High-brow graffiti leads to Web
Founded by an NYU graduate student, grafedia is a new form of street art that unites the wireless and physical worlds. Photos: Grafedia sightings
In the morass of cryptic tags, stickers and drawings, however, one piece doesn't quite fit. It is scrawled on the base of a lamppost near First Avenue in permanent marker and reads "click here," with "here" written in blue and underlined.
Here is how it works: The person posting the piece of grafedia uploads an image to the Grafedia site and chooses a word to associate with it ("here"). That person then writes the word in a public place (street, print media, Internet) and underlines it in blue (the mark that distinguishes grafedia from graffiti; a full e-mail address is also a tip-off).
On the other end, when people see the writing and recognize it as grafedia, they send a text message or e-mail note to the appropriate e-mail address (the underlined word plus @grafedia.net, or here@grafedia.net in the East Village example), and are sent the image.
Founded in December by John Geraci, a New York University graduate student, grafedia has gotten attention primarily from blogs and other Web sites. In March and April, the site logged an average of a few hundred requests for images daily. More than 2,000 images have been uploaded to the server from all over the world, for diverse uses, from advertising personal Web sites to running a treasure hunt at an Australian art school, Geraci said.
Similar projects to grafedia include Yellow Arrow, which uses yellow arrow stickers and text messages to annotate public space, and Murmur, which has been posting phone numbers around Toronto letting visitors call and hear a story set in their location.
Christina Ray, an artist, recently used grafedia as part of an interactive feature in her online magazine, Glowlab, which explores "psychogeography," the effect of spaces on people.
Ray wrote "heystranger@grafedia.net" on clear tape and posted it in a dozen locations around Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Her image depicts a white shadow on a brick wall with the words "Hey stranger, what are you up to today?" and another e-mail address. Ray takes the responses she gets and posts them on Glowlab's site.
The project's goal, which is part of Geraci's work in the NYU interactive telecommunications program, is to "extend the borders of the Web out to physical surfaces," he said. "The separation between the online and the physical universes is artificial anyway." He attributes grafedia's appeal to the public's picking up on the natural merging of wireless and physical spaces, and its desire to explore the trend.
Other recent wireless phenomena attest to Geraci's assertion. Wardriving, the hobby of driving around with a wireless-enabled laptop computer searching for and recording the locations of open wireless networks, became popular in 2001 and was followed by warchalking, the practice of indicating the presence of these same networks on walls or sidewalks with chalk symbols. Neighbornode, Geraci's previous project, encourages people to set up open Internet hot spots that send people first to a community bulletin board, effectively bringing neighbors together through wireless Internet access.
"Taking the Internet into the physical world gives it boundaries and a character or voice that is otherwise lacking," he said.
Graffiti, of course, is often simple vandalism, but Geraci doesn't think he is promoting criminal behavior. He said most grafedia users have never posted graffiti before, and a lot of the grafedia he encounters is done in chalk or on less permanent surfaces like paper, cardboard or a person's skin.
But grafedia could be picked up by traditional graffiti artists, said Karla Murray, a co-author of two books on graffiti. Murray said that graffiti's essence is fame. "The artists are very adaptable," she said. "If grafedia helped them get their name out there, they'd use it."
Geraci said he might rank the most popular grafedia tags on his Web site, so graffiti artists may have a reason to embrace grafedia. On the whole, though, he is just happy to be part of the larger phenomenon.
"It's unquestioned in my mind that the streets will be a point of digital exchange for people in the future," he said. "Whether grafedia will be part of that, I don't know."