Manifesto

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Inspiration:

Computer Problems

I've been battling a virus that first infected my OS through MS Word, and has slowly spread to all things on all three of my hard drives. Techies say they can recover all of my applications without jettisoning most of the content that I created on them, so when I find a way to get all those random city pictures up, I will. In the meantime, I'll be at NYU's Media Lab working on my Manifesto and catching up on everyone else's Metaforms schtuff.

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Wrestling with Graffiti

My Murray Hill, my Gramercy. Strangled by a cluster fuck of chains that have invaded like the plague (and I've been here less than a year). More services! Less diversity, less choice, less...life. And that was all BEFORE NYU bought a dorm down the street.

How do you know when you're suffocating (or, in the evolution of things, already caput)? How do you know when you're sunk? I remember hearing the stories, of coal mine workers using canaries to ensure that oxygen levels were sufficient to keep them alive long enough to finish a day's work.

But then, what can be said about the rapid decimation of commercial diversity up and down third avenue can be extended to a whole lot of problems in the world as a whole.










From previous class discussion:

I wanted to do a little research on sculptural grafitti, and encoutered an interesting result to my search for 3-d graffiti art from weburbanist.com:

3D graffiti, whether it’s in chalk or paint, on walls or the street, represents a new way of combining the mastery of Renaissance art techniques with the gritty, ephemeral qualities of amazing street art. These 3D street artists gives graffiti a whole new meaning – one that departs from the conventional interpretation of graffiti as vandalism in the form of images and letters scrawled on public property. Artists like Kurt Wenner, Eduardo Relero and Tracy Lee Stum create street art that’s so incredible it is almost impossible to pass by without being sucked in to the worlds they create on asphalt and concrete surfaces.

It occurred to me that in discussing the rigid definitions of graffiti, we became absorbed in a discussion about what defines the authentic in this particular culture. So it begs the question: do these particular works of (mostly) commissioned street art belong to the genre defined as graffiti? WebUrbanist seems to think so. Yet if the medium is more important than the meaning (paid art by chalk is more authentic than rebellion by projected image), hasn't the spirit of graffiti already been abandoned?

And the architect inside is interested in knowing...can we expand the physical mediums beyond a flat surface to articulate a new dimension to graffiti culture (as i argue projection 'graffiti' does)?

Photo ESSaY

More:

http://flickr.com/photos/30377480@N02/

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KYle