sundance

Dam graffiti in Ventura County

I was blown away when I first saw this photo. I thought the clever imagery was absolutely brilliant, but I suspected it was probably too good to be true and Photoshop had to be involved. It turns out some things that are too good to be true can actually be true. An anonymous group of guerrilla artists rappelled down the wall back in September to paint this environmentally conscious, large-scale mark on the 200 foot Matilija Dam in Ventura County.

New robot artist, the “Senseless Drawing Bot”

SENSELESS DRAWING BOT from yang02 on Vimeo.

Although they’re primitive and rudimentary in design (not that I could ever make such a thing) built with household object à la Make, Japanese artists So Kanno and Takahiro Yamaguchi are the creators behind what they call the “Senseless Drawing Bot.” Reflecting the artists’ interests in typography, from the formal (calligraphy) to the recent (graffiti), they built and programmed a robot that merges these forms.

Mobile graffiti van

Art collective Everfresh Studio built this tongue-in-cheek service van outfitted with all the gear and material, such as spray paint, masks, ropes, wire cutters necessary for a team to infiltrate and graffiti bomb a neighborhood. The van is also outfitted with a boombox to provide the accompanying soundtrack. [Via]

Old Keith Haring profile

From the annals of street and graffiti art history is this old 8-minute video profile of artist Keith Haring during his pop culture ascendancy, including interviews with the artist and his dealer Tony Shafrazi (along with representing countless other artists, he also incidentally gained infamy for once spray painting in an act of protest “Kill [...]

Titian’s Venus gets graffiti-clothed

This Minneapolis billboard promoting a traveling exhibition of Titian paintings from the National Gallery of Scotland which opened this month at the Minneapolis Institute of Art demonstrates that graffiti bombers and museum officials both have a sense of humor. The museum staff found it amusing and wanted it left up, but unfortunately the billboard company [...]

Hard times at Ghostbusters

By the looks of this photo posted at Unseen NYC (a nice photoblog of random graffiti and seedier spottings in NYC), it looks like the Ghostbusters’ business shift to animal control isn’t going too well. This car was spotted in my old neighborhood of Park Slope.

Stop motion film: miniature graffiti

Tumblingerstraße from yo man on Vimeo. This is an impressive stop-motion video using miniature toy cars and figures to create a scale model of Tumblingerstraße, which is a street in Munich where graffiti is legally permitted. A hipster Ken could hang out on this street.

Light painting warfare

Freddie Wong created this short yet exciting action sequence titled “Light Warfare” using stop-motion light painting. Only photons were hurt in the making of this short film, which took Wong and company a total of 13 hours over two days to shoot. Watch the behind the scenes video here. [Via]

Green graffiti

As someone who loves and appreciates street art I have to say it is rare these days when graffiti moves me. Maybe it is just living in a city like New York. We’re inundated daily with it on building sides and subway platforms. It’s become part of the city’s landscape. With that said I could [...]

Mac and Retna, collaborations in graffiti

“Mac and Retna are unlikely partners. Mac is a photorealist, Retna is all brush.” More unlikely still is the fact that their giant murals, usually the stuff of city streets, have been popping up in places like Art Basel, Miami and on September 26th at the Robert Berman Gallery in Los Angeles. While the photorealism [...]

Street Rothko

Life imitates art: Street graffiti and tags and subsequent efforts to paint over them inadvertantly results in an effect that mimics or resonates with Mark Rothko’s iconic “multiform” aesthetic. View the entire photo set here.

Parisian graffiti taxonomy

In “Graffiti Taxonomy,” Evan Roth ambitiously photographed and documented over 2,400 graffiti tags from each of Paris’s 20 districts, then archived and categorized them by letter. The artist tackled a smaller scale version as a Parsons graduate student in New York City where he “created character studies of the letter ‘S’ from the Lower East Side and the letter ‘A’ from Harlem, followed by an NYC-based letter ‘E’ study in 2008.”

Banksy’s new exhibit

I announced here a couple days ago about the opening of anonymously renowned street artist Banksy’s latest show, which also happens to be his largest exhibition yet, “Banksy Versus Bristol Museum” at the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery in Bristol, England.

This graffiti is on fire

New York artist Ellis Gallagher’s latest graffiti technique is sure to please any pyromaniac. He is showing currently, along with other blog-worthy street artists including Poster Boy at the “Hollowood” show in West Hollywood’s Carmichael Gallery until the end of April. LAers, go check it out. It’s a bit dated, but I still really like [...]

The pink bunker

A Barcelona-based group of subversive art-activists, Difusor took it upon themselves to give a decaying bunker from the Spanish Civil War era a face lift with pink camouflage. Rumor has it that Hello Kitty may be moving its operations there. View more photos of the bunker here. [Via]

The graffiti culture of Brazil

An interesting tour of Sao Paulo’s streets and buildings led by Joao Wainer, who explains pixação, a form of graffiti unique to this region. The night vision shots of locals climbing buildings to leave their paint marks are particularly hair-raising. [Via]

Wii graffiti

A German guy named Martin Lihs turned a Wii controller into a can of virtual spray paint. Here’s video of a recent WiiSpray demo: WiiSpray Teaser from Martin Lihs on Vimeo. [via Daring Fireball.]

Explosive skateboarding

Against the background of UNKLE’s emotive song “Heaven,” directors Spike Jonze and Ty Evans film the Lakai skateboarding team navigating an explosive terrain. The video starts a little slow, but “explodes” around the 1:58 mark. If that didn’t sell you then, let me try this: three words, skateboarding, explosions, and slo-mo. ‘Nuff said. [Via]