The street art community has established an online presence that chronicles its past and unites it present. It could also define the future of graffiti…

Graffiti demands your attention. Sprayed onto walls, street furniture or public transport, it’s an unusually physical form of communication. Unlike the advertising billboards with which it shares the streets, graffiti is usually applied without permission, a distinctly unlicensed medium.

The work of street artists draws sharply contrasting reactions: some see it as vandalism, while others take a more benevolent view that acknowledges the creativity of its practitioners. To the latter, sizeable group, graffiti is cool. Despite the efforts of some media-savvy companies to muscle in and use street art to sell product, the scene has successfully remained independent, with its own culture and language.

That independence makes the street art movement a natural for the internet, which so effectively enables individuals to pool their expertise for a common cause. Through the net, the spirit of graffiti has taken flight to turn a patchwork of grass-roots projects into an international movement.

“Computer technology has been instrumental in perpetuating graffiti and street art,” says legendary graffiti photographer Martha Cooper, whose images in Subway Art, alongside those by Henry Chalfant, did much to legitimise graffiti art. “There are hundreds of graffiti sites where writers can share their photos. There are sites where you can select spray paint colours and simulate painting, and others which will create your name in different graffiti styles.

Cooper adds: “There are numerous graffiti fonts you can download, and there are online shops to buy hard-to-find supplies such as fat caps. The web has spread the art form to the farthest corners of the world, and has kept it evolving.”

Documenting the form
Naturally there are many individual sites created by artists to showcase their own work. Big names such as the UK’s Banksy and France’s 123klan have promotional areas; Art Crimes has a lengthy directory to help you hunt down your favourites. More interesting are the many sites that invite participation, with artists and enthusiasts using community web tools such as blogging and photo-sharing to document a vibrant and fast-evolving scene.

Photos of new throwups and pieces are now appearing so quickly that the digital camera has clearly joined the spray can and the stencil as an essential part of the modern graffiti artist’s arsenal. Flickr, a photo-sharing service that enables anyone to post image collections, has several regular contributors who add pictures of the latest sightings. By searching for ‘graffiti’ or ‘street art’, you can take in current trends at any time.

To really see the impact of graffiti, though, you need to explore dedicated photo sites such as Streetsy. Here, around 10,000 images show the scenes in major cities worldwide, with prolific taggers tracked on an ongoing basis. Street Memes also charts the various campaigns and tags as they spread through different cities, taking its unusual name from biologist Richard Dawkins’ concept of self-replicating ideas called memes.

Street art is both big and diverse enough to support sites that offer a laser-tight focus on new work. The Stencil Archive tracks the fast-growing graffiti subculture after which it’s named, while the somewhat weird Bathroom Graffiti Project shows only artwork that’s been produced in public conveniences worldwide.

We’re also starting to see sites that go beyond the mere documentation of individual pieces, stepping back to offer a bigger picture. Graffiti Archaeology www.otherthings.com/grafarc makes the crucial connection that graffiti isn’t a static art: because sites are unofficial, other artists often appear and work over the art that’s already there. So the website revisits locations and offers timelines to show their development over weeks and months.

other links:

Wooster Collective

Visual Resistance

Billboard Liberation Front

The Film & Television Institute (FTI) has recently opened their internal training email newsletter, Instant Rushes, to the wider industry. If you want to find out about the latest technological developments, see examples of innovative new media and links to the latest creative web based content then subscribe now.

Instant Rushes is produced fortnightly and features around six stories of interest ranging from the technical, to the fun and bizarre.

To subscribe simply send an email to instantrushes-subscribe@fti.asn.au and follow the instructions that will be emailed to you. Instructions are also available on the FTI website in the‘Training’ section.

I think it’s a gigabit connection.

We may inherit a bizarre situation in Australia if Yahoo! is bought by Microsoft…

The high-definition bandwagon must be a heavy cart by now, because everyone seems to be jumping on it. It is still a good six months from launch but Foxtel held a “press event” in Sydney to unveil details of its new high-definition service.

The subscription-television provider will deliver four 24-hour HD channels under the banner of Foxtel HD+, scheduled for a mid-year launch. Foxtel’s executive director of content, Patrick Delaney, described the new HD channels as carrying “five times the resolution of a standard-definition picture [and Foxtel’s] HD channels are the best-looking HD signals in Australia”.

The pay TV service follows free-to-air networks Seven and Ten, which launched their respective high-definition channels late last year (Nine is planning to launch its channel in March). Initially the mid-2008 launch will be dominated by documentaries and sport, with dedicated content from the BBC, Discovery, National Geographic, Fox Sports and ESPN.

Delaney says the most likely scenario is that rather than being entirely exclusive content, many of the shows will premiere on the HD channels before making their way into the regular Foxtel programming.

There will also be a new movies-on-demand service called Foxtel Box Office HD, where subscribers can watch a show downloaded to the IQ set-top box in 1080i resolution and Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. The pay-per-view movies can be watched instantly, and viewers have “a 48-hour viewing window” where they can pause, fast- forward and rewind the show. As with the existing Foxtel Box Office service, movie titles are released 90 days after they become available on DVD.

However, subscribers must upgrade to the new IQ2 set-top box that Foxtel will release when the service is launched. The IQ2 will come in two versions; high- and standard- definition. The former version of the personal digital recorder features a 320GB hard disk, able to store up to 30 hours of video (or 90 hours of standard definition). It also features three tuners, so viewers can record two separate channels while watching a third. A fourth tuner is included so that Foxtel can push content to the box. IQ2 will also feature a broadband connection, though it’s more for future-proofing at this stage, as it will be turned off on arrival.

IQ2 will launch into a much more crowded digital recorder market than the original IQ box, with Channel Seven scheduled to bring the long- awaited TiVo recorder here soon. Delaney is unfazed, however. “It’s a cool brand but the product doesn’t live up to the brand,” he says. “In Australia, one particularly big problem is that [TiVo] isn’t fed by that many channels. The disk-drive machine with a good [electronic program guide] is only as good as how much programming you’ve got.”

The fact that we have not started seeing more of these types of designs to date is quite strange. Here we have two fashion forward digital accessories that look amazing, and would certainly be a huge hit in the stores. The first is an e-paper style slap bracelet that can be expanded and also connects with magnets at either end. It’s a miniature multimedia device for the wrist that could have so many possibilities from photos, video and bluetooth connectivity from your phone. The second little gem is the Gucci LED watch concept that in typical Gucci style looks amazing.

For many decades now, there has been a well developed and understood paradigm by which we physically interact with mechanical and electronic devices. Regardless of the device, its size or shape, when you press a button, you receive feedback from the device from the action of pressing. The ‘press’ paradigm is the default method of interacting with almost any mechanical or electrical object you care to name that requires buttons to operate: a light switch, a typewriter, a push-button telephone, a calculator, a computer.

Further, it makes for an effective paradigm in interaction design within computer applications and on the web, since it mimics the action of real world objects, and it works excellently when combined with physical keys such as those found on a computer keyboard or a pointing device like a mouse.

A valid response to this could be: “Well, duh…”; but it is clear from Apple’s iPhone that their “multi-touch” interface has fundamentally altered the press paradigm permanently for touch screen devices.

This change has probably occurred out of necessity. Rather than using physical keys, multi-touch uses a virtual keyboard on an advanced LCD screen. Instead of a stylus for accuracy (to maintain the press paradigm), multi-touch has the required smarts to minimise the mistakes of human fingers.

Multi-touch employs a ‘hold and release’ paradigm

Instead of receiving feedback from the press of a virtual button on the iPhone, you receive feedback upon hold and release of its virtual buttons. Not a big change when selecting large buttons and controls, but absolutely essential when learning to do more accuracy-dependent tasks, such as typing.

This change requires unlearning the press paradigm to a degree. Since feedback must come from the pause between pressing and releasing a virtual button, users must learn to hold their finger on the screen momentarily until confirmation of the correct key is shown (below). On a regular computer keyboard, feedback is received by physically pressing the key. Not to mention that holding the key down on a regular keyboard would enter duplicate characters.

Typing Problems?

A number of articles made the rounds on the web last year proclaiming that the iPhone was ‘practically useless’ for people who are heavy users of text applications. Thinking from the press paradigm perspective that is a true statement.

By pecking at the virtual keys, even with some practice, users can still be highly error-prone. Once a user learns to slide their finger and release over the desired letter key, for example, they become faster and more accurate.

The Future of Touch Screens

As usual, Apple has looked to the future willing to jettison yesterday’s standards if required. The touch screens of tomorrow need a new interface. One that requires a new paradigm.

Microsoft have taken a beating over Vista since its debut last year. Seven options to shutdown/sleep. It’s even been called a chrome plated turd.

Why is this important? Usability should affect all facets of design, from the creation of the thing, to its packaging and even to the documentation supporting it.

When a retail box requires online help - even before you get to the thing inside the packaging, you may need to rethink your overall strategy.

You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you’ve written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers.

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