via Paul Golding, this link to John Geraci's Grafedia:
What is Grafedia?
Grafedia is hyperlinked text, written by hand onto physical surfaces and linking to rich media content - images, video, sound files, and so forth. It can be written anywhere - on walls, in the streets, or in bathroom stalls. Grafedia can also be written in letters or postcards, on the body as tattoos, or anywhere you feel like putting it. Viewers "click" on these grafedia hyperlinks with their cell phones by sending a message addressed to the word + "@grafedia.net" to get the content behind the link.
What Kinds of Things Can I Do With Grafedia?
You can make street art with grafedia, or just leave behind simple calling cards for others wherever you go. You can have running dialogues between authors, or create interactive narratives or poetry in public spaces. Grafedia is a boundless, interactive publishing platform, base, cheap, and easy to use. It is an open system - the places and ways to use it are limitless. With grafedia, every surface becomes potentially a web page, and the entire physical world can be joined with the Internet.
How is Grafedia Made?
Grafedia authors can make hyperlinked text at any time in three easy steps. Simply: 1. Choose a word. 2. Send a media file from your cell phone to that chosen word plus '@grafedia.net', e.g. 'myword@grafedia.net'. 3. Write that word anywhere in the real world in blue with an underline. That word will then be linked to the media file the author sent to grafedia.net, and viewers will be able to retrieve the file. You can also upload media from your computer directly to the grafedia.net server here in order to create grafedia with more precise images.
Also via Paul Golding, a link to Tristan Manco's Fotolog. Tristan Manco is a graphic designer and partner of Tijuana Design in Bristol; he is also the author of Stencil Graffiti and Street Logos, and editor of Graffiti World.
Paul Golding has posted about the graffiti recorded in Street Logos ('an absolutely wonderful collection of graffiti art. Unlike other books on the topic, Tristan has documented a very diverse set of styles and concepts'):
Some of the graffiti work definitely inspired connections with mobilisation. I am attracted to the idea of marking meeting places with graffiti as a kind of "war chalking" tag. However, instead of marking open WiFi access, the points would mark virtual meeting places. At each tag, users could "log in" and download, or exchange, information.
What really excited me were some of the graffiti styles and concepts that seemed to lend themselves to this idea. For example, the floor-based renderings of a compass by L'Atlas would make excellent visual markers for meeting places and allow directional information to be included, perhaps to the whereabouts of the next tag. This would blend well with the location-based potential of modern mobiles.
Other tag schemes had a very distinct style that in my opinion seemed to allow for a socially acceptable, or ascetically possible, use of graffiti for mobile communities. The Space Invader invasion is particularly interesting in this regard. Interestingly, the website contains invasion maps. This reminded me of war chalking maps, but is representative of the location theme that is already strong in this particular graffiti movement.
Finally, a third key link via Paul Golding, to Julian Bleecker and his project, Street Memes:
"street meme": a sticker, stencil, or poster that can spread a single image around the world. Unlike traditional graffiti art where each piece is unique, street memes can be copied repeatedly, taking on a life of their own, and spreading through the collective effort of people scattered around the world.
"meme": A term coined by Biologist Richard Dawkins to describe self replicating ideas. Read more about the concept of the meme here.
Jyri spoke about graffiti tags last November at the 2004 Radley conference (see here), and a (zipped) pdf file of the same is available: 'Free Speech in Urban Space: Past, Present and Future'. The talk was fascinating — and now I have a lot more to follow up on and to play with. My own (as yet very small) collection of 'graffiti'-tagged Flickr photos is here.
