Some highlights of the night were Marlon Peterson’s “Am I not a human? A call for criminal justice reform,” Zubaida Bai’s “A Birth Kit for Mothers in the Developing World“, Kunal Sood’s “What makes us truly happy“, Lia Elle’s “Virtual reality is not a luxury” and Sharon de la Cruz’ “Can computers understand slang?”. And hats off to Cyndi Stivers and Katrina Conanan-Riel for cultivating such a transformative group at the TED residency!

During the TED residency, my project was part of a team imagining a VR/AR archival reconstruction of the lost graffiti, street and aerosol art haven 5 Pointz. Originally constructed as the 200,000 sq. ft. Neptune water meter factory, Jerry Wolkoff (head of G&M Realty) bought the building in 1970’s. Under the leadership of Pat DiLillo and Michael “Iz the Wiz” Martin (a seminal figure in the movement that elevated Graffiti Writing to the New York subways) it became known as the Phun Factory in the 1990’s. In 2002 Jonathan “Meres” Cohen began curating the site, and so began the title “5 Pointz,” named for NYC’s five boroughs. The site then became a destination for Graffiti and art pilgrims from around the globe. 

To give you a send of the scale of the artistic accomplishment, consider this photo (Alamy stock photos):

Over the years, thousands of artists painted there, making the layered collection unique for both its magnitude and the extraordinary legacy of artworks.

Most uniquely, everything was legally authorized by the landlord himself. For years he gestured toward developing the land, and in 2013 public outcry resulted when the artists’ works were at risk of demolition. A court warned G&M Realty that while the law protects a property owner’s right to their property, the law also protects artist’s rights (see https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106A for more):

(A) to prevent any intentional distortion, mutilation, or other modification of that work which would be prejudicial to his or her honor or reputation, and any intentional distortion, mutilation, or modification of that work is a violation of that right, and

(B) to prevent any destruction of a work of recognized stature, and any intentional or grossly negligent destruction of that work is a violation of that right.

In short: if I own a restaurant and you install one of your sculptures, I have to give you a chance to save it before I remodel (at your own cost).

In this case, the landlord whitewashed the building--reinforcing a long history of cultural erasure and gentrification--and then decided to leave disfigured artwork standing until the demolition a year later. Antagonizing the community further, he captured the copyright to the name “5 Pointz”. 

Even if it was impossible now, after such a traumatic cultural loss, how might we let people see it one more time, as the curator Jonathan “Meres” Cohen would say? How might we dream the memory?

Graffiti x AR/VR?

AR/VR has shown promise in other examples of graffiti, street art and urban cultural heritage more generally. For example:

• Kingspray offers painting in a fully realized virtual environment. Visual quality is surprisingly high for a mass market VR project that attempts to recreate the experience of moving through a built environment and using a spraycan. See more here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVrX2OKs5wg

• Mi Querido Barrio Augmented Reality Exhibition & Tour

  El Museo del Barrio’s use of Blippar in NYC is particularly interesting, including works such as the Raze Memorial Wall (see: https://cccadi.org/mqb/2016/11/28/popular-murals-of-the-1990s-mind-over-matter-mom-wall-raze-memorial-wall-mural). Rather than prioritize a representation of the individual’s creative act, this approach prioritizes the preservation of cultural memory in a rapidly changing urban environment.

The plasticity and mobility of digital media allows for a unique engagement with the history of these artworks. Indeed, we may even consider the subway era of Graffiti Writing in New York as a unique contribution to the graphical user interface revolutions and early social networks of the 1970s.

Traditional archival methods reflect a type of experience from a time before artists wrote Graffiti on the New York Subways, before that sparked a global revolution in street art, and before the globe started trekking back to NYC to read, and write, this aesthetic history.

Museums struggle to archive Graffiti for a number of reasons:

• Museum funding and built environments struggle to accommodate the disruption of Graffiti: traditional models support white and euro-centric narratives more than the history of communities of color

• Much of what we call Graffiti is more accurately understood through text based art histories, like Style Writing which was produced on the New York Subway network in the 1970s-1980s (I mostly refer to this as Graffiti Style Writing for clarity)

• Graffiti Style Writing values unique archival methods of private communication, public longevity and extensive repetition: these methods differ greatly from the traditional cycles of audience engagement in museums

• Traditional masters of the craft remain few and far between: few academic experts exist on the field, so museal archives lack resources for crucial decisions about taxonomy, preservation, presentation, interpretation etc. So in the case of the 5 Pointz loss, courts struggled to deny the credentials expert testimony

In comparison to other Graffiti / Street / Public Art archives, 5 Pointz also presents a unique challenge because the content was created and collected by a vast number of disparate contributors, and all the content appeared in one place.

What interested me most when writing my TED talk was not just the present challenge of how we would design the AR/VR archive project, but how we could do justice to the longevity of such a unique art form.

To understand how Graffiti could be archived, I needed to reflect on “Why Graffiti should be Immortal” (the title of the talk: thanks to the curator of the TED residency, the brilliant Cyndi Stivers, for inspiring the title when I had writers’ block). Knowing that a wide range of audiences might encounter my statements that night, I wanted to offer a piece of common ground. So to communicate the value of the art of Graffiti Writing, I went back to the 13th century to find the impeccable Dante Alighieri.

Dante’s poetic genius left its mark while he was the run, unable to access the center of his community when exiled by the authorities. Fast forward to the later 20th century: urban planning like the abstract modernism of Robert Moses carved lines across the metropolitan area, severing social ties and relegating  entire racial communities to squalor. By the late 1970’s, the world series announcer looked past the baseball field and announced to the world that “the Bronx is burning.”

Centuries years later, we can read and be inspired by Dante’s work of genius around the world, thanks to the commitment of classical institutions. At present, cities around the planet has seen the influence of New York’s Graffiti Style Writing—indeed many people traveled back to 5 Pointz to learn more. So, how much will we learn if most of us still can’t read the writing on the wall?

Link to TED talk: ​

https://www.ted.com/talks/abram_coetsee_why_graffiti_ought_t o_be_immortal​

See also, Khare Communications coverage of the TED residency:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8dKTlLu_jc&feature=emb_logo