It must be the absolute pinnacle of achievement for a graffiti artist: putting your own “tag”, several meters high, on a prominent building … within a couple of seconds! The Colosseum in Rome, the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, Tate Modern in London … all have been decorated with enormous graffiti – laser graffiti, to be exact – as part of an interesting project by the Graffiti Research Lab. And the beauty of it is: everyone can join in! The necessary software, Laser Tag 2.0, can be downloaded for free.
Graffiti Research Lab is “dedicated to outfitting graffiti artists with open source technologies for urban communication.” The organization has its roots in New York, but there are also chapters in Australia, Austria, Brazil, and the Netherlands. The members give a whole new meaning to graffiti and street art. All the experiments are extensively documented on the website, by means of videos, Do-It-Yourself instructions and free software. This way, anyone can learn the technique, put it into practice and, if desired, expand it further.
Lately, one of the most noticeable projects has been Laser Tag. In its simplest form, the Laser Tag system 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 building with a high power projector.
Laser graffiti is not permanent, but it allows the graffiti to be placed on a much larger scale. Quite a few special buildings have been ‘targeted’ already, such as the Colosseum in Rome and Temple Street in Hong Kong. Early this year, laser graffiti was even on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as part of the Design and The Elastic Mind exhibition.
All you need is a fast laptop, a video camera, a projector, a laser pen, and the free software Laser Tag 2.0, which Graffiti Research Lab developed in collaboration with Theodore Watson and Zachary Lieberman. With these means, anyone can put tags and messages on buildings, walls and bridges. Even from hundreds of meters away.
Links:
www.graffitiresearchlab.com
www.muonics.net/blog/index.php?postid=26 (Free download Laser Tag 2.0 software)
