10 Artists Using the Internet Like the Street

Filling in the voids of cyberspace.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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For the past few years, I’ve been working on a book and writing on Vandalog.com about the increasing number of artists who are treating the Internet like the street. Sometimes the work looks like street art and other times like graffiti, but it all comes fully to life when experienced digitally.

As I’ve written before, for some of these artists, a physical work exists, but it’s the performance that matters most. For others, the work is entirely digital, and yet it still either appears similar to or function similarly to graffiti or street art. If street art and graffiti are about putting work in front of people’s eyeballs, then it makes sense that the same artists interested in working outdoors would make art for a digital audience now that our eyeballs are always in front of screens rather than scanning the walls of a city. Many of these artists’ projects are featured in my upcoming ebook on street art and the internet, due out sometime later this year.

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Ron English

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Insa

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Insa

Insa’s “GIF-itti” is a great innovation to draw in a digital audience for graffiti and street art. One frame still exists as a static piece on a street somewhere for passersby to enjoy, but the finished product really has to be seen online. Whereas graffiti and street art have been monetized for decades now, it’s still pretty difficult to make money off a GIF. It basically has to be free, something that goes back to nostalgic feelings about early street art and graffiti, and which Insa embraces, having said, “I quite like the fact my GIFs can’t be [sic] brought or sold or hung on a gallery wall per se. Once a GIF has been uploaded, it is free to travel and be seen by many.” In that same article, Insa also notes that his GIFs can be seen online by a lot more people than might physically pass by the walls they are painted on. As with any photographed piece of graffiti, the potential audience goes from quite tiny to quite large as soon as the work is uploaded online; however, Insa’s GIFs have the added appeal of animation, which sets them apart from the crowd of traditional graffiti photographs being uploaded to the web.

Above: Mural at Unit 44 by Insa

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Kidult

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Kidult

Kidult is famous for using fire extinguishers to put giant tags on the storefronts of luxury brands that have used graffiti-style work in their products or marketing. The only thing is, these pieces don’t usually last too long. Most stores are understandably quick to remove Kidult’s work and get things back to business as usual. That’s why it is essential that Kidult documents his work. His medium of choice for documentation is video. In the case of his piece on the Supreme store in New York City, Kidult is shown spouting off a sort of manifesto over creepy music for more time than any footage of his actual graffiti gets. Seeing the finished tag in-person is like seeing only a third of Kidult’s piece. One-third is what he has to say, one-third is the performance, and only the final third is the finished piece. Maybe the tag would still make sense on its own, but the only way to really see the work as intended is to watch Kidult’s video online.

Above: Kidult hits Supreme NYC

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Lush

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Blu and David Ellis

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Blu and David Ellis

In Combo, Blu and David Ellis made a series of super ephemeral work outdoors and recorded the process, turning it into a video. That is to say, they made an animation, and they made it outdoors on a huge scale rather than just drawing it out on a piece of paper. I’ve actually visited the place where Combo was made, and the remnants of the piece are pretty uninteresting unless you’ve seen the film already. The point was very clearly for the animation to be the finished product, and for that animation to be seen on the web by many more people than would have ever seen a single static piece on that same location. After all, they painted Combo in an abandoned monastery outside of a small town in Italy.

Above: Combo by Blu and David Ellis

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KATSU

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KATSU

When KATSU tagged a spot just outside of the White House in broad daylight, the video spread around the web like wildfire. It wasn’t the biggest or baddest piece of graffiti that was ever done, but it was KATSU and it was cool. Fans were in such a rush to share the video with their friends that they forgot to, you know, watch the video properly. The video is a fake. KATSU just filmed himself doing the motions for a tag in that spot and edited the “paint” in later. Regardless of the authenticity of the video, it has received nearly 100,000 views on YouTube, so that seems like a success to me. With this video, KATSU showed very clearly that graffiti didn’t need to exist in the physical world for graffiti writers to still gain the fame that a real-world piece might get them.

Above: KATSU White House

Matt Troy

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Jeff Greenspan

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Jeff Greenspan

Jeff Greenspan’s Letterbombing doesn’t really work anymore thanks to the Facebook redesign (although it could still work on Twitter), but the idea got around the fatal flaw in Matt Troy’s comment art: Any can just delete a strange comment. What’s a lot less apparent to any spam screeners who might be out there policing Glenn Beck’s Facebook page are profile pictures. There’s where Letterbombing comes in. By posting innocuous messages on any given Facebook wall, Greenspan and his friends could slip past the filters and insert their real message onto Facebook walls by hiding it in their profile pictures.

Above: Letterbombing by Jeff Greenspan

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John Fekner

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Franco and Eva Mattes

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Franco and Eva Mattes

Not everyone wants to see art all the time. Too bad. For Freedom, Franco and Eva Mattes forced performance art onto an unsuspecting and unwilling online crowd. One of them entered a game of the online first-person shooter game Counter-Strike, where they tried to ask people to hold off just a moment before killing them, because they were just trying to be artists, not killers. The Counter-Strike community was not very interested, but the other players also didn’t have much of a choice. The duo was there to perform in that digital space no matter what anybody said. It's like if they had staged a similar performance in the middle of a LARP event at a public park in the physical world.

Above: Freedom by Franco and Eva Mattes

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