March 04, 2011
Tagging the City
Tuesday 8 March, 2011, Impakt HQ, Utrecht. Open: 19.30, start: 20.00. Free entrance.
Today’s cityscapes are tagged not only with traditional graffiti out of the spray can, but also with what could be called ‘digital graffiti technologies’. RFID tags and Photos and Youtube videos placed on Google maps also mark and control virtual and physical territories. The big difference, however, is that these new media technologies are mostly used for entertainment and surveillance purposes and not for individual expressions and political statements. The fifth Utrecht New Media Evening features artists, activists, academics, and developers who discuss the new digital graffiti practices, and how they can establish alternative communicative systems that remain bottom-up and subversive.
Keynote speakers:
- Evan Roth (USA): co-founder of both Graffiti Research Lab and Free Art & Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab). His ‘EyeWriter’, made a paralysed graffiti writer bomb again and Roth developed various digital graffiti analysis tools resulting in ‘Graffiti Taxonomy, Paris 2009’ and the ‘Graffiti Markup Language’, an XML based open file format designed to store graffiti motion data.
- Jeroen Jongeleen/Influenza (NL): internationally renown for his infamous interventions in public space under his alter ego Influenza, prosecuted for vandalism by the same Boijmans he later exhibited in, Jongeleen talks about the relationship between subversive markings on the streets and the web.