14 DAY TRIAL // "Going all city" in graffiti slang means putting your graffiti on trains in every neighborhood. The history of cinematography talks about two remarkable movies that have reinvented the concept: "Style wars" and "Bomb the system", which have turned the hooligans from the streets into "graffiti artists", "taggers" or "writers".
Nowadays, the trains have become a rather dull and overcrowded support for this art, therefore some electronic displays manufacturers have come up with this Graffonic art system that uses an intelligent surface that can detect the path of these lasers that are shone upon it. Once detected, the system creates a sort of trace upon the corresponding area. The process results in a pretty cool, electronic, interactive and paint display.
This might actually lead to some cool possibilities of using the technology, such as new advertisement strategy, street media campaigns, or else. Not to mention the interactivity related to the artistic field it can enable.
Besides that, the Graffonic is said to be the first system of this kind to use the video tracking and laser pointer, that features the ability to generate RGB images.
According to Indicio, the Graffonic uses a video camera, an analog to digital video converter, a video projector and a custom "can" that includes the two already mentioned laser pointers, four batteries, one electric switch and one button, as hardware components.
As software, the system features a custom software that was programmed in the graphical programming environment Max/MSP and includes some nice Jitter objects. It seems that the first version of this kind of installation was presented at the University of Barcelona in July 2006. The current model was exhibited at oPorto, in Portugal, last month. I have to say that some of the videos on the Internet are amazing.
The most important part is that this is never going to be called "an illegal art" ever again. Good job!
And hey, check on it in here:
Pretty damn cool!
