“Although believed to have been painted at the start of the year, images of Banksy’s street pieces in Africa are only now beginning to circulate. These great pieces are thought to be in Mali.”
Taggraffiti
The project is called the Unaddressed and it focuses on the under-housed, giving voice to their personal opinions. Over the course of 3 months I met with 18 individuals who are currently or have recently been homeless. Through meeting, talking about their lives and discussing issues that were important to them, they developed their announcements and created a cardboard sign to reveal them. By photographing homeless and formerly homeless individuals holding cardboard signs that announce their concerns, the hope is challenge preconceived notions of homelessness and make the passers-by realize how serious the situation is and that everybody deserves the same basic necessities of life and to be treated the same way. Basically do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Jordan Seiler’s incrediblely ambitious “New York Street Advertising Takeover” became a reality yesterday, when over 120 illegal billboards throughout the city were white washed by dozens of volunteers.
NYSAT was organized as a reaction to the hundreds of billboards that are not registered with the city, and therefore are illegal. While illegal, these violations are not being prosecuted by the City of New York, allowing the billboard companies to garner huge profits by cluttering our outdoor space with intrusive and ugly ads.
After the illegal spots were white washed, late in the day yesterday over eighty artists transformed these spaces into personal pieces of art.
Here’s some of the initial photos that are coming in.
Brazil has legalized certain types of graffiti (plus it’s even being taught in schools):
Last week a law was passed in Brazil legalizing graffiti. But this doesn’t mean exactly what you may think. In Brazil, “graffiti” (grafite in Portuguese) refers not so much to the entire hip hop tradition of writing, but more specifically to colorful pieces, characters, abstractions, and other painted street art. In everyday speech, it’s often contrasted against pichação, which is Brazil’s home-grown style of tagging, so named because its first practicioners used tar (piche) stolen from construction sites. The semantic distinction echoes a sentiment I often hear here in the US: “I like the artistic stuff, but not, you know, those ugly scribbles.”
This distinction is part of what’s being put into law. What’s interesting about this law is that it appears to recognize the artistic and cultural value of the graffiti itself, not just the monetary value of the property it’s painted on. How will this play out in practice, I wonder?
Full Story: Public Ad Campaign
Meanwhile, San Francisco has made it a low priority.
(Both links via Tomorrow Museum)
Forget flying cars. I just want my student loan bailout.
Picture by Politics for Misfits
(via Grinding)
What would happen if all graffiti writers overnight would write their name backwards? It is a cheap paperback cliche of occultism that reading the bible backwards will undo the universe while the devil supposedly can be heard by playing certain records backwards. It is enough to mention Babylon, that ancient dystopia of linguistic diversion, to remind you that messing with the structure of language has always been considered to be dangerous. It is the power of computers to generate all permutations that can made by combining according to different rules a certain range of tokens. It would not be hard to code a small software running on your pocket PC or Mobile phone that would tell you what combinations could be made with words you encounter while out on your game: the man-machine graffiti interface.
(via Frequency 23.
Man, I really need to start reading socialfiction a regular basis again.
Not a Crime: “A series of billboards featuring local graffiti artists will be on display for one year in Portland, Oregon.”
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