Thus far I’ve not thought much about what to actually do with video graffiti. As far as I’m concerned, the medium is the message. I’ve been more concerned with figuring out how to do it, assuming content will follow (hell, I don’t know if I even want to do it… I’d just like to see it happen).
But, Tate’s got an interesting idea (not exactly graffiti, though): he remembers seeing a documentary about a video art project from the 80s where an artist setup video cameras and projection screens on busy street corners in two cities (San Franscico and New York, possibly). The projectors and cameras were connected via sattelite. They were left on for three or four days. The project wasn’t announced… people only discovered them by accident. “Say you’re walking down the street and see a projection of a street scene on the side of a building. You stop to look at it for a while. In the other city, somebody stops to look at the projection of you looking at them. At this point, neither side knows the projection is live. I think that moment of discovery would have been uncanny.”
So the idea is this: with web cams and wifi (and a homemade projector) this sort of thing could be done much cheaper now. Tate suggests doing this, only keeping within one city (I say, perhaps even in the same neighborhood). I was thinking it could also be done in coffee shops or bars, not announced and just sort of setup in a corner out of the way or something.
BTW, check out Tate’s newly redesigned blog. Especially the picture-blog section Detritus.