Articles & Texticles

Take one perfectly useful urban train…

Graffiti Archeology is an amazing site. It documents the changes happening to the graffiti in several Californian locations over time and allows us a look into their past in a sort of peelable palimpsest that has been co-operatively documented by many contributors.

My heart normally sinks when I’m faced with a pointless Flash interface, but the way that the designer, Cassidy Curtis has used the technology to its best, offers you, the visitor, a deep multi-layered exploration of the site in time and space, without ever getting in your face.

Let’s follow the tale of the tunnel and the little train that so confidently emerged into the Los Angeles sunlight of 1949….

1952, and the line is about to be rubbed out…

The Belmont Tunnel is used as a film set for the movie “V”.

Incidentally, this shows how the graffiti Archeologists source their picture material from a wide variety of image providers in order to build up a graffiti location’s timeline. This pic comes from Warner Bros./NBC/Film In America

The Belmont Tunnel greets the new millennium as a crappy black and white JPEG!

April 2004

November 2004

And best of all, using Flash for the website allows you to zoom in on the pictures, too.

Aerosol version of The Cramps typeface.

Here’s the link.
And here’s a link to Cassidy Curtis’ own website. He’s an animator, with synaesthesia, natch.

Graffiti is the chameleon skin of the urban landscape. Equal parts public art and vandalism, virtuosity and subversion, it is among the most ephemeral forms of human expression.

Graffiti walls are repainted frequently, as different writers compete and collaborate on the public canvas. A given piece may last years, weeks, or mere hours. For graffiti writers, this is expected and in fact fundamental to their process, which they perceive as an ongoing dialogue. However, most city dwellers experience this constant change only at a subconscious level.

Graffiti Archaeology (grafarc.org) captures this process of constant change and makes it visible. Grafarc.org is an interactive, timelapse collage of photographs of certain walls, taken over a span of months or years.

The photos are precisely superimposed, so that by moving through the layers, you experience a compressed version of time passing, as old tags are submerged beneath new ones.

You can see how one writer’s style changes over the years, or explore the dialogue between writers as they paint over each other’s work. The project also functions as a living archive, since most of the pieces on the site no longer exist in the real world.

Grafarc.org mirrors the actual public space of city walls in the virtual public space of the internet. The site design is intended to encourage curiosity and exploration; to facilitate comparisons over time and space; and to reveal, rather than hide, the assembly process.

Each photocollage is assembled by hand and corrected for skewed perspectives and lighting so as to faithfully recreate the appearance of the flat wall. However, the warped photos’ irregular outlines are preserved, hinting at the photographer’s original point of view.

The photos themselves are gathered from diverse sources, including my own collection, other photographers, and various graffiti sites on the web. As grafarc.org expands to include more cities, the web is becoming ever more important as a resource for the project.

The site has attracted the attention of both graffiti artists and photographers, and a vital online community is beginning to form around it (http://flickr.com/groups/grafarc). This community has become essential for weaving together disparate threads of visual information into a nuanced, structured historical record.

This project is an example of a new phenomenon unique to the era of digital photography and the internet: structured, networked, grass-roots assemblage.

The world is being more throroughly photographed now than at any point in human history, and people are sharing these photos freely on the web. Choose a subject, and you can now see it from many different points of view, even from people who only captured it accidentally.

Graffiti Archaeology shows that by assembling and juxtaposing these scattered fragments, we can gain new kinds of insight. What else can we reconstruct from so many points of view? What subtle dimensions will we discover?

All in all, you have to admire, or at least take your hat off to a man who can say very publicly: