Image via Complex Original
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
Ron English
In April 2011, Ron English put up this billboard along the U.S./Mexico border. This photograph of the billboard, along with photos of some of English’s other hijinks at the border, were spread online through blogs. Presumably, most of the people who saw the photograph were not those who spend a lot of time along the U.S./Mexico border, but they might have some pretty strong opinions, nonetheless, about immigration, drugs, and other issues that connect Mexicans and Americans. English points out that most of us are really just armchair politicians and activists without any real idea of what’s going on in Mexico, because we haven’t been there to experience it ourselves. English says, “Even if you’re well-informed, you having a well-informed opinion is not the same as being there.” It’s not quite Internet art, but this is a piece that’s certainly made to be seen by an online audience rather than those people who might see it in person.
Insa
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
Kidult
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
Lush
Lush
With stitched-together pieces like this one, Lush has made work that exists in the physical world but really makes no sense there. Any one of those words seen individually wouldn’t even make sense as graffiti, since it’s not a name, a slogan, or anything really meaningful. It would just be a random word. Put together though, the complete piece is hilarious. More so than any other examples so far, Lush has modified what he does on the street so that it is best viewed online instead of in the flesh.
Above: Why don't you just go home... by Lush
Blu and David Ellis
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
KATSU
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
Matt Troy
Maybe Matt Troy is just a spammer or a troll, or maybe he is a great artist. His Twitter profile describes him as a “real person,” so I’ve got my doubts about that. But nonetheless, Troy or the person behind the person seems to know what he is doing. In addition to posting photos dealing with our digital existence to Instagram, GIFboom, and Tumblr, Troy brings his art to new audiences on Instagram by commenting on people’s photos and including his art, which often consists of patterns or figures made up of text, characters, or emoji. Using characters that he can type to form his work means that Troy can insert his work into anyone’s Instagram stream by simply commenting on their photos with his art. Recently, Troy posted a comment on the Instagram of Jayson Musson (the man behind the Hennessy Youngman character), at which point Musson compared Troy’s comment to the net art version of graffiti. I don’t think Musson was being serious, but I do think he was somewhat right.
Jeff Greenspan
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
John Fekner
John Fekner
John Fekner has been doing street art since the 1970s, but he’s as up on digital art and Internet art as anyone half his age. With his street art, Fekner often seemed to put work where people would least expect it, like on sidewalks in residential neighborhoods, for example. The works in his Kickwriting series appeared in an equally unexpected digital space: Flickr search results. In the case of Give a damn donate to Japan, which was made after the earthquake in 2011, Fekner’s message, split up into a series of images, can appear unexpectedly in Flickr search results for “red cross” or “earthquake.” Fekner says, “the sentence and individual letters start to be 'kicked' around, float, disseminated, and scatter in image searches on the Internet in cryptic and accidental combinations, interpretations, and meanings.” The work is less for his already existing fans than for those who might randomly stumble across it while looking for something else, just like a piece of street art; except in this case, the viewer is online rather than at a street corner.
Above: Give a damn donate to Japan by John Fekner
Franco and Eva Mattes
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