Gizmodo: Graffiti

The Berliner Dom Projected with Graffiti

Mark Wilson — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:00:00 EDT

In 1894, when German Emperor Wilhelm II ordered the construction of the neoclassicist Berliner Dom, otherwise known as the Berlin Cathedral, he probably didn't think it would turn out like this. Projected with the visual musings of graffiti artist Jaybo (specifically, Disney cartoon hands forming Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa), the Dom is always a spectacle...but not like this. Here's the cathedral on any other day:

[CircleCulture via Coolhunting]

Graffiti'ed AT-AT Walker Up For Grabs at Christie's Auction

AddyDugdale — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 07:40:00 EDT

If you've got a spare couple of grand loitering in your bank account, and you're a S*** W*** fan, then this graffiti'ed AT-AT walker might be so far up your galaxy it's parked in your constellation. Customised by EASE and JK5 for Suckadelic, the Hasbro toy is tagged in gin-u-wine Aurebesh language, and is expected to go for between $1,500 and $2,000. You can pick it up at the Christie's Pop Culture sale on June 25 in New York. [Christie's via GeekAlerts]

GRL Documentary Switches Us Onto Electronic Street Art

Kit Eaton — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 04:00:38 EDT

Never heard of the Graffiti Research Lab? Well, if we tell you they were wrongly suspected of being involved in the Boston LED Mooninite mess, and their self-declared mission statement is to be "dedicated to outfitting graffiti writers, pranksters, artists and protestors with open source tools for urban communication" do you have more of a clue? A documentary is due out soon on the work of these technology-mad urban artists, and the video shows a few snippets from it. It's pretty fascinating. We're tempted to strap some magnets, batteries and LEDs together and start decorating boring urban steel things with glowing throwies right away. The film premieres at MoMA in New York on May 4th. [BoingBoingTV]

Handwriting Recognition for iPhone Now Available

Jesus Diaz — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 07:30:00 EDT

Holy Egg Freckles! A Chinese developer has released handwriting recognition software—both Latin and Chinese alphabets—for the iPhone. Similar to Graffiti, the classic writing software for Palms, you can setup HWPen from Installer.app to give you an a writing area that can take over the standard keyboard at the touch of button. It's a 1.0 beta version, but it works. Screenshots and more info after the jump. UPDATED: fingers-on video is up now.

You can download HWPen today using Installer.app. Go to "Sources," click on "Edit" and "Add" a new source:

http://iphonecake.com/src/new

Then refresh your sources and look for HWPen in the iPhoneCake packages category. Install the software and restart the iPhone.

You will have to restart your iPhone.

The software is still in beta and it has quite a few errors—it doesn't work correctly in landscape mode and it doesn't appear in Mail.app for now—but it works a bit better than Doonesbury's original Newton (I just started using it, though), although not as good as later incarnations of the Newton or Graffiti, as you can see in the video. But it's a start and hopefully it will get into a solid alternative for the people who hate the on-screen keyboard (I prefer the keyboard myself, it's just a lot faster than I would ever be doing character recognition). [Hanwang via ModMyiFone]

Glow In The Dark Graffiti Makes Street Art Rave-tastic

Elaine Chow — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 22:00:12 EDT

Every aspiring Banksy has run into the same problem at some point in time—he or she has defaced public property beautifully, but no one wandering the area at night can see it. With the power of design brand Suck UK's glow in the dark Graffiti, however, this quandary will affect the noble street artist no more. Now every miscreant's scribbles will be admired by the general public, no matter what time it is. No word on pricing, but the product should be available soon. [Suck UK]

Digital Billboards Hacked in Southern California

Sean Fallon — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:53:00 EDT

A well known 18 year old graffiti artist that goes by the name "Skullphone" has expanded his repertoire of vandalism to include 10 digital billboards around L.A. Earlier this week, onlookers were treated to Skullphones's calling card in between the normal ads running on the display. Nice work dude, let's hope that the police and the folks at ClearChannel appreciate art. Updated: Apparently, it wasn't a hack, but a two-day paid "art project." [Skullphone and Curbed L.A. via Textually and Supertouch]

"Couleur Sur l'Object" Graffiti Robot Turns Vandalism All-Electronic

Kit Eaton — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:00:46 EST

Designer Stefan Rechsteiner has come up with the Couleur sur l'Objet concept as a modern way of applying "urban art" to walls in hard-to-reach places. Equipped with a can of spray paint, the little tyke would be like a badly-behaved roomba with a vacuum-suction mod to keep it in place. With its accompanying design software, you could presumaby use to it create large-scale murals on walls that would previously have required some serious (and conspicuous) ladder-work. Town councils everywhere had better invest in new grafitti-cleaning tech of their own— we suspect this won't remain a concept for too long. [Yanko Design]

Four Crazy Radio Concepts to Celebrate National Inventor's Day

AddyDugdale — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 07:53:59 EST

Today is National Inventor's Day, in honor of Thomas Edison, and Giz is going to celebrate it with some designs from the Work In Progress show by students at London's Royal College of Art. There are no less than four concept radios in the show, including this one by Mikael Silvanto, which melds a slide rule with an iPod-esque analog radio. The other three, including one which uses QR codes to hook up graffiti artists with pirate radio stations, are below.

Yuri Suzuki's design uses a Post-It pad to mark out the frequencies of pirate radio stations that caught her ear while living in North London. "My radio enables you to make notes about the radio station and mark its position," she says. "The radio looks like a memo pad, but underneath is a speaker; the pencil acts as the antenna that controls tuning and volume."

Yuri feels there is a connection between graffiti artists and pirate radio stations, as both are art forms that hack into public spaces. Her Future Pirate Radio lets you tune into pirate radio via QR codes. First, the graffiti artist stencils a QR code onto the wall, incorporating it into their work. Anyone who takes a picture of the graffiti will then be able to tune into the pirate radio station that inspired the artist via the internet.

Finally, Jochem Faudet's work consists of a pair of radios whose controls are grouped together in order to make it easier to use. Actually, it's rather complicated, so here's Jochem's own explanation.
"Radio 1: All the tuning and volume functions are grouped around the speaker. The On/Off switch and volume function is situated closest to the speaker. The AM/FM switch is situated at the end of the tuning circle, by flicking the switch down it points to the FM numbers situated on the outside of the circle or by flicking the switch up it points to AM numbers on the inside of the tuning semi-circle.

"Radio 2: The tuning function and volume function are separated from each other in this concept. To adjust the volume one has to turn the wheel with the integrated speaker, by sliding the AM/FM switch to FM it hides the frequencies of the AM and vice versa."

Nope, still too complicated for me, I'm afraid. [Dezeen]

Interactive Graffiti Billboard Lets You Be Simultaneously Tough and Geeky

ybaranovsky — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 19:30:23 EDT

Finally, graffiti and technology have joined to create something beautiful. Mark Ecko is designing digital citylights that will consist of a giant LCD screen and a Bluetooth interface that will allow passerby's to "spray graffiti" by accessing the screen via Bluetooth. They will then be able to use their cell phone cursor to spray any phallic object and/or clever curse words they can think of.

Not sure when or even if this will come out (and it looks like it'll be in Germany) — but it's a godsend for tech-savvy gang members. By the way, if you're not sure what a "citylight" is — it's that large, vertical LCD screen that you see in the picture. [Ads of the World]

Graffiti Research Labs Mark Up Buildings With L.A.S.E.R.TAG

www.gizmodo.com — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:48:38 EST

The tech-savvy artists over at Graffiti Research Lab hacked together a large-scale tagging projector using a standard notebook computer, 5000 ANSI DLP projector, a 60mw green laser (apparently super illegal in a lot of places and very dangerous), an astronomer's camera, and some other random crap.

The L.A.S.E.R.TAG tracks the motion of the green laser through the camera and then projects the 'ink' onto any large flat surface—like in this case, the side of a large building.

The lab has instructions on how to get started with creating your own tagging projector, and they've thankfully released the source code to help you on your way. But remember, even if you get one successfully built, you still need some art skills to properly do graffiti. – Alexander Yoon

L.A.S.E.R.TAG [via Pop Sci]

LED Throwies: Harmless Way to Make Your Mark

Charlie White — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 17:26:34 EST

LED technology is so cheap that now you can throw it away. So the Graffiti Research Lab has dreamed up LED Throwies, colorful little LED markers you can make yourself. They require a 10mm LED and a button-size lithium battery and are taped together with a rare earth magnet for superior stickage. Each "Throwie" costs less than a buck if you buy the ingredients in bulk. All you need is a magnetic surface and you're ready for some LED throwing. This is said to be especially fun when you toss a bunch of them onto a metal surface that's high off the ground, out of reach of interlopers who might spoil the fun. Once they're stuck up there, they stay lit for up to two weeks. It's harmless graffiti that s actually kind of pretty.

LED Throwies [Via Boing Boing]

A Moment of Perspective: iNeed

Joel — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:55:36 EST

From Mantis, UK-based stencil artist.

Genuine Portable Media Player Graffiti

Travis Hudson — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 13:29:54 EST

Sony's PSP graf-admen have it all wrong. Convince the world that your product is superior and it will appear in graffiti without having to pay shills.

iPod Graf [Cult of Mac]
Via Taniwha's Flickr

GrafittiWriter Will Roll Up And Tag Your Neighborhood

gizmodo.com — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 10:04:42 EST

Meet the product that results when students get too close to paint fumes: GraffitiWriter. This guerilla marketer's dream machine is a remote controled car loaded with cans of spray paint and dot-matrix printer parts inside for printing text anonymously from a remote location. GraffitiWriter packs a microcontroller that allows the robot to print out pixelated letters on the ground and spell out words and sentences in paint. GraffitiWriter also has a top speed of 9.3MPH. One application of this robot could be used over in Iraq today for spelling out messages on the ground in dangerous areas. Another would be for Rockstar Games to start spray painting its game logos all over NYC (wait, they already do that).

This devious robot is the latest from the activist group Institute for Applied Autonomy, and comes complete with this bogus stat:

"Studies have shown that in nearly 100% of the cases, a given agent of the public will willing participate in high profile acts of vandalism, given the opportunity to do so via mediated tele-robotic technology."

GraffitiWriter [Product Page]

Spray On A Computer

gizmodo.com — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 08:32:28 EDT

Perhaps this will allow graffiti artists to become helpful in one way or another, but a spray-on computer is being developed at the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, St Andrews and Strathclyde as a joint effort to create tiny specks that can peform computations and communicate somehow with applications. These "specks" as they're being called, will be embedded in objects and can detect things such as a problem in an aircraft wing or letting someone know when their medicine should be taken. Peep the idea:

Thousands of Specks, scattered or sprayed on a person or surfaces, will collaborate in programmable computational networks called Specknets. Scientists are even considering the idea of a putting the devices in a spray-can, allowing the Specks to be sprayed onto any surface.

Sounds useful enough to me. Although it's only a matter of time before Specknets form Skynet and take over the world and the governor of California steps up to the plate to defend us. By us I mean John Connor.

Spray On Computers [WMMNA]