% Lines starting with % are comments and will be ignored
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% http://blogs.lgru.net/ft/conversations/tying-the-story-to-data
% FS = Femke Snelting
% ER = Evan Roth
% PW = Peter Westenberg
% SV = Stéphanie Villayphiou
% JH = John Haltiwanger
% MW = Michele Walther
% USED FOR NAME INDEXING
% HIDDENKEYWORDS: Roth, Evan|Westenberg, Peter|Vilayphiou, Stéphanie|Haltiwanger, John|Walther, Michele
% TITLE:
Tying the story to data
% SCALEFONT: 1.3
In the **summer of 2010**, Constant commissioned artist and researcher Evan Roth to develop a work of his choice, and to make the development process available in some way. He decided to use a part of his fee as prize-money for The GML-Recorder Challenge, inviting makers to propose an Open Source device ‘that can unobtrusively record graffiti motion data during a graffiti writer’s normal practice in the city’.
In three interviews that took place in Brussels and Paris within a period of one and a half years, we spoke about the collaborative powers of the GML-standard, about contact points between hacker and graffiti cultures and the granularity of gesture.
Based on conversations between Evan Roth (`ER`), Femke Snelting (`FS`), Peter Westenberg (`PW`),
Michele Walther (`MW`), Stéphanie Villayphiou (`SV`), John Haltiwanger (`JH`) and momo3010.
% RESETFONT:
%BIGSKIP:
# Brussels, July 2010
% -------------------
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
So what should we talk about?
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Can you explain what GML stands for?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
GML stands for Graffiti Markup Language[^]{Graffiti Markup
Language (.gml) is a universal, XML based, open file format designed to
store graffiti motion data (x and y coordinates and time). The format
is designed to maximize readability and ease of implementation, even
for hobbyist programmers, artists and graffiti writers.
http://www.graffitimarkuplanguage.com}. It is a very simple file-format
designed for amateur programmers. It is a way to store graffiti motion
data. I started working with graffiti writers, combining graffiti and
technology back in New York, in 2003. In graduate school, my thesis was
on graffiti analysis, and writing software that could capture their
gestures, to archive motion data from graffiti writers. Back than I was
saving the data in an x-y-time array, I was calling them
.graph files and I sensed there was
something interesting about the data, the visualization of motion data
but I had never opened up the project at that time.
About a year ago I released the second part of the project, of which the
source code was open but the dataset wasn't. In
conversation with a friend of mine named Theo[^]{Theo Watson
http://www.theowatson.com}, who also collaborated with me on the L.A.S.E.R. Tag
project[^]{In its simplest form, L.A.S.E.R. Tag is a camera and
laptop setup, tracking a green laser point across the face of a
building and generating graphics based on the laser's
position which then get projected back onto the same building with a
high power projector.
http://graffitiresearchlab.com/projects/laser-tag}, he brought up the
.graph file again and how we could bring back the file format as a way
to connect all these different applications. Graffiti
Analysis[^]{Graffiti Analysis is a digital graffiti blackbook
designed for documenting more than just ink.
http://graffitianalysis.com}, L.A.S.E.R. Tag, EyeWriter[^]{The EyeWriter is a low-cast eyetracking system
originally designed for paralyzed graffiti artist TEMPT. The EyeWriter
system uses inexpensive cameras and Open Source computer vision
software to track the wearer's eye movements.
http://www.eyewriter.org} ... so I worked with Theo Watson, Chris
Sugrue[^]{Chris Sugrue http://csugrue.com} and Jamie
Wilkinson[^]{Jamie Wilkinson
http://www.jamiedubs.com} and other people to develop Graffiti Markup
Language. It is a simple set of guidelines, basically an .xml file
format that saves x-y-time data but does it in a way that is very
specifically related to graffiti so there's a drip tag
and there's tags related to the size of the brush and
to how many strokes you have: is it one stroke or two strokes or three
strokes.
% SLOGAN: Archive graffiti in ways of code
The main idea is: How do you archive the motion of graffiti and not just
the way graffiti looks. There are a lot of people photographing
graffiti, making documentaries etc. but there hasn't
been a way to archive graffiti in ways of code yet.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
What do you mean, 'archive in terms of code'?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
There hasn't been a programmatic way to archive
graffiti. So this is like taking a gesture and trying to boil it down
to a set of coordinate points that people can either upload or
download. It is a sort of midpoint between writers and hackers.
Graffiti writers can download the software and have how-to guides for
how to do this, they can digitize their tags and upload it to an open
database. The 000000book-site[^]{http://000000book.com. Pronounced:
'Black Book': 'A black book is a graffiti artist's sketchbook. Often used to
sketch out and plan potential graffiti, and to collect tags from other
writers. It is a writer's most valuable property,
containing all or a majority of the person's sketches
and pieces. A writer's sketchbook is carefully guarded
from the police and other authorities, as it can be used as material
evidence in a graffiti vandalism case and link a writer to previous
illicit works.' [@en.wikipedia.org:2014:graffititerminology]}
hosts all this data and some people are writing software for this.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
So there are three parts: the GML-standard, software to record and
play and than there is the data itself -- all of it is 'open' in
some way. Could you go through each of them and talk about how
they produce uploads and downloads?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Right. It starts with Graffiti Analysis. It is software written in
C++ using OpenFrameworks, an Open Source platform designed by artists
for visual applications. Right now you can download the recorder app
and from that you can generate your own .gml files. And from there you
can upload these files into the playback app. In the beginning that was
the only Open Source side of the project. Programmers could also make
new applications based on the software, which also happened.
Last night we met Stéphane Buellet[^]{Stéphane Buellet, Camera
Linea http://www.chevalvert.fr/portfolio/numerique/camera-linea} who is
developing a calligraphy analysis project and he used Graffiti Analysis
as a starting point. I find it exciting when that happens but more
often people take the file-format as a starting point, and use it as a
jumping-off point for making their own work.
Second was the database. We had this file-format that we loosely
defined. I worked with Jamie to develop the 000000book site. It is
pretty nuts-and-bolts but you can click
'upload' and click on your own .gml
files and it will playback in the browser. People have developed their
own playback mechanisms, which are some of the first Open Source
collaborations that happened around .gml files. There is a user account
and you can upload files; people have made image renderers, there are
people that have made Flash players, SVG players. Golan Levin has
developed an application that converts a .gml file into an auto-CAD
format. The 000000book site is basically where graffiti writers connect
to developers.
In the middle between Graffiti Analysis and database is the Graffiti
Markup Language, that I think will have its own place
on the web. But sometimes I see it as one project. One of my interests
is in archiving graffiti and all of these things are ways of doing
that. It is interesting how these three things work together. In terms
of an OS development model it has been producing results I
haven't seen when I just released source code.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
How do you do that, develop a standard for graffiti?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
We started by looking at Graffiti Analysis and L.A.S.E.R. Tag, the
apps that were using graffiti motion data. From those two projects I
had a lot of experience of meeting graffiti writers as a userbase. When
you meet with them, they tell you right away what pieces of the
software they think are missing. So from talking with them we developed
a lot of features that now are in GML like brushes, drips,
line-thickness. Some people had single line tags and some people had
multi-line tags so that issue came up because GML tracks both drawing
and non-drawing motion so we knew that we needed in the file format to
talk about pen up and pen down. I was interested in the connection
points between lines also.
We tried to keep it very stripped down. From the beginning we knew that
people that would participate as developers or anonymous contributors
were not going to be the same people that would develop a Linux core.
They are students, people just getting into programming or visual
programming. We wanted people to be able to double-click a .gml file
and than everything should verbally make sense so it is
`Begin stroke`. `End stroke`.
Anyone with basic programming skills should be able to figure out what's going on.
% SLOGAN: Domain specificity
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Did you have any moment where you had to decide:
_this does not belong to graffiti_
or: _this might be more for calligraphy
tracking_?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
The only thing that has to be in there is the format in x-y time
scenario with some information on drawing and not drawing, everything
else is bonus. So if you load an .xml file structured like that,
compliant apps will load it in. On top of that, there are features that
some apps will want and others not. Keywords are, for example, a
functionality that we are still developing applications for. It is
there but we are looking for how to use it.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Did you ever think about this standard as a way to define a
discipline?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
(_laughs_) I think in the beginning it was a very functional
conversation. We were having apps running this data and I
don't think we were thinking of defining graffiti when
we were writing the format. But looking back, it is interesting to
think about it.
Graffiti has a lot of privacy issues related to it too, right? So we did
discuss about what it would mean to start recording geo-located data.
There are different interests in graffiti. There is an interest in
visuals and in deconstructing characters. Another group is interested
in it, because it is a sport and more of a performance art. For this
type of interest, it is more important to know exactly where and when
it happened because it is different on a rooftop in New York to a
studio in the basement of someones house. But if someone realizes this
data resulted from an illegal action, and wanted to tie it back to
someone, than it starts to be like a surveillance camera. What happens
when someone is caught with a laptop with all this data?
% SLOGAN: A handshake between communities
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Your desire to archive, is it also about producing new work?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I see graffiti writers as hackers. They use the city in the same way
as hackers are using computer systems. They are finding ways of using a
system to make it do things that it wasn't intended to
do. I am not sure graffiti writers see it this way, but I am in this
position where I have friends that are hackers, playing around with
digital structures online. Other friends are into graffiti writing and
to me those two camps are doing the most interesting things right now,
but these are two communities that hardly overlap. One of the interests
I have is making these two groups of people hang out more. I was
physically the person bridging these two groups; I was the nerd person
meeting the graffiti writers talking to them about software and having
this database.
Now it is not about my personal collection anymore, it is making a
handshake between two communities; making them run off with each other
and having fun as opposed to me having to be there all the time to make
introductions.
% SLOGAN: It is no big deal if you keep one
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Is GML about the distribution of signature? I mean: The gestures of
a specific person can now be reproduced by a larger community. How does
that work?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
This is an interesting conversation we should have with the
graffiti writers. A tag might be something they have been writing for
more than 25 years and that will be very personal to them and the way
they write this is because they've written it a
million times. So at the one hand it is super-personal, but on the
other hand a lot of graffiti writers have no problem sharing this data.
To them it is just another tag. They feel like, _I
have written this tag a billion times_ and so when
you want to keep one of them, it is no big deal.
I don't think the conversation has gotten as involved
as it could have. You set something in motion and cross your fingers
hoping that everyone plays nice and things go well and so far that is
what has been happening. But you are dealing with people that are
uploading something that is super personal to them and
I'd be curious to see what happens in the future.
The graffiti taxonomy project that I have been doing involves a lot of
photos of graffiti. It is a visual studies based on characters, I am
shooting thousands of photos of graffiti and I don't
have an opportunity to meet with all these writers to ask them if it is
OK. So I get e-mails from writers once in a while saying
_Hey, you used a photograph of one of my
tags_ and usually it is them feeling out where my
intentions are and where I am coming from.
It has taken a long time to gain the trust of the community I am working
with. Usually when I am able to explain what I am doing and that
everything is released openly and meant to be completely free, so far
at least the people I have managed to talk toare OK with it and
understand it. Initially when people see something
they've made being used by other people, a lot of
times it can be a point where a red flag is raised and I am assuming
there are more red flags going to go up.
% SLOGAN: I hope that people play nicely
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
If you upload a .gml file, can you insert a licence?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Not yet. Right now there is not even a 'private mode' on the 000000book site. If you upload, everything
is public. There is a lot of interesting issues with respect to the
licence that I have been reluctant to deal with yet. Once you start
talking too much about it, you will scare off people on either side of
the fence. I think that will have to happen at some point but for now I
have decided to refer to it as an 'open database' and I hope that people will play nicely,
like I said.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
But just imagine, what kind of licence would you need?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
It might make more sense to go for a media-related licence than for
a code licence. Creative Commons licences would lend themselves easily
for this. People could choose non-commercial or pure public domain.
Does that make sense?
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Well, yes but if you look at the objects that people share,
we're much closer to code than to a video file?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Functionally it is code. But would a graffiti writer know what GPL is?
% SLOGAN: Tying the story to data
% NOWSPEAKING: PW
% ---------------
I am interested in the apprentice-system you were talking about
earlier. Like a young writer learning from someone else they admire.
The GML notation of x-y-time might help someone to learn as well. But
would you ever really copy someone else's tag?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
One of the reasons I think graffiti writing has this history of
apprenticeship is because you don't really have a
chance to learn otherwise. You don't turn on the TV
and see someone else doing it. You only see how it is being written if
you see other people actually do it. That was one of the original
reasons I started doing graffiti research because, having met with
graffiti writers. I thought: it is a dance, it is as much about motion
as it is about how the final image is constructed. You can come to a
much better understanding about how it is made as opposed to just
seeing a photograph of it.
% NOWSPEAKING: PW
% ---------------
If you want to learn from the person writing, you would need to see
more than just the trace of a pen?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Someones tag might look completely different if they had six seconds
to make it, they make different decisions. In the first version of the
Graffiti Analysis project, I had one camera recorder tracking the pen
and another camera behind the hand and another so you could see the
full body. But there was something about tracking just the pen tip that
I liked. It is an easier point of entry for dealing with the motion
data than having three different video feeds.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Maybe it is more about metadata? Not a question of device or
application, but about space for a comment.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Maybe in the keywords there will be something like: Rooftop. Brooklyn. Arrested.
The most interesting part is often the stories that people tell
afterward anyway. So it is an interesting idea, how to tie the story to
the data.
It is a design problem too. Historically graffiti has been documented
many times by outsiders. The movie Style Wars[^]{Style Wars. Tony
Silver, 1983. http://www.stylewars.com} is a good example of this epic
documentary that was made by outsiders that became insiders. Also, the
people that have been documenting most of the graffiti are not
necessarily graffiti writers.
Graffiti has a history with documentarians entering into their community
and playing a role but sharing the stories is something writers do
internally, not as much to outsiders. How do you figure out a way to
get graffiti writers to document their stories into the .gml files
themselves, or is it going to take outsiders? How does the format
facilitate that?
% SLOGAN: Influencing communities
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Do you think the availability of a project like GML can have an
impact on the way graffiti is learned? If data becomes available in a
community that operates traditionally through apprenticeships and
person-to-person sharing, what does it do?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I am interested in Open Source culture being influenced by graffiti, and I
am interested in Open Source culture influencing graffiti as well. On a
big picture I would love it if the graffiti community got interested in
these ideas and had more of a skill-sharing-knowledge-base.
KATSU[^]{KATSU http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=graffiti+katsu},
someone I worked with in New York, has acquireda lot of knowledge about
how to make tools for graffiti and he initially wasn't so much
into sharing them, because graffiti writers tend to save that knowledge
for themselves so that their tags are always bigger and better
(_laughs_). Talking to him I think I convinced him to write tutorials on
how to make some of these tools. On the street art side there is Mark
Jenkins[^]{Mark Jenkins tapesculptures http://tapesculpture.org},
he has this technique of making 3D objects that exist within the city
and we had a lot of conversations too.
There are many ways tech circles and Open Source circles can come
together with people that are making things outside, with their hands.
I think graffiti can learn from that. In the end people would be making
more things outside which would be a good thing.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
In a way typography has a similar culture of apprenticeship. Some
people enjoy spreading knowledge, and others resist in the name of
quality control.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Interesting. I think the work I am doing is such a tangent! In
general, for something that is decidedly against the rules, the culture of writing
graffiti often has a rigid structure. To people in that community what I
do is a blip on their radar. I am honored when I get to meet
graffiti writers and they are interested in what I am doing but I
don't think it will change anything in what is in some ways a very
strict system.
And I don't want that either. I like the fact that they
found a way to make spraypaint and markers change the way each city in
the world looks. They have the tools they need. Digital projectors will
not change that. Graffiti writers still like to see their names
projected at big scales in new ways but it is not something they really
need (_laughs_).
% SLOGAN: It takes little to come up with great ideas
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
And the other way around? How does graffiti have an influence on
Open Source communities?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
For the people on the technology side, it is an easy jump. To think
about hacking software systems and than about making things outside. I
see that with the Free Art and Technology Group[^]{The Free Art
and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab is an organization dedicated to enriching
the public domain through the research and development of creative
technologies and media. Release early, often and with rap music.
http://fffff.at} that I help run. When they start thinking about
projects in the city, it takes little to come up with great ideas. I
also see that in the class I teach, Urban Hacking. There is already a
natural overlap.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
What connects the two?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
It is really about the idea of hacking. The first assignment in the
class is not to make anything, but simply to identify systems in the
city. What are elements that repeat. Trying to find which ones you can
slip into. It has been happening in graffiti forever. Graffiti in New
York in the eighties was to me a hack, a way to have giant
paintings circulating in the city... There is a lot of room to explore
there.
% SLOGAN: Graffiti is hard to accept
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Your experience with the Blender community[^]{Blender is a free Open Source 3D content creation suite. http://www.blender.org/} did not sound like an easy bridge?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Recently I released a piece of software that translates a .gml file
and translates it into a .stl file, which is a common 3D format. So you
can basically take a graffiti gesture and import it into software like
Blender. I used Blender because I wanted to highlight this tool,
because I want these communities to talk to each other.
So I was taking a tag that was created in the streets of Vienna and
pulling it into Blender and in the end I was exporting it to something
that could be 3D printed, to become something physical. The video that
I posted intentionally showed online showed screenshots from Blender and it
ended up on one of the bigger community sites. I only saw it when my
cousin, who is a big Blender user, e-mailed me the thread. There is
about a hundred dedicated Blender users discussing the legitimacy of
graffiti in art and how their tools are
used[^]{http://www.blendernation.com/2010/07/09/blender-graffiti-analysis};
pretty interesting but also pretty conservative.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Why do you think the Blender community responded in that way?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
It doesn't surprise me that much. Graffiti is hard
to accept, especially when we are talking about tags. So the only
reason we might be slightly surprised by hearing people in the Open Source
community react that way, is because intellectual property
doesn't translate always to physical property. Writing
your name on someone's door is something people
universally don't like. I understand. For me the
connection makes sense but just because you make Open Source
doesn't mean you'll be interested in
graffiti or street art or vice versa. I think if I went to a Blender
conference and gave a talk where I explained sort of where I see these
things overlap, I could make a better case than the three minute video
they reacted to.
% SLOGAN: Gesture vs. Graffiti
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
What about Gesture Markup Language instead of Graffiti Markup Language?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Essentially GML records x-y-time data. If you talk about what it
functionally does, it is probably more related to gesture than it is to
graffiti. There is nothing at the core specifically related to
graffiti. I am interested in branding it in relation to graffiti and to
get people to talk about Open Source where it is traditionally not talked
about. To me that is interesting. It is a way to get people excited
about open data, and popularizing ideas about Open Source.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Would you be OK if it would get more popular in non-graffiti circles?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I am super excited when I see it used in bizarre places.
I'll keep using it for graffiti, but someone e-mailed
me that they were upset that it only tracks one point. There
hasn't been a need to track multiple tags at once.
They wanted to use it to track juggling, but how to track multiple
balls in the air? I keep calling it Graffiti Markup Language because I
think it is a good story.
% SLOGAN: What's the licence on GML?
% NOWSPEAKING: PW
% ---------------
What's the licence on GML?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
We haven't really entered into that. Why would you need a licence on a file format?
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
It would prevent that anyone could own the standard.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
That sounds good. Actually it would be interesting for the project,
if someone would try to licence it. Legal things matter, but for the
things I do, I am most of all interested in getting the idea across.
% SLOGAN: Standards allow collaboration
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
I am interested in the way GML stems from a specific practice. How
it is different and similar to large, legal, commercial, global
standardization practices. Related, how can GML connect to other
standard practices? Could it be RDF compliant?
% NOWSPEAKING: PW
% ---------------
Gesture recognition to help out the police?
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Or maps of places that are in need of some graffiti? How to link
GML to other types of data?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
It is hard for me to imagine something. But one thing is interesting
for example, how GML is used in the EyeWriter project. It has not so
much to do with gesture, but more with how you would draft in a
computer. TEMPT is plotting points, so the time data might not be so
interesting but because it is in the same format, the community might
pick it up and do something with it. All the TEMPT data he writes with
his eyes and it is uploaded to the 000000book site automatically. That
allowed another artist called Benjamin Gaulon[^]{Benjamin Gaulon,
Print Ball
http://www.eyewriter.org/paintball-shooting-robot-writes-tempt1-tag}
who I now know, but didn't know at the time, to use it with his
Print Ball project. He took the tag data from a paralyzed graffiti writer in
Los Angeles and painted it on a wall in Dublin. Eye-movement translated
into a paint-ball gun ... that is the kind of collaboration that I
hope GML can be the middle-point for. If that happens, things can
start to extrapolate on either end.
% SLOGAN: The wish-list
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
You talked about posting a wish-list and being surprised that your
wishes were fulfilled within weeks. Why do you think that a project
like EyeWriter, even if it interests a lot of people, has a hard time
gathering collaborators, while something much more general like GML
seems to be more compelling for people to contribute to?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I'll answer that in a second, but you reminded me
of something else: because EyeWriter was GML based, a lot of the
collaborations that happened with people outside of the project were
GML related, not EyeWriter related. So we did have artists like Ben
and Golan take data drawn by TEMPT and do completely different things
which made TEMPT a collaborator with them in a way. The software allowed
him to share his work in a format that allowed other people to work
with him.
The wish-list came out of the fact that I was working on a
graffiti related project that had a lot of use but not a lot of
innovation. Not so many people were using it in ways I
wasn't expecting, which is something you always hope
of course. By saying: _Here's the
things I really would like to happen_, things
started to happen. I have been surprised how that drove momentum.
Something similar I hope will happen to the work we will do together in
the next months too!
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
What are you planning to do?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
We are planning to make a dedicated community page for the graffiti
markup language which is one of the three points of the triangle. The
second step would be a new addition to the wish-list, a challenge with
a prize associated to it which seems funny. The project
I'd like to concentrate on is making the data
collection easier so that graffiti writers can be more active in the
upload sense. Taking the NASA development model: Can you get into orbit on this budget?
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
How is that different from the way you record graffiti motion at the moment?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
If I go out with a graffiti writer, I'm stuck
standing with a laptop and a camera facing the wall and then the
graffiti writer needs to have a really bright light attached to the
writing device which is a bit counter-intuitive when you are trying to
do something without being seen (_laughs_). It could be infrared by the
way, that could be the first step but then security cameras would still
pick it up. The design I am focusing momentum on is a system
that's easier. A system that can work without me
there, without having to have a laptop there. The whole idea is that it
would be a natural way to get good data, to document graffiti without a
red-head holding a laptop following you around the whole time!
% NEWPAGE:
# Paris, December 2010
% --------------------
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
How is it to be the sole jury member?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I tried to get another jury-member on there actually. Do you know
Limor Fried? She runs Adafruit Industries.[^]{Limor Fried,
Adafruit Industries http://www.adafruit.com} I really like her work.
She works with her partner Phil Torrone who runs Make
Blog.[^]{Phillip Torrone, Makezine
http://makezine.com/pub/au/Phillip\_Torrone} I invited her to be
the second jury-member because she makes Open Source hardware kits;
this is her full-time thing. She is very smart and has a lot of background in making DIY
kits that people actually build. She is also very straightforward and
very busy, so she wrote back and said: this is too much work. No.
So... yeah, I am the only jury member. Hmmm.
% SLOGAN: You end up speaking to people you already work with
% NOWSPEAKING: SV
% ---------------
Is the contest already over?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
It is not over. It was easy to launch; I tried to coincide it with
the launch of the website and there were a couple of things going on at
the same time. The launch helped spread the word about this
file format, and people making projects, and vice versa.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Did you have any proposals that came close to meeting the challenge?
Did you consider giving out the prize?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
No.
There are a couple of people that got really close. The interesting
thing that is happening with the challenge is something that is also
happening to other high barrier projects: You end up speaking to the
people you already work with the most. I have a hard time figuring out
to some extent what is really happening, but the things I hear, of
people making progress, is people that are close to me. It reminds me
of the EyeWriter project where people that are to dip their toes into
this, are already in the friend group, or one level removed. They are
pretty high level programmers.
% SLOGAN: Is it the money?
I didn't really think that actual money would be such
an incentive but more that it would make the challenge feel serious,
more in the sense of an organization that has some kind of club behind
it. If you solved one of the design problems by the Mozilla community you could
receive kudo's from the community, but if you solved
one of my projects, you don't really get
kudo's from my community, do you?
Having the money associated makes it this big thing. At Ars Electronica
and so on, it got people talking about it and so it is out there. That
part worked.
Beyond that it has been a bit hard to keep the momentum. Friends and
colleagues send me ideas and ask me to look at things, but people I
don't know are hard to follow; I
don't think they are publishing their progress. There
is a hackerspace in Porto that has been working on it, so I see on
their blog and Twitter that they are having meetings about this and are working
on it.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Don't you think having only one prize produces a
kind of exclusivity? It seems logical **not** to publish your
notes?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Maybe. Kyle[^]{Kyle McDonald http://kylemcdonald.net} has been
thinking up ways to do it and I know he wanted to use an optical mouse,
and then this a friend Michael [^]{Michael Auger http://lm4k.com} has been using sensors, and he ran into a software
problem but had the hardware problem more or less solved. And then
Kyle, a software expert, has been running into hardware problems and so
I kind of introduced them to each other over e-mail so I
don't know if they are working on it together.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Would you consider splitting the prize?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I don't care, but I don't know if
the candidates would consider splitting the prize! I know Michael has
already spent a lot of money because he has been buying
Arduinos and other hardware. He wants to make a cheap
version to solve the problem and then make another one that costs 150€
on top of the price limitation to make it easier to use. He is
spending a bunch of money so even if he wins, it is going to get him
only out of the hole and he will not have much left.
% SLOGAN: Getting data from the wall or from the hand
Actually, Golan[^]{Golan Levin http://www.flong.com} had an idea for an
iPhone app that he wants to make but I am not sure it solves it.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Why don't you think his app will solve it?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
He is really interested in making something where you do not need to
meet with the graffiti writer. His idea was that if you could take a
photo of it on the wall, and then with your finger you guide it for how
it was written. It has an algorithm for image processing and that
combined with your best guess of how it was written would be backed out
in motion data. But it is faked data.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
That it is really interesting!
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Yes it is and I would love it if he would make it but I am not going
to let him win with it (_laughs_). I understand why he wants to do it;
especially if you are not inside the graffiti community, your only
experience is what you see on the wall and you don't
know who these people are and it is going to be almost impossible to
ever get data for those tags. If you don't have access
to that community you are never going to get the tag of the person that
you really want. I like the idea that he is thinking about getting some
data from the wall as opposed to getting it from the hand.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Learning by copying. Nowhere near solving the challenge, but interesting.
%
% SLOGAN: Competition and collaboration
%
At OSP[^]{OSP (Open Source Publishing) is a graphic design
collective that uses only Free, Libre and Open Source software.
http://ospublish.constantvzw.org} we were discussing about the way
designers are invited into Open Source Software by way of contest.
Troy James Sobotka[^]{ _The very notion of Libre / Free
software holds cooperation and community with such high regard you
would think that we would be visionary leaders regarding the means and
methods we use to collaborate. We are not. We seem to suffer from a
collision of unity with diversity. How can we more greatly create a
world of legitimate discussion regarding art, design, aesthetic, music,
and other such diverse fields when we are so stuck on how much more
consistent a damn panel looks with tripe 22 pixel icons of a given
flavour?_ http://www.librescope.com/975/spec-work-and-contests-part-two}
got angry and wrote:
_We want to be part of this community, we don't want to compete for it_.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
With the EyeWriter project, we were thinking a lot about that; how
to spur development. I think I would not have done a competition with
the EyeWriter. Making it fun, that is what makes it happen. If it would
be a really serious amount of money, with people scraping at each
other, fighting each other ...
For me, the fact that there is prize money makes something that is
already ridiculous in itself even more funny. To have prize money for
such a small community of people that are interested in coding
and in graffiti. I'm not seriously thinking that we can spur development with this kind of money.
To use the EyeWriter as an example, we've had money
infusions from awards mostly and we had to think about how we could use
that money to get from point A to point B. That's also
a project where we had very definable design goals of what we wanted to
reach, especially between the first version and where we are now with
the second version.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
How did that work?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
We are not talking about a ton of money here, 10 to 20.000€, and
we tried to get as far as we could. We got almost no work done between
the meetings in LA but if we flew in, it was OK to take a week out of
our schedules and really hammer at it. We were trying to think how we
could do the same thing for people that we wanted to work with and who
we had met in conferences. So that is how we thought of spending that
money.
The other way we use money in the EyeWriter project is that we buy
people kits. We know a few people that are interested in hacking on it
but they don't have the hardware. Not that they are so
expensive, but Zach wants to buy twenty or thirty unpackaged kits and
he has interns working with him in New York helping to build them. So
we have these systems ready so as soon as someone wants to get hacking
on it, we can mail them a working system that they can just plug in and
they don't have to waste their time ordering all these
parts from all these websites all over China. And when they are done,
they just send it back.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
You talked about some things in the challenge that worked and some that didn't.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I think the forum is the obvious thing that did not work. I have
friends working on OpenFrameworks, it is headed primarily by Zach and Theo. When you see
that forum, it is very involved. It is a deep system, with many
different libraries and lots of code flying around. GML is really not
large enough.
I think what makes sense for this project is when I post news about the
project, I see it ripple in Google Alerts. For people working on it,
having a place where these things show up is already a lot. The biggest
success is the project space, to see all the projects happening.
% SLOGAN: Calibration
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
What happened on the site since we talked?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
A project I like, is kml2gml[^]{Yamaguchi Takahiro
http://www.graffitimarkuplanguage.com/kml2GML} for example. It is done
by a friend from Tokyo. He was gathering GPS data riding his bike
around various cities, and building up a font based on his path. I like projects like this, where
someone takes a work that is already done and just writes an
application to convert the data into another format. To see him riding
his bike played back in GML was really nice. It is super low barrier to
entry, he already did all the hard work. I like that there is now a
system for piping very different kinds of data through GML.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
But it could also work the other way around?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Yeah. This is maybe a tangent but depending on how someone solves
the GML challenge... I was discussing this with Mike (the person that is
developing the sensor based version). He was thinking that if you would turn
on his system, and leave it on for a whole night of graffiti writing, you would have the
gestural data plus the GPS data. You could make a .gml file that is
tracking you down the street, and zoom in when you start making the
tag. Also you would get much more information on 3D movement, like tilt
and when the pen is picking up and going down. Right now all I
am getting is a 2D view through video data. I am really keeping my
fingers crossed. But he ran into trouble though.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Like what?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I have my doubts about using these kind of sensors, because 'drift' is a problem.
When you start using these sensors too long, it tends to move a little bit.
I think he is working within a 0.25 inch margin of error right now, which is right
on the edge. If you are recording someone doing a big piece, this is
not going to ruin my day too much but if you record a little tag than
it is a problem.
The other problem is that you need to orient the system before you start
tagging. It needs to know what is up and down, you have to define your
plane of access. I don't really understand this 100\%
but he thinks he can still fit it all within the ten second calibration requirement,
he's thinking that each time you come to a wall, you
tap once, you tap twice and tap a third time to define what plane you
are writing on and that calibrates the 3D space. Once you have that
calibration done, you can start writing. It is not as easy as attaching
a motion sensor. The problem is hard.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
So you need to touch the wall before writing on it, feeling out the
playing field before starting! It is like working on a tablet; to move
from actual movement to instruction; navigation blends into the action
of drawing itself.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I like that!
% NOWSPEAKING: SV
% ---------------
The guy using the iPhone did not use it as a sensor at all?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Theo was interested in using the iPhone to record motion data in
GML, but also to save the coordinates so you could try it into a Google
Earth or something but he had trouble with the sensitivity of the
sensor. Maybe it is better now but you needed to draw on a huge scale
for one letter. You could not record anything small.
% SLOGAN: Capturing vs. projecting
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
But it could be nice if you could record with a device that is less
conspicuous.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I know. I have just been experimenting with mounting cameras on
spray-cans. A tangent to GML, but related. It is not data, but video.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
What do you think is the difference between recording video, and
recording data? You mentioned that you wanted to move away from
documentation the image to capture movement. Video is somehow indirect
data?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Video is annoying in that it is computationally expensive. In
Brazil[^]{Graffiti Analysis: Belo Horizonte, Brazil 2010
http://vimeo.com/16997642} I have been using the laptop but the data is
not very precise.
Kyle thinks he might be able to back out GML data from videos. This
might solve the challenge, depending on how many cameras you need and
how expensive they are. But so far I have not heard back from him. He
said it needs three different cameras all looking at the wall. I mean:
talk about computationally expensive! He likes video-processing, he
knows some Open Source software that can look for similar things and
knows how to relate them. To me it seems more difficult than it needs
to be (_laughs_).
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
It is both overcomplicated and beautiful, trying to reverse engineer
movement from the image.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I am getting more into video myself. I get more enjoyment from
capturing the data than from the projections, like what most people
associate with my work.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Why is it so much more interesting to capture, rather than to
project?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
In part because it stays new, I've been doing those
projections for a while now and I know what happens at these events.
For a while it was very new, we just did it with friends, to project on
the Brooklyn bridge for example. Now it has turned into these events
where everyone knows in advance, instead of just showing up at at a certain time ate a
set corner. It has lost a lot of its magic and power.
Michele and I have done so many of these projections and we sort of
know what to expect from it, what questions people will ask. When I
meet with graffiti writers, that almost always feels new to me. When we
went to Brazil, we intentionally tried to not project anything but to
spend as much time as possible with writers. Going out with graffiti
writers to me always feels right.
% SLOGAN: Documentation as an excuse to be taken along
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Is the documentation an excuse to be taken along, or is the act of
documenting itself interesting to you?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
To me documentation is interesting. I don't know
where all of this is going right now, I am just trying to get the
footage; I put these pieces together showing all this movement but I
don't really know what the final project is. It is
more about collecting data so I am interested in having video, audio
and GML that can be synced up, and the sound from these microphones is
something to do something with later. This is research for me. I like
the idea of having all this data related to a 10 second gesture.
I am thinking that in the future we can do interesting things with it. I
am even thinking about how the audio could be used as a signal to tell
you what is drawing and what is not drawing. It is a really analog way
of doing it, but in that way you don't need a button
where you are getting true and false statements for what is drawing and
what is not drawing; you can just tell by the sound:
tfffpt ... tfffpt.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
You can hear the space, and also the surface.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I got started doing this because I love graffiti and this is a way
to get closer to it again. Like getting back out to the streets and
having very personal relationships to the graffiti writers and talking
to them, and having them give feedback. I think that is how the whole
challenge started. It didn't start because I was
projecting, but because I was out on the street and testing the
capture, having graffiti writers nearby when it is happening. It feels
like things are progressing that way.
% SLOGAN: Capturing conversation
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Are you thinking of other ways of capturing? You talk about
capturing movement, but do you also archive other elements? Do you take
notes, pictures? What happens to the conversations you are having?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I have been missing out on that piece. It is a small amount of time
we have, and I am already trying to get so much. I am setting up a
camera that shoots straight video from a tripod, I am capturing from
the laptop and I am also screencasting the application, my head is
spinning. One reason I screwed up this footage in the beginning is
because with all these things going on I forget to turn on some things.
Maybe someone will solve this challenge.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Are you actually an embedded anthropologist?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
In the back of my head I am thinking this will become a longer
documentary. I like to experiment with documentation, whether that is
in code or with video. I do think that there is this interesting
connection between documentation and graffiti and how these two things
overlap. I am always thinking about documentation. The graffiti writer
that was in Vienna[^]{momo3010 http://momo1030.com} showed me a
video that was amazing. It was him and a friend going out on a sunny
day at 15:30 in the afternoon with two head mounted cameras, bombing an
entire train and you hear the birds singing and you only experience it
by these two videos that are linked. There are interesting constraints:
your hands are already full, you don't want peoples' faces on camera so
the head-mounted cameras were smart. Unless you walk in front of a mirror
(_laughs_).
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Is it related to the dream of 'self documenting code'?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I like that. Even doing the challenge is in a way a reflection on
this, how I am fighting to get GML back to the streets somehow, it has
a natural tendency to get closer to the browser, to the screen, and my job
is to get it back to the street. It is so sexy and fun and flashy and
that is important too. My job is to keep the graffiti influence on it
as large as the other part.
% SLOGAN: Was using an XML-like structure a bad idea?
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Is any of this reflected in the standard itself?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I haven't looked at the standard for a while now.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
I was thinking again about live coding and notation. Simon
Yuill[^]{Simon Yuill. All problems of notation will be solved by
the masses. Mute Magazine, 2008} describes
notation as a shared space that allows collaboration but also defines
the end of a collaboration.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Maybe using an XML-like structure was a bad idea? Maybe if I had
started with a less code-based set of rules? If the files were raw video, it would encourage people to go outside more often? By
picking XML I am defining where the thing heads in a way. I think I am
OK in the role of fighting that tendency. It is not just a problem in
GML but with a lot of work I have been doing with graffiti and
technology and even way back with Graffiti Analysis, before GRL
(Graffiti Research Lab), the idea was always to keep the research very
close to the people doing graffiti. I was intentionally working with
people bombing a lot and not with graffiti celebrities. I wanted to
work with who's tag was on my mailbox,
who's tag do I see a million times when I walk down
the street. Since then a lot has happened, like with more popular
projects such as L.A.S.E.R. Tag, and it goes almost always further away
from graffiti. Maybe that is a function of technology. Technology, or
the way it is now, will always drift towards entertainment uses,
commercial uses.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Do you think a standard can be subversive? You chose XML because it
is accessible to amateur programmers. But it is also a very formal
standard, and so the interface between graffiti writers and hackers is
written in the language of bureaucracy.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
(_laughs_) I thought that there was something funny with that. People
that know XML and the web, they get the joke that something so rigid
and standardized is connected to writing your name on the wall. But to
be honest, it was really just a pragmatic choice.
% NOWSPEAKING: SV
% ---------------
It reminds me of an interview[^]{Interview with François
Chastanet http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayPcaGVKJHg} with François
Chastanet who wrote a book[^]{François Chastanet, Cholo writing:
Latino gang graffiti in Los Angeles. Dokument, 2009} about tagging in
Los Angeles. He explains that the Gothic lettering is inspired by
administrative papers!
% SLOGAN: Hacking the standard
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
I am wondering whether you're thinking about the
standard itself as a space for hacking?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Graffiti is somehow coded in-itself. Do you mean it would be
interesting to think how GML could be coded in a way for
graffiti writers, not for coders?
There would be more space for that when more people start to program at
a younger age? When it is more common knowledge. If I would start to do
that now, I would quickly lose my small user-base. I love that idea
though; the way XML is programmed fits very much to the way you program
for the web. But what if it was playing more with language, starting
from graffiti which is very coded?
% SLOGAN: How to visualize motion in print
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
When I was in college, I was always thinking about how to visualize
motion in print. I was looking for ways people had developed languages
for different ways of writing.
% NOWSPEAKING: SV
% ---------------
Maybe you could look at the Chinese methods for teaching writing,
because the order of the strokes is really important. If you make the
stroke from bottom to top, and not from top to bottom, it is wrong.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
A friend in Hong Kong, MC Yan, loves the Graffiti Analysis project because it
shows the order in which he is writing and he likes to play with that. So he
writes words in different order than people are used to and so it
changes the meaning. People can not only watch the final result, but
also the order which is an interesting part of the writing process. The
brush, the angle, direction: depicting motion!
In the beginning of the Graffiti Analysis Research project I was very against
projection, because I felt that was totally against the idea of graffiti.
I was presenting all of these print ideas and the output would be pasted
back into the city because I was against making an impermanent
representation of the data. In the end Zach said, you are just fighting
this because you have a motion project and you want to project motion
and then I said alright, I'll do a test. And the tests were
so exciting that I felt OK with it.
% SLOGAN: Drawing with computers
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
In what way does GML bridge the gap between digital drawing and hand
writing? Could you see a sort of computer-aided graffiti? Could you see
computation enter graffiti?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Yeah. When you are in a controlled environment, in a studio, it is
easy but the outdoors part always trips me up. That is why the design
constraints get interesting, playing in real time with what someone is
writing. I think graffiti writers would be into that too. How to
develop a style that is unique enough to stand out in an existing canon is already hard enough.
This could give someone an edge.
% SLOGAN: The next challenge
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I think the next challenge I'd like to run is about
recreating the data outside. I've been thinking about
these helicopters with embedded wireless camera's,
have you seen them? The obvious thing to me would be uploading a
.gml file to one of these helicopters that is dripping paint on a
rooftop. Scale is so important, so going bigger is always going to be
better.
Gigantic rooftop tags could be a way to tie it back to the city, give it
a reason? I am thinking of ways to get an edge back to the project. The
GML-challenge is already a step into that direction; it is not about
the prettiest screensaver. To ask people to design something that is
tying back to what graffiti is, which is in a way a crime.
I think fixing the data capture is the right place to start, the next
one could be about making marks in the city. Like: the first person to
recreate this GML-tag on the roof of this building, that would be fun.
The first person that could put this 'Hello World' tag onto the Brooklyn bridge and get a photo of
it gets the prize. That would get us back to the question of how we leave
marks on the surface of the city.
% SLOGAN: That is how my hand moved
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
When you capture data of an individual writer in a certain standard,
it ends up as typography?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
That's another trend that happens when designers
look at graffiti, and I've fallen into this too
sometimes, you want to be able to make fonts out of it. People have
done this actually; there's a project in New York
where they met with pretty influential graffiti writers and asked them
to write in boxes, the whole alphabet, and I think
there's something interesting there.
The alphabet that you saw the robot write was drawn by TEMPT with the
EyeWriter and what he did was a little bit smarter than other attempts
by graffiti writers to make fonts. He intentionally picked a specific style, the
Cholo style, and the format is very tall, vertically oriented, angled.
That style is less about letter connections and pen-flow. What graffiti
has developed into, and especially tags, is very much about how it is
written and the order of the letters. When TEMPT picked this style he
made a smart decision that a lot of people miss when you make a font,
you miss all the motions and the connections.
% NOWSPEAKING: SV
% ---------------
What if a programmer could put this data in a font, and generate
alternating connections?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
That kind of stuff is interesting. It would help graffiti writers to
design tags maybe?
To get my feet wet, I designed a tag once, and it was so not-fun to
write! I was thinking about a tag that would look different and that
would fit into corners, I was interested in designing something that
wasn't curved; that would fit the angles of the city,
hard edges. So I had forgotten all my research about drafting and
writing. I think I stopped writing in part because the tag I picked
wasn't fun o write. For a font to work like writing,
it is not just about possible connections between lines.
You'd need another level in the algorithm, the way the
hand likes to move.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
It would be a good algorithm to dream up. It was beautiful to see a
robot write TEMPT's letters by the way.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
When TEMPT saw the robot writing for the first time, his reaction
was all about the order of how the letters were constructed. The order
is I think defined by the way he dropped the points in with the
EyeWriter software. When he was writing with his eyes, he ended up
writing in the same way as he would have written with his hands. When
he saw the video with the robot, it freaked him out because he was
like: _That's how my hand moved when
I did that tag!_
% NEWPAGE:
# The Graffiti Markup Field Recorder challenge
% --------------------------------------------
% SCALEFONT: 1.5
An easily reproducible DIY device that can unobtrusively
record graffiti motion data during a graffiti writer's normal practice
in the city.[^]{GML-recorder challenge as published on: http://www.graffitimarkuplanguage.com/challenges}
% RESETFONT:
## Project Description and Design Requirements:
The GML Field Recorder Challenge is a DIY hardware and software solution
for unobtrusively recording graffiti motion data during a graffiti
writer's normal practice in the city. The winning
project will be an easy to follow instruction set that can be
reproduced by graffiti writers and amateur technologists. The goal is
to create a device that will document a night of graffiti bombing into
an easily retrievable series of Graffiti Markup Language (.gml) files
while not interfering with the normal process of writing graffiti. The
solution should be easy to produce, lightweight, cheap, secure, and
require little to no setup and calibration. The winning design solution
will include the following requirements listed below:
### Material costs for the field device must not exceed 300€.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
300€ even felt expensive to me. How can this be a tool that is
really accessible? If it goes over a certain price point, it is not the
kind of thing that people can afford to make. It is a very small
community, a lot of the people that are going to have enough interest
to build this are not going to have a background in engineering, and
are probably not even a part of the _maker_ scene that we know. The
audience here might not be people that are hanging out on
Instructables. I wanted to make sure that the price point meant that
people could comfortably take a gamble to make something for the first
time. But I also did not want to make it so small that the design
would be impossible.
### Computers and equipment outside of the 300€ can be used for non-field activities (such as downloading and manipulating data captured in-field), but at the time of capture a graffiti writer should have no more than 300€ worth of equipment on him or herself.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I was trying to think of how the challenge could be gamed... I did not
want to get into a situation where we were getting stressed out because
some smart hacker found a hole in the brief, and bought a next
generation iPhone that somehow just worked. I didn't
want to force people to buy expensive equipment. This line was more about
covering our own ass.
% SPECIFIC OPTIONS FOR CONVERSATIONS A5 LAYOUT
% VFILL:
### The graffiti writer must be able to activate the recording function alone (i.e., without assistance from anyone else).
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Are you going to be out of work soon?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Thinking selfishly, I screw up on documentation a lot because I have
too many hats. When I'm going out doing this, I am
carrying a laptop, a calibration set up, I also have one video-camera on
me that is just documenting, I have another one on a tripod, and I am
usually screen capturing the software as it processes the video-footage
because it tells another story. I screw up because I forget to hit stop
or record. If the data-capture just works, I can go have fun getting
good video-footage.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
What if it had to be operated by more than one person? It is nice
how the documentation now turns the act of writing into a
performance-for-one.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
If you record alone, the data becomes more interesting and
mysterious, right? I mean, no one else has seen it. Something captured
very privately, than gets potentially shared publicly and turned into
things that are very different. I also thought: you
don't want to be dependent on someone else. It is a
lot to ask, especially if you are doing something illegal.
% SPECIFIC OPTIONS FOR CONVERSATIONS A5 LAYOUT
% NEWPAGE:
### Any setup and/or calibration should be limited to 10 seconds or less.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
This came out of me dealing with the current system. It feels wrong
that it takes ten to fifteen minutes to get it running. Graffiti is not
meant to be that way. This speaks to the problem of the documentation
infringing on the writing process, which ideally wouldn't
happen. The longer the set-up takes, the more it is going to influence
the actual writing. It is supposed to be a fly on the wall.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Does it scale? Does a larger piece allow longer callibration -time?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
That's true. But I think this challenge is really
about recording tags.
% SPECIFIC OPTIONS FOR CONVERSATIONS A5 LAYOUT
% VFILL:
### All hardware should be able to be easily concealed within a coat with large pockets.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
A hack to get around that would have been to design a jacket with ten gallon pockets!
I put it there again, to make the device not be intrusive. A big part of
graffiti writing is about gaining entry and you limit where you can
go depending on how much equipment you have. How bulky it is, what
walls you can get up, what holes you can get through.
% SPECIFIC OPTIONS FOR CONVERSATIONS A5 LAYOUT
% VFILL:
### The winning solution should be discrete and not draw any added attention to the act of graffiti writing.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
It's part of the same issue, but this one also came
out from me going out and trying to capture with a system where it
requires you to attach a flashlight to a graffiti implement. I
didn't want anyone solving the problem and then,
Step one is: 'Attach a police siren to a spraypaint can'
% SPECIFIC OPTIONS FOR CONVERSATIONS A5 LAYOUT
% NEWPAGE:
### The resulting solution should be able to record at least 10 unique GML tags of approximately 10 seconds each in length in one session without the need for connecting to or using additional equipment.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I wasn't thinking this was going to be an issue in
terms of memory-storage, but maybe in terms of memory management. I did
not want the graffiti writer to behave as if he was on vacation with a
camera that could take only three photos. I
wanted to make sure they were not making decisions on what they were
writing based and how much memory they had.
### All data recorded using the field recorder should be saved in a secure and non-incriminating fashion.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
(_laughs_) If I had to do that one again, I would have put that in
Bonus category actually. That's a difficult question to ask.
What does secure mean? It seems a bit unfair, because it
doesn't fit in to the way graffiti is currently
documented. There's not a lot of graffiti writers that
currently are shooting encrypted photos and
videos, right?
But whatever bizarre format comes out from the sensor will help. I
don't think that the NYPD will have time or make the
effort to parse it. They'd just have a file with a bunch of
numbers. Time stamped GPS coordinates would be more dangerous.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
What would count as proof?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
In most cases it is hard to convict someone on the basis of a photo
of a tag that you would tie to another tag. For good reasons, because
if it is a crew name for example, all of a sudden you are pinning one
tag on a person that could have been written by twenty people. This came up in
a trial in DC when an artist named BORF got arrested. He had written his
name everywhere, completely crushed DC and his trial was a big deal.
This issue came up and they argued that BORF was a collective, not an
individual. Who knows if that's true, there were a lot
of people around him, but how do you really know?
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
GML could help balance the load?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
You mean it would not be just the image of a tag but more like signing at the bank?
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
I mean that if you copy and distribute your data, the chance is
small that you can link it to an individual.
% SPECIFIC OPTIONS FOR CONVERSATIONS A5 LAYOUT
% VFILL:
### The winning design will have some protection in the event that the device falls into the wrong hands.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
This again should probably have been a bonus item.
Wouldn't it be awesome if you could go home and log in
and flip a one to a zero and the evidence goes up in smoke?
One graffiti writer friend told me: _If the police
comes, just smash the camera as hard as you can!_
It's a silly idea, but it shows that they are thinking about it.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Edible SD cards?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
That would be a good idea!
% SPECIFIC OPTIONS FOR CONVERSATIONS A5 LAYOUT
% VFILL:
### Data should be able to be captured from both spray cans and markers.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Yes.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Are you prepared for tools that do not exist yet?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
That was kind of what I was thinking there. Markers are about direct
contact, spraypaint is in free space. If it works in those two
situations, you should theoretically be able to tie it to anything,
even outside of graffiti. If it was too much about spraypaint, it
would be harder for someone to strap it to a skateboard.
% SPECIFIC OPTIONS FOR CONVERSATIONS A5 LAYOUT
% NEWPAGE:
### System should be able to record writing on various surfaces and materials.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
It is something you can easily forget about. When you are developing
something in the studio and it works well against a white wall, and
than when you go out in the city than you realize that brick is a
really weird surface. Or even writing on glass, or on metal or on other
reflecting surfaces that could screw up your reading. It is there as a
reminder for people that are not thinking about graffiti that much. The
street and the studio are so different.
### Data should be captured at 30 points per second minimum.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I was assuming that lots of people were going to use cameras, and I
wanted to make sure they were taking enough data points. With other
capturing methods it is probably not such a problem. Even at 30 points
per seconds you can start to see the facets if you zoom in, so anything less is
not ideal.
### The recording system should not interfere with the writer's movements in anyway (including writing, running and climbing).
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
So this is where Muharrem is going to run into trouble. His solution
interferes. Not that much if you are just working in front of your
body space. But the way most writers write is that they are shuffling
their feet a lot, moving down the wall. Should it have said:
_Graffiti writer should retain access to feet
functionality_? This point should be at the top
almost.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
To me it feels strange, your emphasis on the tool blending into the
background. You could also see Muharrem's solution as
an enhancing device, turning the writer into a tapdancer?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I want to have on record: I love his solution!
There's a lot in his design that is 'making us more aware' of
what's happening in the creation of a tag. One thing that he is doing that is
not in the specs, is that he is logging strokes, like up and down. When
you watch him using it, you can see a little light going from red to
green when the fingers goes on and off the spraypaint can. When you
watch graffiti, it is too small of a movement to even notice but when
you are seeing that, it adds another level of understanding of how they
are writing.
### All motion data should be saved using the current GML standard[^]{http://graffitimarkuplanguage.com/spec}.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Obvious.
% SPECIFIC OPTIONS FOR CONVERSATIONS A5 LAYOUT
% VFILL:
### All aspects of the winning design should be able to be reproduced by graffiti writers and amateur technologists.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
It wouldn't be exciting if only ten people can make
this thing. This tool should not be just for people that can make
NASA qualified soldering connections. Ideally it should not have any
soldering. I always thought of a soldering iron like a huge barrier point. I'm all for duct-taped electrical connections.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
There's nothing about weather-resistant in the
challenge. You're not thinking about rain, are you?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
A lot of paint stops working in rain too.
I think what you get from this brief though is that the whole impetus
for this project is about me trying to steer the ship that clearly
wants to go into another direction, back to my interest in what
graffiti is rather than anything that people might find aesthetically
pleasing. It is not about 'graffiti influenced visuals'.
% SPECIFIC OPTIONS FOR CONVERSATIONS A5 LAYOUT
% NEWPAGE:
### All software must be released Open Source. All hardware must include clear DIY instructions/tutorials. All media must be released under an Open Content licence that promotes collaboration (such as a Free Art License or Creative Commons ShareAlike License).
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I didn't want it to be too specific, but there had to be some effort into making it open.
### The recording must be an unobtrusive process, allowing the graffiti writer to concentrate solely on the act of writing (not on recording). The act of recording should not interfere with the act of graffiti writing.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I've been through situations where the process gets
so confusing that you can't keep your head straight
and juggle all the variables. Your eyes and ears are supposed to tell
you about who's coming around the corner. Is there
traffic coming or a train? There are so many other things you need to
pay attention to rather than: _Is this button
on?_
The whole project is about getting good data. As soon as you force
people to think too much about the capture process, I think it
influences when and how they are writing.
% BIGSKIP:
__Bonus, but not required:__
### Inclusion of date, time and location saved in the .gml file.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Yes. Security-wise that is questionable, but the nerd in me would
just love it. You could get really interesting data about a whole night
of writing. You could see a bigger story than just that of a single
tag. How long did it take to gain entry? How long were they hiding in
the bushes? These things get back to graffiti as a performance art
rather than a form of visual art.
% NEWPAGE:
# Paris, November 2011
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Last time we had contact we discussed how to invite Muharrem to
Brussels[^]{By early October 2011 no winning design-solution had
been entered, besides a proposal from Muharem Yildirim that came more
than halfway. We decided to use the prize money to fly Muharrem from
Phoenix (US) to Brussels (BE) and document his project in a worksession
as part of the Verbindingen/Jonctions 13 meetingdays.
http://www.vj13.constantvzw.org}. But now on the day of the deadline,
it seems there are new developments?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I think in terms of the actual challenge, the main update is that since we
extended the deadline and made another call, I got an e-mail right on
the deadline today from Joshua Noble[^]{Joshua Noble http://www.thefactoryfactory.com/gmlchallenge/} with a very solid and pretty smart proposal that seems to solve (maybe
unfortunately for Muharrem) a bit more of the design spec. It does it
for cheaper and does it in a way that I think is going to be easier to
make also.
His design solution is using an optical mouse and he changed the sensors
so it has a stronger LED. He uses a modified lens on top of a plastic
lens that comes on top of a mouse, so that it can look at a surface
that is a set distance away. It has another sensor that looks at pitch,
tilt and orientation, but he is using that only to orient, the actual
data gets recorded through the mouse. It can get very high resolution,
he is looking at up to a millimeter I guess.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Muharrem's solution seems less precise?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I think he gets away with more because his solution is only for
spraypaint and once you are writing on that scale, even if you are off
a few centimeters, it might not ruin the data. If you look at the data
he is getting, it actually looks very good. I don't
think he has any numbers on the actual resolution he is getting but if
you were using his system with a pen, I think it would be a different
case. I like a lot of his solution too, it is an interesting hack. It
is funny that two of the candidates for the prize are both
mouse hacks. One is hacking a mechanical mouse and the other an optical
mouse.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
It goes from drawing on a screen, to drawing on a wall?
% NOWSPEAKING: JH
% ---------------
And back again!
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Yes. When I first was working on graffiti related software, the
whole reason I was building Graffiti Analysis as a capture application
was because I did not want to hand graffiti writers a mouse (_laughter_).
I had done all this research into graffiti and started to be embedded
in the community and I knew enough about the community that if you were
going to ask them to take part in something that was already weird, you
could not give them a mouse and expect any respect on the other end of
that conversation. They respect their tools, so the reason I was using
camera-input was because I wanted to have a flexible system where they
could bring in anything and I could attach a device to it. Now I am
coming back to mice finally.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Now the deadline has passed, do you think the passage from wishlist
to contest worked out?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I think it was a good experiment, I am not sure how clever it was.
To take a piece of culture that a lot of people don't
even look at, or look at it and think it is trash, to invest all this
time and research and software expertise into it makes people think
about the graffiti practice and what it actually is. The cash prize does
something similar. It attaches weight to something that most people
don't even care about. Even having the name of an
organization like Constant attached to it is showing that I am really
serious about this. In that sense it is different than a wishlist.
I just read the Linus Torvalds[^]{Torvalds, Linus; David Diamond
(2001). Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. New
York, New York, United States: HarperCollins.} biography, and I liked
his idea that 'fun' is part of
innovation, right? In a programming sense, it is scratching a personal
itch. The attachment of a prize is more to underline the fun aspect
than anything else.
% SLOGAN: Taking pride in a project with wings
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
I am still puzzled about GML and how it is at the one hand
stimulating collaboration and sharing, and than it comes back to the
proud individual that wants to show off. It is kind of funny actually
that now two people are winning the prize.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I understand what you mean.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Also in F/LOSS, under the flag of
'Open' and 'Free' there is a lot of competition.
Do you feel that kind of tension in your work?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Even 'Open' and 'Free' are in competition!
In a project like White-Glove Tracking for example, the most popular
video I had not made and it did not have my name on it but personally I still felt a part of it. I think when you are working in open systems, you take
pride when a project has wings. It is maybe even a selfish act. It is
the story of me receiving some art-finding and realizing that I am not the best
toolmaker for the job. Who ever manages to win the prize gets all the glory, but
I'm still going to feel awesome about it.
% SLOGAN: It is harder to release a piece than a tool
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
I have been reading the interview that Kyle McDonald did with Anton
Marini[^]{Anton Marini: _Some personal projects of
mine, for example specific effects and
'looks' that I have a personal attachment to, I don't release_
https://github.com/kylemcdonald/SharingInterviews/blob/master/antonmarini.markdown}
and at some point he talks about being OK with sharing code and
libraries, but when it is too much of a personal style, then it is hard
to share.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Yes, I thought that was an interesting point. I've
been in similar conversations on listservs with artists in the
OpenFrameworks, Processing
% HIDDENKEYWORDS: processing.org
and visual programming communities. What are
the open pieces? It makes sense to share libraries, but if I make a
print from a piece of code, do I then have to share the exact source
and app for how that exact print was made? What does it mean when I am
investing money in a print, and it is a limited series but
I'm sharing the code? The art world is still based on
scarcity and we're interested in computers that are
copy-machines.
I see both sides of the argument and I am still trying to see how I fit into it. It
gets trickier when you are asked to release a piece rather than a tool.
If you are an Open Source artist and you make a toolset, that is easier
to share because people use that to make their own things. But then an
artist gets asked: how come I can't get the file of
that print? I think that is a really hard question.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
But isn't the tool often the piece, and vice versa?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I agree. And I haven't solved that question yet.
Lately I've been a lot less excited about running
workshops for example. A lot of the people that want to take part in
the workshops are actually the opposition. Often they own a club and they
want to install a cool light-show or they are into viral marketing. I
never know which way to go with that. It depends on what side of the
curve of frustration I am on at that moment.
% SLOGAN: Graffiti culture
% NOWSPEAKING: JH
% ---------------
Earlier you brought up the contrast between people that were more
visually invested and others that are more interested in the
performance aspect. I wanted to hear a bit more about the continuum in
the culture and how GML fits into that?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
My focus has been on tags, this one portion of graffiti. I do think
there could be cool uses for more involved pieces. It would be great if
someone else would come in and do that, because it is a part of
graffiti that I haven't studied that much. I would not
even be able to write a specs-sheet for it; it requires a lot of
different things when you paint these super-involved murals, when you
have an hour or more time on your hands a lot more things come into
play. Color, nozzles, nozzle changes and so on.
% NOWSPEAKING: JH
% ---------------
Z-axis becomes important?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Yes, and your distance from the wall, a lot of other things my brain
isn't wrestling with. I think tags are always
fundamental, even if they are painting murals that take three days to
paint, somewhere in their graffiti education they start with the tags.
You're still going to be judged by the community based
on how you sign your name on the blackbook.
Graffiti is funny because it is almost conservative in terms of how a
successful graffiti writer is viewed and it is reflected in how graffiti is in some
way similar in the world. In some way it is a let down, to travel from
Brooklyn to Paris to Brussels and it looks all the same but I think it
stems from the fact that the community is so tight-knit. But at the end
of the day it comes back to the tag always.
% SLOGAN: Hacking the limitations of gesture
In terms of the performance, in a tag the relationship between form and
function is really tight. The way your hand moves and how the tag
actually looks on the wall is dictated by the gesture you are making. A
piece where you have three hours, that tight synchronization
isn't there. With a tag, every letter looks the way it
does because that's how it needs to be drawn, because
it needs to be connected to this other letter. There's
a lot of respect for writers that do oneliners, and even if your tag
has more than one line, a good graffiti writer has often a one line version.
If you don't have to pick up the pen it is a really
economical stroke.
% NOWSPEAKING: JH
% ---------------
It is almost like hacking the limitations of gesture.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
It is a very specific design requirement. How to write a name that
is interesting to think about and to look at, you have to do it in 5
seconds, you have to do it in one line, you have to do it on each type
of surface. On top of that, you have to do it a million times, for
twenty years.
% SLOGAN: The burn-factor
% NOWSPEAKING: JH
% ---------------
In Seattle they call a piece that stays up for a longer time a
'burner'. I was connecting that to an archival practice of ephemera.
It is a self-agreed upon archival process, and it means that the
piece will not be touched, even for years.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Graffiti has an interesting relationship to archiving. On the one
hand, many graffiti writers think: Now that tag's done,
but I've got another million of them. While others do not
want people painting over them, the city or other graffiti writers.
Also if a tag has been up there for a few years, it acquires more
reverence and it is even worse when it is painted over.
But I think that GML is different, it is really more similar to a photo of the
tag. It is not trying to be the actual thing.
% SLOGAN: Social limits of referentiality
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Once a tag is saved in GML, what can be done with the data?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I am myself reluctant to take any of these tags that
I've collected and do anything with it at all without
talking closely to whoever's tag it is, because it is
such an intimate thing. In that sense it is strange to have an open
data repository and to be so reluctant to use it in a way that is
looking at anyone too specifically.
The sculpture I've been working on is an average from a
workshop; sixteen different graffiti writers merged into one. I
don't want to take advantage of any one writer. But
this has nothing to do with the licence, it is totally a different
topic. If someone uploads to the 000000book site, legally anyone should
be able to do anything that they can do under the Creative Commons
licence that's on the site but I think socially within
the community, it is a huge thing.
% NOWSPEAKING: JH
% ---------------
There must be some social limits to referentiality. Like
beat jacking for DJs or biting rhymes for
MCs, there must be a moment where you are not just
homaging, but stealing a style.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I've seen cases where both parties have been happy,
like when Yamaguchi Takahiro used some GML data from KATSU and piped it
into Google Maps, so he was showing these big KATSU tags all over the
earth which was a nice web-based implementation. I think he was doing
what a graffiti writer does naturally: Get out there and make the tag
bigger but in different ways. He is not taking KATSU-data from the
database without shining light back on him.
% SLOGAN: Feeling comfortable vs. having permission
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
GML seems very inspired by the practice of Free Software, but at the
same time it reiterates the conventional hierarchies of who are
supposed to use what ... in which way ... from who. For me the
excitement with open licences is that you can do things without asking
permission. So, usage can develop even if it is not already prescribed
by the culture. How would someone like me, pretty far removed from
graffiti culture ever know what I am entitled to do?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I have my reasons for which I would and would not use certain pieces
of data in certain contexts, but I like the fact that it is open for
people that might use it for other things, even if I would not push
some of those boundaries myself.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Even when I am sometimes disappointed by the actual closedness of
F/LOSS, at least in theory through its licensing and
refusal to limit who is entitled and who's not, it is
a liberating force. It seems GML is only half liberating?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I agree. I think the lack of that is related to the data. The
looseness of its licence makes it less of an
invitation in a sense. If the people that put data up there would sit
down and really talk about what this means, when they would really walk
through all the implications of what it means to public domain a piece,
that would be great. I would love that. Then you could use it without
having to worry about all the morality issues and
people's feelings. It would be more free.
I think it would be good to do a workshop with graffiti writers where
beyond capturing data, you reserve an hour after the workshop to talk
to everybody about what it would mean to add an open licence.
I've done workshops with graffiti writers and I talked
to everyone: _Look, I am going to upload this tag up to this
place where everyone can download them after the workshop, cool?_ And
they go _cool_. But still, even then, do I really feel comfortable that they understand what
they've gotten into? Even if someone has chosen a ShareAlike licence, I would be nervous I think.
Maybe I am putting too much weight on it. People outside Free
Software are already used to attaching Creative Commons licences to
their videos. Maybe I am too close to graffiti. I
still hold the tag as primal!
% SLOGAN: Normalizing
% NOWSPEAKING: JH
% ---------------
It is interesting to be worried about copyright on something that is
illegal, things you can not publicly claim ownership of.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Would you agree that standards are a normalizing practice, that in a
way GML is part of a legalizing process?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
For that to happen, a larger community would have to get involved.
It would need to be Gesture Markup Language, and a community other than
graffiti writers would need to get involved.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Would you be interested in legalizing graffiti?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
No. That's why I stopped doing projections.
% NOWSPEAKING: JH
% ---------------
Not legal forms of graffiti, but more like the vision of KRS-One of
the Hip Hop city,[@krs-1:2014:templeofhiphop] where graffiti would obviously be
legal. Does that fundamentally change the nature of graffiti?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
To me it is just not graffiti anymore. It is just painting. It
changes what it is. For me, its power stems from it
being illegal. The motion happens because it is illegal.
% NOWSPEAKING: JH
% ---------------
In a sense, but there is also the calligraphic aspect of it. In
Brooklyn, a lot of the building owners say: _yeah,
throw it up_ and those are some of the craziest
pieces I know of, not from a tag-standpoint, but more as complex
graffiti visuals.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I am always for de-criminalization. I don't think
anyone should go to jail over a piece of paint that you could cover
over in 5 seconds. And that KRS-One city you mentioned would be cool to
see.
% NOWSPEAKING: JH
% ---------------
It is his Temple of Hip Hop, the idea to build a city of Hip Hop
where the entire culture can be there without any external repression.
It's an utopian ideal obviously.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Of course I would like to see that. If nothing else, you would
totally level the playing field between us and the advertisers. The
only ones that would get up messages in the city would be the ones with
more time on their hands.
% SLOGAN: Global insurgent subcultures
% NOWSPEAKING: JH
% ---------------
At the risk of stretching coherency, Hip Hop and Free Software are
both global insurgent subcultures that have emerged from being kind of
thrown away as fads and then become objects of pondering in
multinational boardrooms. So I was hoping to open you up to riff on
that: zooming out, GML is a handshake point between these two cultures,
but GML is a specific thing within this larger world of F/LOSS and
graffiti in the larger world of hiphop. What other types of contact
points might there be? Do you see any similarities and differences?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
For me, even beyond technology and beyond graffiti it all boils down
to this idea of the hack that is really a phenomenon that has been
going on forever. It's taking this system that has some
sort of rigidity and repeating elements and flipping it into doing
something else. I see this in Hip Hop, of course. The whole idea of
sampling, the whole idea of turning a playback device into a musical
instrument, the idea of touching the record: all of these things are
hacks. We could go into a million examples of how graffiti is like
hacker culture.
% SLOGAN: A handshake between communities II
In terms of that handshake moment between the two communities, I think
that is about realizing that its not about the code and in some sense
its not about the spraypaint. There's this empowering
idea of individual small actors assuming control over systems that are
bigger than themselves. To me, that's the connection
point, whether its Hip Hop or rap or programming.
The similarities are there. I think there are huge differences in those
communities too. One of them is this idea of the hustler from Hip Hop:
the idea of hustling doesn't have anything to do with
the economy of gift-giving. The idea that Jay-Z has popularized in
Hip Hop and that rap music and graffiti have at their core has to do
with work ethic, but there's also a kind of braggadocio
about making it yourself and attaining value yourself and it definitely
comes back to making money in the end. The idea of being
'self-made' in a way is empowering but I
think that in the Open Source movement or the Free Software movement
the idea of hustling does not apply. It's not that
people don't hustle on a day to day basis. You disagree
with me?
% NOWSPEAKING: JH
% ---------------
It's interesting because the more you were talking,
the more I was not sure of whether you were speaking about Hip Hop or
Free Software or maybe even more specifically the Open Source kind of
ideological development. You have people like David Hannemeier Hansson
who developed Ruby on Rails and basically co-opted an entire
programming language to the point where you can't
mention Ruby without people thinking of his framework.
He's a hustler du jour: this guy's been
in Linux Journal in a fold-out spread of him posing with a
Lamborghini or something. Talk about braggadocio! You get into certain levels or certain
dynamics within the community where its really like pissing contests.
% SLOGAN: It is different where it is coming from
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I like that, I think there's something there. At the
instigation of the Open Source Initiative, though: like Linus
'pre-stock option', sitting in his
bedroom not seeing the sun for a year and hacking and nerding out. To
me they are so different, the idea of making this thing just for fun
with a kind of optimistic view on collaboration and sharing. I know it
can turn into money, I know it can turn into fame, I know it can turn
into Lamborghinis but I feel like where its coming from is different.
% NOWSPEAKING: JH
% ---------------
I agree, that's clearly a distinction between the
two. They are not coming from the same thing. But for me its also
interesting to think about it in terms that these are both sort of
movements that have at times been given liberational trappings, people
have assigned liberatory powers to these movements. Statistically the GPL is considerably more popular than the Open Source
licences, but I don't know if you sat everybody down
and took a poll which side they would land on, whether they were more
about making money than they were about sharing. Are people writing
blogposts because they really want to share their ideas or because they
want to show how much cooler they are?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
You're totally right and I think people in this
scene are always looking for examples of people making money,
succeeding, good things coming to people for reasons that
aren't just selflessness. People that are into Open
Source usually love to be able to point to those things, that this
isn't some purely altruistic thing.
% NOWSPEAKING: JH
% ---------------
Maybe you could take some of the hustle and turn it into
something in the Free Software world, mix and match.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I think this line of inquiry is an interesting one that could be the
subject of a documentary or something. These communities that seem very
different until you start finding things that at their core really
really similar.
% NOWSPEAKING: JH
% ---------------
It would be so interesting to have a cribs moment with some gangsta
or rapper who came from that, and he's sort of showing
off his stuff and he has this machismo about him. Not necessarily
directly mysognistic but a macho kind of character and then take a nerd
and have them do the same.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Would they really be so different?
% NOWSPEAKING: JH
% ---------------
Obviously some rappers and some nerds, I mean that's
one of the beauties -- I mean its a global movement, you
can't help but have diversity -- but if we're just speaking in generalizations?
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
There's a lot of showing off in F/LOSS too.
% NOWSPEAKING: JH
% ---------------
Yeah, and there's a lot of chauvinism. And when you
said that self-made thing, that's the Free Software
idea number one.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
I think that part is a direct connection.
% NOWSPEAKING: JH
% ---------------
And they're coming from two completely different
strata, from a class-based analysis which is absent from a lot of
discussion. Even on that level, how to integrate them to me is a
political question to some degree.
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Right.
% SLOGAN: Deprecation
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Will any features of GML ever be deprecated?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
Breaking currently existing software? I hope not.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
Basically I'm asking for your long-term vision?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
When the spec was being made of course it wasn't
just me, it was a group of people debating these things and of course
nobody wants things to break. The idea was that we tried to get in as
many things as we could think of and have the base stay kind of what it
was with the idea that you could add more stuff into it.
It's easy enough to do, of course its not a super-rigid
standard. If you look at what the base .gml file is, the minimum
requirements for GML to compile, its so so stripped down. As long as it
just remains time/x-y-z, I don't think
that's going to change, no.
But I'm also hoping that I'm not gonna
be the main GML developer. I'm already not,
there's already people doing way more stuff with it
than I am.
% NOWSPEAKING: FS
% ---------------
How does it work when someone proposes a feature?
% NOWSPEAKING: ER
% ---------------
They just e-mail me (_laughs_). But right now there
hasn't been a ton of that because it's
such a simple thing, once you start cramming too much into it it starts
feeling wrong. But all its gonna take is for someone to make a new app
that needs something else and then there will be a reason to change it
but I think the change will always be adding, not removing.
% DOUBLEPAGE: var/layouts/momo3010-01/momo3010-01-nomargin.pdf
% % NEWPAGE:
%
% ## Chat with momo3010, November 2011
%
% {\tt momo3010: there is one BIG point i want to make}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: graffiti is so easy to do .. u only need a marker
% or something .. even a pencil is enough and u are in the game .. it
% takes u 1 min. to buy something to write and start}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: with all the computer stuff the entry barrier is
% much higher}\crlf
% {\tt
%
% % NOWSPEAKING: FS
% % ---------------
% yes, true.}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: i dont have to understand graffiti to do it. just
% get out and do it! with gml i have to have a sort of understanding of
% xml, i will need a comp, internet ..}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: what i like of gml is the way to document (save)
% the tag, keeping the original still outside! that is really cool}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: in the gallery i just show the code .. haha}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: \quote{keep it simple keep it
% fresh}}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: one thing i miss too (i think evan is not
% forgetting this aspect)}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: is the aesthetic of graffitianalysis}\crlf
% {\tt
%
% % NOWSPEAKING: FS
% % ---------------
% you mean the way it plays out?}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: yes}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: it is super nice .. it attracts people. u see it and ..}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: wowow}\crlf
% {\tt
%
% % NOWSPEAKING: FS
% % ---------------
% i love the way it works with speed, and these fireworks when it turns}\crlf
% {\tt
%
% % NOWSPEAKING: FS
% % ---------------
% also the drip is great -{}- i like that it is not faking
% paint}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: it is really well done .. so this is the aesthetic
% point which is also very important for a tag}\crlf
% {\tt
%
% % NOWSPEAKING: FS
% % ---------------
% yes. the digital rendering is super precise without
% trying to be the same. no replacement}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: http://www.graffitiresearchlab.de/blitztag}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: the germans have made various brushes .. do not
% know i like it that much ..}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: this is more trying to look like graffiti brushes
% but it is not}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: gml is cool to keep it raw}\crlf
% {\tt
%
% % NOWSPEAKING: FS
% % ---------------
% yeah. it is sort of legible in the way a tag also talks
% about how it was done}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: that is why we need data from outside. the way the
% tag is done is always depending on the outside!}\crlf
% {\tt
%
% % NOWSPEAKING: FS
% % ---------------
% what do you mean?}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: i said to evan: look it is cool the gml recorder ..
% but if i am in a room my tag looks different then when i am
% outside}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: it makes a difference when, where, and how to place
% the tag}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: is the place hidden, do i have time, is it crowded, is it a big wall ..}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: what i like also about all gml is the fact}\crlf
% {\tt
%
% % NOWSPEAKING: FS
% % ---------------
% sorry you got disconnected}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: it opened a whole new direction. combination of
% digital art with graffiti art .. the two new popular cultures .. i see
% gml not only as 'x,y, time'. it paved the way to do electronic outdoor stuff.}\crlf
% {\tt momo3010: everybody interesting in doing something into his
% area is somehow connected to gml.}
%
% \page
% {\ss Tying the story to data}
% \startcolumns
% This document is based on conversations between Evan
% Roth (ER) and Femke Snelting (FS), Peter Westenberg (PW), Michele Walther (MW),
% St\'ephanie Villayphiou (SV), John Haltiwanger (JH) and momo3010.
%
% {\tt Evan Roth} is an artist and researcher who explores the
% intersection of free and popular culture. His research into the
% practice of graffiti writing started in 2003 and continues in Graffiti
% Markup Language.
%
% {\tt Constant} is a Brussels based association for Arts and
% Media, interested in the culture and
% ethics of the internet. The practice of Constant is inspired by the way
% that technological infrastructures, data-exchange and software
% determine our daily life. Free software, copyright alternatives and
% (cyber)feminism are important threads running through their
% activities.
%
% In the summer of 2010, Constant commissioned Evan Roth to develop a work
% of his choice, and to make the development process available in some
% way. He decided to use a part of his fee as prize-money for The
% GML-Recorder Challenge, inviting makers to propose an Open Source
% device \quote{that can unobtrusively record graffiti motion
% data during a graffiti writer's normal practice in the
% city}. A related worksession and presentation were
% included in the 13\high{th} edition of
% Jonctions/Verbindingen: Prototypes for transmission.
%
% In three interviews that took place in Brussels and Paris within a
% period of one and a half years, we spoke about the collaborative powers
% of the GML-standard, about contact points between hacker- and
% graffiti-cultures and the granularity of gesture.
% \godown[19.6pt]
% \godown[19.6pt]
% {\tfx Typeset with ConTeXt using Reglo and Linux\crlf Libertine fonts.}
%
% {\tfx Thank you: John Haltiwanger, An Mertens, momo3010, Wendy Van Wynsberghe}
%
% {\tfx {\tt Constant Verlag 2011}\crlf
% Copyleft: This is a free work, you can copy, distribute, and modify it under the terms of the Free Art License
% http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en}
% \stopcolumns
% \stoptext