Posts Tagged ‘Graffiti Research Lab’
Graffiti Research Lab: Trailer
Friday, April 25th, 2008Art of graffiti, minus the paint
Monday, April 21st, 2008
Take a look at Toronto City Hall and what do you see? An architecturally unique government building or a massive canvas awaiting a graffiti artist’s touch?
The facade of City Hall was given a temporary facelift early yesterday morning as out-of-town graffiti artists tagged its east tower with a laser pointer and projector in lieu of the traditional spray can of paint.
Projecting phrases of political protest and vulgar humour, the pair attracted the attention of dozens of onlookers on the street, countless confused gawkers from apartment blocks across downtown, and three Toronto police officers who urged the high-tech artists to keep their messages clean.
Using technology he pioneered himself, Evan Roth, founder of New York City’s Graffiti Research Lab, took to Bay St. shortly after midnight Sunday morning with $9,000 worth of equipment for projecting handwritten messages and illustrations.
Throwing phrases like “POLICE STATE!” and “COPS PIGS” onto the side of David Miller’s office block, Roth and another New York-based artist named Katsu had passing cars and pedestrians stopping to marvel at their work
“Society has been told to see graffiti as unacceptable,” said Roth, 30, who was in Toronto to speak about his laser tagging technology at the weekend’s FITC Design and Technology show.
“But with the laser tagging, it’s seen as more socially acceptable because it doesn’t leave a mark.”
Socially acceptable, until Katsu attracted the attention of Toronto police when he started drawing a series of phalluses and derogatory phrases into the Toronto skyline.
“Freedom of speech is one thing, but you can’t show anything that’s obscene or has a hate bias on there,” said a polite but adamant John Liska of Toronto police
“If you start doing that, then we’re going to have to shut you down.”
Roth, who has projected such images on edifices across the globe, from Brooklyn Bridge to the Coliseum in Rome, said he has received rougher treatment elsewhere.
“The cops in Barcelona took our equipment away, then charged us to get it back.
“These cops here were pretty cool,” he said.
Roth’s graffiti-cum-lightshow has earned him a cult following on YouTube, where he posts videos of his exploits from around the world.
His method is simple.
He scopes out a city for an appropriate building or structure and aims the projector at the surface. Artists then flick a laser pointer across the surface of the targeted building, drawing an image as if they were writing on paper with a pen. The projector captures the movement and traces the line of the laser onto the structure allowing the artist to paint an image in light.
Though he’s seen by some as an evolutionary graffiti artist and not a vandal, Roth says his principles are in line with those of all artists who stand to express themselves on public and private property.
Roth, who also targeted the CN Tower on Friday night but found its narrow structure and heightened security a hindrance to his methods, says he purposely chooses targets that are inaccessible to more traditional artists.
“The bigger the better, you know, especially if it’s some big pristine structure that people hold holy.”
Spray paint? Graffiti has moved on
Friday, April 18th, 2008
[Via:blogs.guardian.co.uk]
For those uncomfortable with the materialistic fight over Pictures on Walls screen prints, there is a new wave of ephemeral street art intervention emerging. And it’s all about light.
Graffiti Research Lab are a pair of NYC-based artists who met at futuristic creative lab Eyebeam – a company that has had other hot artists like Cory Arcangel working under its wing. Much of GRL’s work involves projecting light beams of graffiti-style tags onto buildings. In the past they have also created LED “throwies”, which can be thrown onto walls and create text and images. Lights, lasers and LEDs have an inbuilt sense of modernity and lightness. They don’t annoy people as much as paint. In a way GRL’s work is like painted graffiti but with the process of time speeded up to seconds rather than years. Instead of watching the elements attack a wall over time, here the images are so transitory they’re gone in minutes.
GRL have projected their dripping light images onto the Brooklyn Bridge, international skyscrapers and miniature pyramids in Italy (the Egyptian ones may still be a bit too big to attack as yet). Sometimes the glowing projections look rather rough around the edges, but that DIY freedom is what gives the work its impact. The work still explores many of the same ideas that underlie graffiti – personal politics and identity, the reclamation of public space, new methods of pushing letterforms and visual language. There’s also a real sense of freedom to their approach. They are equally free from the rigidity of the graffiti world’s self-imposed rules and regulations as they are from the curatorial-heavy institutionalised art world.
They aren’t the only artists exploring the idea of fusing technology with street art. Karolina Sobecka created projected film pieces, transforming cityscapes into a moving backdrop for nightglow animations. German collective Lichtfaktor uses lights to draw images at night in open space and capture the resulting images on film. There’s something about the fact that the work can only be created and seen at night that fits perfectly with graffiti’s heritage of illegal night-time painting. This geek-street vein of art is bound to keep growing…
Graffiti Research Lab Invades MoMA!
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
[Via:www.blackbookmag.com]
Graffiti is as ubiquitous in New York as the sky and the buildings that scrape them. Until nowish. Time.com has published an article on James Powderly and Evan Roth, graffers who’ve taken their art form off the streets, into the lab, and back onto the streets again. The duo uses a form of graffiti they call laser-tagging, which is a short-term, invisible paint that is only revealed once splashed in the light of a special projector. Instead of a can, they use a laser pointer. Tough to fathom, to be sure. Roth and Powderly have tattooed everything from the underbelly of the Brooklyn Bridge to the tech-towers of Hong Kong. Videos of their projections make for popular YouTube clips, and can be seen on their website GraffitiResearchLab.com. And, instead of law enforcement taking notice, it’s caught the attention of museum curators. The MoMA is even featuring their work at their “Design and The Elastic Mind” exhibit, which runs until May 12th. Check out a video of their work after the jump.
Graffiti 2.0: High Tech and Temporary
Monday, April 14th, 2008
[Via:www.time.com]
Artists James Powderly and Evan Roth recently went on a daring graffiti mission. The goal? Tagging New York’s Brooklyn Bridge. They waited for rush hour to die down and tried to be as incognito as people milling around bridges can be in this post- Sept. 11 world. Then, the duo fixed their crosshairs firmly on the bridge’s underside, and started etching out dozens — maybe hundreds — of tags on one of its massive supports. They held still as a police boat floated under the bridge. Later, they allowed passersby to pick up the equipment and try it for themselves. Yet, the next morning, there was nary a sign that Powderly or Roth — nor their towering
While most graffiti crews use spray paint to mark buildings and urban infrastructure, Roth and Powderly, the artists behind the Graffiti Research Lab, have perfected a unique form of temporary high-tech graffiti they call laser tagging that utilizes a laser pointer in lieu of paint, a projector in place of a spray. Instead of hitting dark subway tunnels and back alleys, they turn their attention to public places such as skyscrapers and monuments. A growing legion of fans turn out regularly to witness live demonstrations of their light shows (see video of their latest graffiti missions), but most log on en masse to watch videos of the events on such sites as YouTube and GraffitiResearchLab.com. A few hundred have even downloaded the needed computer code and instructions — something the “open-source” artists encourage people to do — to replicate Powderly and Roth’s art in cities around the world. As a result of their soaring online popularity, the two artists have been sought out by a number of prominent curators in the art world — most recently by those at the Museum of Modern Art. in New York — who see in their digital etchings a convergence of street art, graffiti art, and urban cinema.
“The basic idea for laser tag was to create free speech machines — to find ways of helping people say things at a scale and in a place where you normally have people controlling speech,” Powderly says. “Doing it in an art museum was never the intent. Some days we think it’s an art project, but other days it seems like an activism project, bringing together hackers and engineers.”
The artists started laser tagging in earnest only a year ago; they devised the basic concept while art fellows at Eyebeam, an art and technology center in New York where Powderly and Roth refined their open-source technology. The system is simple: The duo will locate an appropriate building or structure (avoiding buildings with windows to prevent any accidental laser-eye injuries) and aim the projector at the surface; with each flick of the laser pointer, the computer software registers a streak of light (see the equipment). The artists have pointed their projectors at everything from bridges in New York City to miniature pyramids in Italy, high-rises in Hong Kong and snow-covered mountains just a few miles away from the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. Video of their work can be seen until May 12 in the current MoMA exhibit “Design and the Elastic Mind,” an exhibition that kicked off with a live Graffiti Research Lab demonstration at the opening night reception.
“The best part was they agreed to let us have a really large guest list, so we invited 100 people, and put every graffiti writer we’ve ever worked with on the list, bringing them into the MoMA,” Roth says. “When graffiti writers are arrested, it’s at the judge’s discretion what they are charged with, depending on whether they were acting as vandals or misguided artists. And by inviting all these people to MoMA, now if they ever get arrested, they can point to this video and say that of course they’re artists, they’ve been featured by one of the country’s most prominent institutions.”
As evidenced by those unlikely guests at the MoMA opening — some of whom used the occasion to digitally spray comments mocking both the opening night crowd and the institution itself — the GRL seems to be inhabiting two worlds simultaneously. Powderly has called his laser tag device a “weapon of mass defacement.” But their light art disappears with flip of a power switch, making it not necessarily illegal in some municipalities. “We talk about graffiti a lot,” Roth says, “People view graffiti differently, some think of graffiti as an end design, but others think of it as an action, and by graffiti going online, you can see the action in progress.”
“People say that we’re high-tech,” Powderly chimes in, “But I can’t find a moment where [graffiti] wasn’t high-tech. If you look back, you had spray cans — this form of technology that was a little too new to be considered an art form — and this billion-dollar transportation system that taggers used to spread their art. It’s not all that different from laser pointers, a new technology, and this immense infrastructure that you find in urban areas.”
graffiti art — had ever been there.
