Guerrilla Gifting. Greenjacker
Despite the best attempts of unscrupulous dealers (see Bloomin’ Banksy’ in Doncopolitan issue 1), street art remains among the most generous of art forms. Some artists may be seeking fame and fortune, but the act of presenting your work in such a public manner cannot help but place the emphasis back on communication, the original purpose of art, rather than mere commodity. As such you could argue that it’s also among the most immediate of mediums. World renowned muralist Phlegm once told me that he felt one of the most important aspects of his work is the discovery; that moment when the viewer turns a street corner to find the humdrum everyday suddenly transformed into a moment of wonder, paint and grey city walls acting as a portal to the imagination. Hack the art from those walls and hang it in a gallery – or, worse still, in the vault of a private collector – and the potential for discovery is obliterated. The image remains, but its reason for existing has changed utterly, from wonder to wallpaper in three easy steps. The whole process makes about as much sense as stuffing a nightingale
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because you enjoy the beauty of its song. Leave it in its urban environment (the street art that is, not the nightingale) and it remains charged with art’s greatest gift – the power to transform. In recent decades, a whole host of art forms and crafts have joined the spray can and wheat paste in their endeavour to transform public spaces. From yarn bombing (using wool and knitted items to decorate public spaces) to flash mobs, street dance to parkour, every artistic discipline has the potential to create those explosive moments of joy, surprise and wonder which turn the monotony of another grey day into a lasting memory. Advances in technology have also created new ways to transform the everyday, as well as presenting completely new opportunities for people who may otherwise have struggled to express themselves. Projection Bombing, using powerful projectors to transform the look of a public space or building, allows people to express themselves without making any permanent changes to the space in question. The Graffiti Research Lab (GRL) took this a stage further and
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developed a system which allowed a paraplegic graffiti artist to write his tag using eye movements and have it projected in huge letters on buildings via a mobile broadcast unit. GRL’s description of this unit gives us a good idea of their motives: The Mobile Broadcast Unit with L.A.S.E.R Tag System (LTS) is the latest Open Source, Weapon of Mass Defacement developed by the Graffiti Research Lab in the Eyebeam R&D OpenLab, NYC. This tactical tool allows any citizen, graff writer, artist or protester to use a projector, camera and laser to write, in real-time, on large-scale surfaces and structures from a distance of 100’s of meters away. Citizens can post their art, messages and propaganda on a scale previously monopolized by advertisers, governments, major media, and other cultural tyrants... Like previous work by the GRL, the MBU + LTS has been created as a tool to amplify the voices of everyday citizens and people in the fringe: artists, activists, pranksters and other undesirables in opposition to the dominant global cultural forces of consumerism, control and oppression.