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Hektor: the Graffiti Robot
Lopex writes "Gizmodo has a story about Hektor, a graffiti robot. Apparently it is for the extremely geeky (or perhaps extremely lazy) tagger. Hektor.ch has photos, information (pdf), and a movie (15 Mb) of it in action."
A variation of an XY plotter, hanging from cables, gravity pulls it in the Y direction.
A friend and I did something practically identical years ago for a tech shop project in high school, though we werent allowed to use spraypaint, so we had it draw on walls with magic markers, like a giant hanging etch-a-sketch. Worked pretty well, and really wasnt that complicated to build (QBasic "driver" software included)
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Where's the art? I'm sure that there are lots of people who would argue that graffiti is not art, but I feel that it's a valid form of subversive social commentary.
Most of the Graffiti kids I have known tag for a bunch of reasons..
Reasons like the art of it (I've seen some fantastic tags), but mostly the challenge of getting to a spot where you have time to throw a good tag. I mean, half of what people graffiti is their own name, or TAG, mostly on the biggest, most difficult thing to get to that they can find.
It's about the art, and about the challenge. Using a robot seems like mere automated vandalism.