Digital Graffiti

image: Shasia Hassani, Dream Graffiti, 2015, copyright: Shasia Hassani

King, D.: Digital Graffiti, in Int|AR Journal 09 ‘Design Intervention as ACT, 2018, p.82-89. Peer review article

In the classic first essay on the importance of graffiti in the 1970s in New York City, Norman Mailer tells us the joke about the importance of a mediated visual reality. Two Jewish grandmothers are meeting on a street. The first one is pushing a stroller: “Oh”, says the other, “what a beautiful grandchild you have.” “That’s nothing”, says the first, reaching for her pocketbook, “Wait’ll I show you her picture”.
We might not fully notice what we directly sensually perceive in reality – yet we react very strongly to a mediated visual reality. Graffiti artists use this knowledge to display messages they do not want to be unconsciously, but consciously acknowledged. Playing with size, colors, and remarkable calligraphy, graffiti artists publicly apply layers of mediated visual realities in the hope to provoke real change in society. Graffiti developed as a cultural technique, cheap and available to the suppressed, to react to political and social constraints. Until now most graffiti artists use their publically visible imagery to protest against authority, inequality, racism, supremacy, or ignorance. Graffiti is a tool of intervention. It comments on and criticizes existing cultural parameters.
The change-provoking, reality-mediating aspects are also true of digital graffiti. Yet there are differences, which digital graffiti manifests in its temporality and its material. Digital graffiti is ephemeral in a way which physical graffiti is not.…