Aug 8, 2005
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Banksy Does Gaza

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The BBC reports that the nine paintings have been created on the Palenstinian side of the barrier. One depicts a hole in the wall with an idyllic beach, while another shows a mountain landscape on the other side.

Banksy’s spokeswoman Jo Brooks said, “The Israeli security forces did shoot in the air threateningly and there were quite a few guns pointed at him.”

The 425 mile long barrier, made of concrete walls and razor-wire electric fences, is still being constructed by the Israeli authorities. Israel says that the barrier is necessary to protect the country from suicide bombers, but the International Court of Justice has said that it breaches international law.

Banksy describes the wall as “the ultimate activity holiday destination for graffiti writers.”

Also pictured - a recent Banksy spotted on Bloomsbury Avenue in London.
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Jul 15, 2005
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The Media is the Masses

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From the first reports on LBC to the BBC website, main media providers were initally clueless as to what was going on and reliant on (and imploring for) those on the ground (ie ‘ordinary people’) to report what they saw via email, photophone and digital camera. Within 30 minutes of the tube network lockdown, blog search engine Technorati provided links to people’s personal reports. Bloggers who covered the atrocity saw their web access statistics skyrocket as the public voraciously sought first-hand breaking news.

Even after the rolling news services such as BBC 24 were in play, they needed images such as these to ground their reports. Also, these 'amateur’ witnesses may yet hold the vital evidence and key images of the attacks that escape CCTV in the most watched city on earth. Flickr already has a dedicated page to the events and Wikipedia the most exhaustive (and accurate) account of what actually happened. Multiple media providers have since analysed how the blogs reported the story first.

Note: shortly after this was posted the UK police started appealing for footage and photos as evidence - the UK public is also providing its own panopticon.

The photo above was taken outside a bus stop in Hackney on 8th July 2005. It reads, in bright pink lipstick, “Do we have to pick sides?”
Jul 15, 2005
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RIP: New York Spray Can Memorials

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The picture shows New York spray can memorial by Antonio ‘Chico’ Garcia, located on Bruckner Boulevard, off Brook Avenue, Mott Haven, Bronx. This was Chico’s first memorial portrait, for a high school friend called Ed. Ed was shot down in a hail of bullets in a drive by shooting near this empty lot. The Lower East Side mural has since been defaced by rival dealers.

This is just one of 100 plus such murals documented by Martha Cooper and Joseph Sciorra in their recent book, R.I.P.: New York Spraycan Memorials. The murals memorialise all manner of death in the mean streets of New York: drugs, shooting, wars, asthma deaths, traffic accidents and AIDS.

In the introduction, Sciorra writes:

The memorial wall transforms personal grief into shared public sentiment by serving as a vehicle for community affiliation and potential empowerment. Covering the expenses for materials and the artist’s labor is often a collective endeavor, with neighborhood residents making contributions in memory of one of their own. The murals create new public spaces for community ceremony. Life is celebrated at the walls with parties marking anniversaries and birthdays. These centers of congregation become rallying points of candlelight processions and demonstrations held by community people who march through the streets in opposition to violence, drugs or police brutality.

These neighborhood billboards are used to elicit critical examination of the root causes and solutions to the daily onslaught against inner-city youth. The Crown Heights Youth Collective in Brooklyn sponsors memorials in an aggressive campaign to cultivate alternatives to violence among the neighborhood’s Caribbean and African American kids.

The images in this book represent only a fraction of those we documented; they are a small part of the two thousand plus killing that occur each year in the city. Turn the page and witness a generation of sons and daughters – now gone.
Jul 15, 2005
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Clean Tags

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In the picture, Leeds graffiti artist Moose cleans a wall with his tag. His inspiration was seeing that people had written their names with their fingers on dirty tunnel walls in his hometown of Leeds. He might have also seen a white van saying ‘clean me’. Moose does some freehand drawing, but also uses the grid from wall tiles to create perfect shapes and letters. The tools are simple: A shoe brush, water and elbow grease.

Clean tagging has since been used by the French Yellow Pages as an environmentally friendly advertising vehicle. Maybe one for Greenpeace?

Story via the we make money not art blog.
Jun 23, 2005
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Grafedia

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Grafedia is multimedia graffiti written as an email address (—- @grafedia.net) or in blue underlined text to look like a hyperlink. Spotters can send a message to the address and in return get digital art sent to their phone. The above bastardized McDonald’s sign returns a graphic instructing viewers how to avoid choking (see below).
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Grafedia has already been used as a promotional tool, linking to images or text that includes a personal website address or a band name. An art teacher in Australia creates treasure hunts, with one grafedia image pointing to the next. It’s also begging to be used to promote parties and events.

Grafedia was invented by John Geraci, a recent graduate from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications program. He likens it to putting a message in a bottle, “You don’t know who will find it and uncork it, and it doesn’t really matter. It’s an act of anonymous, artistis sharing, done with strangers in your city.”

More than 2,000 images have been uploaded to the Grafedia server since it went live in December 2004.

You can make your own grafedia by taking a picture and send it to “anyword@grafedia.net” then write that address anywhere you like. It’s ridiculously easy - for a picture of my cat, email jepthah@grafedia.net.

There’s a greater teaser ad in this somewhere as well - see below.
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The full story from Wired is here.
Jun 10, 2005
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Hackney resists gentrification

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Whilst putting the fear of god into new homeowners might not be the best solution, gentrification is a genuine problem in Hackney and many other poor areas of London. It’s a problem shared with many other big urban centres worldwide.

Whilst DINKies (Double Income No Kids) are marketed to with promises of ‘loft city living’ and 'Armani-suited concierges’, council lists are getting ever longer and those in genuine need of sustainable housing not getting it.

Some property developers have recognised that there is a problem and are blending public and private sector interests. Just up the road from this graffiti stands 16 Hoxton Square, a listed old school and community centre. It has been converted into two luxury (but not overtly so) flats overlooking the square and some community offices. The downstairs holds a Prue Leith restaurant (the Hoxton Apprentice) that doubles as a culinary training school for the long term unemployed and Bob Breen, one of East London’s most celebrated martial arts specialists, who has been given back his old place in the building, with an expanded and modernised gym.

According to Sylvie Pierce of Capital & Provident Regeneration who managed the project (full interview in the Financial Times - subscription required):

We all talk about regeneration but what does it really mean? You produce beautiful loft apartments and you bring the wealthy in. They spend money in bars and restaurants and eventually it trickles down. Or you take a more sophisticated view. What does it mean to live on a local estate and see all this affluence around you?


The graffiti in Hackney should give her a fair idea.
Jun 7, 2005
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Do they mean us?

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The rumour that the rest of these painted letters, by Eine, read ‘Arse’ [photograph depicts shutters painted with letters spelling out 'holes’] proved sadly untrue. It’s a simply a cute little East End alphabet on shop shutters.

Posted on Wooster.
May 31, 2005
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Popular culture bites back

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Ad agency apes street art by stencilling ads around ‘hot’ areas in London like Old Street to promote a Brazilian liquor.

Street artists notice – mainly due to posts of the 'graffiti’ on street art sites like Wooster Collective and blogs like The Londonist). A BBC2 documentary, 'Inside Saatchi and Saatchi’, which showed the making of the campaign might have alerted them too…

Street artists expose agency’s lame attempt at nicking their look and paint over/paper over the images. Gain coverage in The Times.

Read and learn:

'Saatchi Tags London with Fake Art to Hawk Brazilian Liquor’

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There’s a lovely irony in graffiti artists 'tidying up’ advertising by papering over it. Or by crossing it out (see picture). The Saatchi’s image is also exposed by the fact that it doesn’t actually say anything – it’s just a stylised picture of the Christ. Compare it to, say, street art by Banksy which always expresses something – more often than not deeply political.

Time magazine are trying to pull a similiar stunt in New York at the moment, watched with increasing amusement by Gawker.
May 17, 2005
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3pm 15th May, Soho

Banksy Gay Policemen graffiti
For a global collection of walls with stuff written/drawn on see pictures of walls
Apr 12, 2005
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Reflective Art

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Artist Lisa Rave has used stencils to create a flock of light-relective animals throughout Berlin which only came out at night in the glare of headlights.

Surely only a matter of time before this technique is ripped off by the folk at Diabolical Liberties for some ad campaign …

See the work here. Courtesy of the we make money not art blog.
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