Spraycan Swat Team Covers Entire Train with Graffiti in Minutes

Compared to some of the street artists featured on Watch. Read. Repeat. who tend to, relatively speaking, take their time when creating their images, this group in Germany is a friggin graffiti swat team.

Nathan Fox: The Frustrated Illustrator

 

Nathan Fox was born in 1975 in Washington, D.C., and raised from the age of 5 in suburban Houston. An early addiction to cartoons, commercials and video games led to a lifelong exploration of narrative art and the over-stimulation associated with his generation.

Paris vs. New York: A Tally of Two Cities

Bagel vs. baguette, subway vs. metro, un petit cafe vs. grande frappuccino.  Graphic designer Vahram Muratyan, having recently moved from Paris to NYC, shares with us his realizations of the quaint little idiosyncratic iconography that most of us overlook, these cosmopolitan ambassadors of salt, pepper and tarragon.

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“Paris versus New York: a tally of two cities” is Vahram’s blog, where you will find the rest of his minimalist depictions and contradictions.

Ahmed Alsoudani: After the Attack

In 1995, a 19 year-old budding artist, rambling about the streets of his Baghdad neighborhood, thought it would be a good idea to deface the local mural of Saddam Hussein. Ahmed Alsoudani, saw this as prank, not any sort of political statement. It was a prank he immediately began to regret. Under Iraq’s violent Baathist regime the consequences for such an action were severe. With a growing feeling that his life was in danger, Ahmed hightailed it out of town in the back of a taxi and made his way to Syria, where he lived for four years before being granted political asylum by the United States.

Play Digital Spy with Covert USB Drives Hidden Around the City

In a scrupulous world, this would be a really cool idea.  As part of his residency with EyeBeam in New York City, Aram Bartholl has created an interesting sociological experiment.  An anonymous, offline, peer-to-peer file sharing network.  On the sly, he has secreted USB flash drives into walls, buildings and street curbs, in publicly accessible spaces

Dave Murray’s Art is Viciously Fantastical

Dave Murray is a Chicago-based artist working in photography, sculpture, and digital media. Falling, Jumping, Mirrors, Office Plant, Shark, Cans, Skies, Stars, Frisbees, Bats, Ghosts, Boxes, Boulder, Rocks, Legs, Cones, Balloons, Mandalas, Skull, Cheerleaders, Sports, Politics, and much more. – via http://www.davidamurray.net/

I stumbled upon Dave, well not so much Dave, but his wickedly funny “Self Portrait as a Dinosaur with Dog”, on display at the School of the Art Institute’s Boomerang exhibition space on Wabash, between Madison and Monroe, in Chicago. 

“A” Train Dancers Bust a Move on the NYC Subway

The unexpected and spontaneous can often be a lot more fun than planned and calculated.  This is one of the reasons I love street art.  A chance encounter with a captivating image can be an enthralling experience.  Not limited to spray paint on concrete, street artists and performers share their talents in unexpected venues, as do these dancers on a New York City subway car.

Glowing LED Tattoos, The Next Big Thing in Body Modification?

 

Although they’ve seen a surge in popularity over the past decade, tattoos are basically created the same way they have been for eons.  Ink forced under the skin by a sharp implement.  Now, thanks to an international team of researchers, led by John Rogers at the University of Illinois, subdural illumination could soon be coming to a tattoo parlor near you. 

Week’s 5 Most Popular Stories: Oct. 11-Oct. 17, 2010

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Scratching the Surface with Portuguese Street Artist “Vhils”

Only 23 years young, contemporary Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto, aka Vhils, chips away at established notions with his destructive approach to street art.  Reverse graffiti, architectural sculpture, creative vandalism?  Whatever you chose to call it, the images he scratches into building facades with jackhammer and pick are downright mesmerizing, haunting even.  Weather-worn faces gazing out from alleyways, lonely apparitions consigned to oblivion.

Banksy Creates “The Simpsons” Opening. Dark, Political… Surprise.

This past weekend’s “The Simpsons” took their regular opening credits “couch gag” somewhere they haven’t been before.  Dark… actually, very dark and unexpectedly thought pervoking (unexpectedly until you realize who storyboarded it, that is).  Riffing on slave labor-like conditions in Asian factories, that happen to be making “Simpsons” animation slides and dvds, the opening sequence was created by none other than our favorite guerilla street artist Banksy.  (video after the jump) 

Radical Cartography Maps Chicago’s Racial Divides and Nuclear Explosions

Radical Cartography is the website of historian and cartographer, Bill Rankin.  Currently working on a PhD at Harvard, Rankin has done considerable research on the changing technologies of cartography (map making) and navigation in the twentieth century.   His mapping activity is focused on reimagining everyday urban and territorial geographies by pushing techniques of statistical information design and rethinking everyday cartographic conventions.

Rankin’s maps help us visualize racial divides in Chicago (as featured below), university campuses surrounding Boston, building heights in Manhattan, the spread of agriculture over the past 300 years, and the location of every nuclear explosion around the world since 1945.