the cultural profile of adolescents involved in “pichacao” and issues related to identity and motivation processes of these adolescents. In doing so, 32 subjects answered an inventory which approached psychological and socio-cultural aspects of this kind of graffiti. These adolescents were all males, with a mean age of 17.2 ± 2.6 years, living in outskirt areas of large cities. The interviews showed that such form of graffiti is related to marked identity processes and describes how such adolescents interact with their peers and leaders, as well as how they represent and deal with social general values and laws. Moreover the main motivations for those youths to participate in this transgressor activity were presented. Conclusion: The youths involved with “pichacao” use such activity as a way to establish their identities and to confront the general society. These aspects were analyzed focusing on the identity building and its crises in the adolescence, according to Erik Erikson contributions. Moreover the implication of the contemporary market ideologies of dominant society in this adolescent subculture was analyzed in this process.

Language and Graffiti of Exceptional Individuals: Pedagogical Strategies in West Africa

Abstract: This paper establishes the place of language and graffiti practiced by exceptional individuals in the interpretation of family values, the preservation of culture and traditional heritage of the Igbo community in Southeastern Nigeria. The paper also takes a cursory look at graffiti art and exceptionality in a time when the Igbo tradition and culture were highly respected, jealously guarded and deep-rooted in the heart and soul of its people. Graffiti creations by exceptional individuals transfer both oral and visual education to documented tradition; for societal knowledge and awareness, individual wisdom, expressions against repression, pride and recognition of Igbo language and art. Unfortunately, the post-Nigeria civil war, evangelical movements with their doctrines and practices, including the influence of western culture; the highly revered expressive medium of exceptional minds are fast disappearing from the Igbo environment.