Graffiti

Friday Inspiration. Pretty Cool People Interviews – Martha Cooper

“It was this shock of the new that led to many a trespassing adventure and a lifelong fascination for graffiti. “One day a young boy said to me: ‘why don’t you photograph graffiti?’ He opened his note book and showed me his drawings. The minute I understood that there was a systematic designing and painting on the wall I became fascinated.”

Submarine Channel, the folks that give you websites like “Forget the Film, Watch the Titles” have a website and a Vimeo channel that is dedicated to interviewing artist, filmographers, designers, illustrators, musicians etc. I try to check it out on a regular basis but time tends to get in the way, so unfortunately I don’t. This morning however, I stopped by and found this great interview with photographer Martha Cooper, the Grande Dame of Hip Hop Documentation who has over the last 30 plus years documented some of the greatest graffiti artist in the world. This short film shows not only her passion for the work, but her deep fascination with the culture, and creativity that goes into so much street art. Even though there were some issues with the way the film is shot and edited for me, the five minute short is worth a watch.

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Future Lions 2012: Absolut Inspire. A Better Augmented Experience.

This is one of the best concepts for augmented reality I have seen in quite a while. Rather than using 3 models to create a rather limited experience, Iris Gavric & Daniel Otterbein, students at the Academy of Visual Arts in Frankfurt, Germany, are proposing that you to be more involved.

Gavric, and Otterbein have created a concept film about an app for Absolute Vodka that would allow you the user to paint virtual graffiti on any surface, and share it with your friends on Facebook. As a secondary incentive to download and use the app, they built in a hook where Absolute will create a custom bottle with your artwork on it.

I love the fact that the idea behind this app is asking you to become involved and interact with the augmented surfaces. I love the fact that they have hooked this back into a social network helping to expand the reach of the Absolute brand.

What I wish they had done, was create a way to leave your virtual tags for others. It would have been great if you were scanning the street and it revealed other peoples graffiti and messages. They hint at it in the beginning of the film, but I don’t think it is part of their actual app proposal. I’m not sure at how difficult it would be to implement, since you would have to create unique marker ID’s for thousands of buildings, but it would create an even deeper experience for everyone involved.

Animae Dementia

Street Artists Ro and l’Homme Pendu have been creating a series of paper paste up monsters in Berlin and Paris over the last few months. The works entitled Animae Dementia (roughly “soul madness” or “animal madness”, feature giant mythical creatures that appear in the photos to be preparing to devour their creators as they are being constructed. The images are great, and the photos from the website are pretty impressive, showing not only how they are made, but the scale of many of the final pieces.

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Skateboard + Spray Paint + Swimming Pool = Awesome!

back in the day, when I was younger and didn’t care if I broke my arm (note that I now have a mortgage, and broken arm + designer = not working) I was a pretty hardcore skater. I spent countless hours at the skatepark, on ramps, in abandoned swimming pools, and carving the asphalt around my neighborhood. This is the kind of thing that makes me wish I had kept up with it.

Not only is this a fun as hell video, some of the shots in it are pretty amazing, and the end result is some killer abstract graffiti.