Slashdot Mirror
Grafedia Elevates Graffiti To Art
joredbar writes "Wired.com has a story about a new phenomenon called Grafedia. This is something new that I never heard of before. Grafedia is hyperlinked text, written by hand onto physical surfaces and linking to rich media content - images, video, sound files, and so forth. Grafedia can be written in letters or postcards, on the body as tattoos, on the street, or anywhere you feel like putting it. Viewers 'click' on these Grafedia hyperlinks with their cell phones by sending a message addressed to the word + "@grafedia.net" to get the content behind the link."
Sounds like a good place for gnaa to troll
Sounds like Garffiti for Metro lamers.
Hmmm, now what would you do with a database of SMS-enabled cell phone numbers? Is it illegal to SMS ads to cell phones? What about if they SMS you first?
Seems like an interesting idea, but imagine 40 years from now having to explain the grafedia link tatoo. That doesn't sound to brilliant.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
huh?
Unbelievable. Just when you thought people couldn't do anything more stupid with hax0r language and cellphones some idiot tries to start a new dumb fad.
May stupidness rule the technology world!
Will I be able to use this to get pr0n though?
this totally supercedes festooning the bathroom walls with the phone numbers of the girls who won't date me.
nothing worth possessing isn't possessed. or something.
Hands on the hood of the car! Spread your legs!
Art! My Ass!
Way too much potential for tubgirl/goatse abuse here. I can imagine the horrors as the morning commuters follow a "hyperlink" to a giant, stretched rectum to start their week.
Sounds like the localized sms/email/forum things that people keep thinking is a good idea.
Damn the man!
Could take this a step further. Take a picture with your cell. Send it to a central repository website. The website parses the photo for 'finger print' type markings and matches it in their database. Then the content is displayed.
For instance... I see a Nike Swoosh tag in the men's room. I snap a pic with my cell. Submit it to Graphedia.com. The site responds with an ad for Nike.
Naturally it wouldn't have to all be commercial. But companies would eat it up. And what better way to get going and stay afloat than with corporate advert money?
How is this any different from scrawling an URL? This is going to be used by a few lame advertising campaigns, where every graphedia will have to be acompanied by instructions 'put this word in front of @graphedia.net'.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
The only "useful" function this serice will provide is for spam and advertising. I can see it now.
SMS "happymeal" to the thing and it comes back "H0t nude teens 4 free!!!"
Sounds like an effort to create a new "hip" advertising trend.
No thanks.
This idea has been around for ages. They're called URLs. I can spray paint "slashdot.org" on a wall and you can "link" to that by typing in that address on your cell phone. Doesn't make it a hyperlink. If I gave someone my business card with an email address on it and said "look, my business card has hyperlinks!" they'd think I'm nuts. Much like I think the perpetrator of this ridiculous idea is.
In the name of all that's holy... what mad science is THIS?!
He's actually HAND WRITING urls onto (sit down) PHYSICAL
URLS...
PHYSICAL SURFACES...
Its MAD! No... its more than mad.
ITS I N S A N E !!!!
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Besides, they want me to effectively pay to read graffiti (in the form of picture messaging charges)? I knew the whole IP situation was kinda getting out of hand, but damn!
Check out some stencil graffiti people are creating, Stencil Revolution. There's tutorials and galleries up there.. Sure, some of it's very amateurish but there's also very inspiring work...
Sample 1
Sample 2
r.a.s.1974.
now the local street gang can inform me on how i can enlarge my penis or how their funds are tied up in some bank and they need my help... spam bangers!
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
You know that graffiti has been art for a long time right?
I dont care if its art- If I catch you tagging grafitti links on one of my buildings, your next venue will be in the city pen. Grafitti, Art or No, is still wrong. As long as I still have private property rights, anybody who pastes links on my buildings isnt getting off lightly.
This is the lamest and most pretentious thing I've seen post-Bubble.
it's not so much different from writing your entire website url on the wall. Here they are just taking out the http://www and the .coms.
ultimately, it's a ploy. if i want to look for a keyword, i'll use google. i get better results and i don't have to login to my email to do that.
As an artist struggling to actualy be able to DO any art, I wish to hell I'd thought of this. This is one of those things, that even IF everoyne forgets about it in to years, your name is IN the art history books! An idea this intersting is somehting I might even participate in, just because the "idea" is so good, wether or not it gets co-opted and destroyed.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
Yes, please come vandalize my property. I want gang symbols and political statements on my home or dream-business.
I suggest you read Slashdot
So all this time when I'd see a URL in a TV commercial, or billboard, or magazine ad, bus or whatever and "written down" the "URL" and "typed" it into my "Firefox browsers" "address bar", I've actually been "clicking" on a "hyperlink"?
Sorry, putting "quotes" around "words" that you're "misusing" to "pretend" you're doing something more "impressive" than you really are doesn't change the fact that your "talking" out your "ass".
lets do this, G=C and ad a "p" to *ra*fedia and you will deduce my opinion of that Id'er
how does this crappy idea 'elevate' the art?
As an occasional writer(graffiti artist), I take offence to that.
http://www.visualorgasm.com/
--
Society has traditionally always tried to find scapegoats for its problems. Well, here I am.
The difference is a scrawled URL would be seen as promotion. That's why something like Grafedia works. If advertisers did start using Grafedia (www.grafedia.net), checks could be put into place to thwart them a la Craigslist (i.e. users who message and get an ad can report it; if enough do, it's taken offline). As the grafedia faq says: "To a certain extent, though, grafedia is intended for an audience of insiders - those don't know about grafedia are not necessarily the target audience." So feel free not get involved.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
So not only do I have to send messages, choose a word, and put it somewhere for people to find, or hand out?
And if I want to retrieve.. say I found one somewhere.. I have to either use my phone, or some convoluted e-mail system?
While I applaud the idea for its originality. I'd rather just have a webpage and a gallery.
And if you are somehow to poor to have your own damn page (I mean, come on), but if you are.. how many free picture services are there out there? Nevermind the fall back on MSN or Yahoo or other image hosting company.
To me... this is work... for the artsy fartsy college kids with nothing better to do... sure have at it ladies...
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
But this is stupid and definitely non-news.
Sounds like someone is using Slashdot to get some free press.
People getting caught writting graffiti have to clean up their own mess then 100 or more hours of cleaning other walls.
This will make it soooo much easier to find the culprits of this visual pollution.
"But officer, it's grafedia not graffiti, are you blind or just stupid?"
I'm gonna have a lot of fun with this. I can't wait till the n00bs get into it and make links that dont go to anything.
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
"Elevates grafitti to art" ???
The implication is the "art" is somehow "higher" than anything else is silly.
Anyone who has studied art philosophy (I majored) can tell you that art has no standards or prerequisites. Anyone can declare anything to be art. (Duchamp anyone?)
You can literally shit on a canvas and call it art. In fact you don't even need the canvas.
Grafitti *is* art.
And for that matter so is Slashdot.
If anything, art is "low" -- most other things have defining parameters.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
OK, I shouldn't fall for the troll, but the idea that writing shorthand URLs on walls is art, but non-web-enabled graffiti isn't, is purely laughable. I browse at +3 so I won't have to see things that transparently stupid.
I liked the article, just not the headline. The idea sounds like a fun experiment, though I can't see it scaling well enough to be worth trying '@grafedia.blah' when you see a random word written on a wall.
The next question that's going to come up, of course, is if graffiti is in fact art already. Heh. I've already had the conversation where we talk about whether something is art or not. They're all the same, and I'm over it. For me it's enough to say, some graffiti seems lame, some makes me happy and I'm glad it's there. I recognize that y'all may disagree, and all I can say is, there's a city full of walls you can post complaints at.
How much does it cost? It'sobviously there to make money from little girls not paying the bills.
I like muppets.
if you're any good at it.
I was kind of curious about how quickly a wikipedia article could be taken from nothing up to something interesting, so please pop on over to the Grafedia Wikipedia article and contribute if you have anthing.
I just started the crazy thing. I wonder how this will go.
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
After reading how this works, it is basically just an email auto reply for any given word @grafedia.com.
In my mind, I jumped to thinking that users took a picture on their camera-phone and sent that picture to grafedia. Then image-comparison software would match that image to an image of the same graffiti that the author submitted. If a match was found, the system would retrieved the information that the author "attached." Now that would have been kind of cool! Think steganography meets UPC symbols.
But no, it's just some word as a mail account. Yawn.
I can't wait to see the hundreds of grafiti links to http://www.goat.se
Even better, use it as a way to harvest email addresses. Keep updating content so that people will tell their friends. Even when they know that they are giving out their addresses to complete strangers, they'll continue to do it because they think that they can't stop the spammers anyways.
I suppose Grafedia will claim to not sell addresses, but who's to say that they are telling the truth?
If Grafedia is reliable, will you trust the next organization to show up?
It would be great if we could charge them to receive spam on their cell phones.
testing out my trending skills
'Graf-whatever elevates graffiti to commerce' sounds more appropriate. A great deal of graffiti already is art. It doesn't have to be linked to the web to be art. You morons.
Sounds sorta like warchalking, but I don't think that caught on either.
#include <signature.h>
This MIGHT be cool if you took a *picture* of the "link" with your cell phone, and then grafedia matched the picture to the one in their database and gave you the content. That MIGHT make this cool, but probably not.
or else!
anyword@grafedia.net is tubgirl. This project had potential, but I'm done with it because of this.
Man, this was on Wired three or four days ago. Get with the program Slashdot. I just guess I couple call this a dupe with all the news I read on a daily basis.
TW
Television is dead. Long live That Weasel Television
This could be very intriguing if used properly.
.net/.com/.uk/etc?
More importantly, it raises the question (to me): Why do we have extensions/suffixes on domain names?
The reason I ask is because an apparently new medium of creativity has surfaced. When I read this article, I felt it was blemished by the ".net" that's intrinsically (and permanently) associated with it. In a world where we can put men on the moon, machines on Mars, and use international language/symbols on the internet; why do we still have to have 90's style suffixes appended to internet names?
Do we gain any significant taxonomy by having
In the new global economy/world, I can't help but think that a better method of taxonomy should be created; and if it isn't, at least the existing obsolete method should be eradicated.
That said, I think graffedia is (or will become) a much more significant historical milestone than many people realize.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I just think it's amusing that the people who actually intend to do this sort of thing think that their silly little random words scrawled on things are somehow inherently 'better' than a kid tagging his name.
Newsflash, morons, no-one is going to pick up on this. The majority of people are going to say, "Hey, look at that annoying, stupid, and obscure graffiti!"
Also, way to go flamebait on the title; there is a lot of worthwhile and interesting graffiti out there. It's not just about stupid kids marking their territory, you know. This is, in fact, less art than most of the graffiti that I pay attention to in my city.
Discworld.
Make some graffiti compatible with the CueCat.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
At first I thought you pointed your camera phone at the graffiti, took a picture, sent the picture to a special address, and got some content back. Now that would be kinda cool. Some type of picture recognition thing...
But this is just dumb.
Macintosh humor! MacComedy.com
Where have you been the past couple of centuries?
GRAFFITI IS ART!!!
Also called Writing, Street Art, just to name a few terms, so that idiots like you, stop degrading us artists!!!
I wonder what "Cool 'Disco' Dan" thinks about this? Is this a new frontier for him?
You want to see graffiti art, look at Basquiat, Haring or Fab Five Freddy. Even with the loosest parameters of what "art" is, this ain't it. This is the modern equivalent of a "for a good time, call xxx-xxxx" message scrawled on a bathroom wall.
I'll take ideas that will never see the light of day for 200, Trebek.
How much was slashdot paid for this story?
In Australia I'd be paying 20 cents to send a message with my mobile. So I can see an ad? I get ads for free on the Internet!
You read the Wired story! ...thing... that's, well, see, you give me some money because I, uh,
You perused the slashdot comments!
Now buy this
never mind.
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
Graffiti is art - Tagging is vandalism.
They even want my money for this shit? One can only hope making a buck from it makes it a serious offence. See you behind bars, talentless fuckheads!
Shit does live forever after all.. .
This space is powered by Google Ad-nauseam.
Well that's silly. Those aren't hyperlinks. They're just printed URLs that happen to have been written by hand. This is about as innovative as a cuecat, and isn't at all new-- the one time I was in Cleveland, like four years ago, I could see from the rail system that someone or other had written out the full URL to the mp3.com account for their hip hop group on the backside of a tunnel support, facing where the trains go by.
If you want ACTUAL examples of semantic-web style hyperlinking in Graffiti, go to Houston. I'm still some of it is still there.
A few years ago, I think over the summer, someone went and drew a whole bunch of graffiti in the area around Rice University. At least, that was where most of it that I saw was. All of the graffiti was the exact same thing; a little logo saying "GONE" in stylized cursive. The E in "GONE" would always trail off into a little arrow.
The arrow pointed to the location of the next "GONE" logo.
These were scattered, and the proximity varied. Some of them were quite a ways from each other, some of them seemed to be following a road, some didn't. The only one I remember the specific location of was that there was one on this electrical transformer box on the Main Street side of Rice. But if you found one of these and followed the arrows, it would pick out for you this meandering path through south Houston.
I have no idea where the path lead.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
It seems you can see all/some/? images without sending email by going to:
. jp g
http://www.grafedia.net/images/grafedias/[word]
For example, slashdot.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
for retarded
Grafedia.net has some serious bugs in it's code and I'd be surprised if it didn't go down after getting hit by Slashdot and have all the uploaded images get wiped. Some I've noticed:
:)
Some words just don't work and images get shown as broken links; often the upload wouldn't take.
In process of uploading an image, if you hit your Back button at the Accept/Reject screen, it locks the word as if it were already used when it's not.
Random "division by zero" PHP errors.
More random PHP errors of just about every flavor.
Some email arrives with such mangled headers that Yahoo Mail can't even open the message, shows it as garbage.
Slashdot's entry is too small to read easily (it says: "Hrumph, Slashdot. How do they always know?" then on the screen: "-5 Troll").
Of course this could all be due to the server melting, but still
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
So let me get this straight -- you send a text message to an e-mail address from your phone and a server somewhere sends you some crap, and also...
Sorry, but no thanks.
Fine, I have no trouble with that. But could you please send me your contact details so _you_ can pay the thousands of dollars we spend each year to keep our apartment building free from 'art'?
This is stupid - have people not heard of Tiny URL?
It even supports mailto: as well as standard http links. I think using tinyurl to directly link to your content is better than having to send an email to some crappy site and then get a link to the content.
At least they didn't call it graffiticasting :)
I will suffer much indignity in my next life for this act.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
What I don?t understand is how "Grafedia Elevates Graffiti To Art", some graffiti might be already defined as art. But graffiti links are just links, not art. Of course the target of the link might be art, but a link is just a link.
So I can call my penis "a beautiful woman" and masturbating "having wild sex", and that makes how I spend my Saturday nights not pathetic?
So cell phones in Japan can take pictures of these little encoded diagrams. They are just blocks of black and white (new ones in color coming out this month) and when you take a picture of it, the phone processes the picture into a hyperlink and goes to the corresponding website. It shouldn't be too complex to get ACTUAL graphiti on the walls that you can take a picture of that will translate into websites (based on thier colors, some other image processing, etc.
Probably not the first to say this, but who the hell would get a tattoo of a URL?
Three years later, "Hey, man, your tat 404'd".
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
This has to be one of the more ignorant ideas I've heard of in some time. Technically any (and I mean any) word written on anything (including printed in books, and on this website) can be treated by Grafedia in this manner. Indeed, phrases that are printed everywhere (like "STOP", and "NO PARKING") and some that are infrequently scribbled (like "IDIOCY")
What they've "invented" is a online dictionary lookup that gives a small amount of your money to the cell phone companies (and possibly Grafedia as well!) every time you send a text message to retrieve the dictionary entry. How much money you lose depends on how long it takes you to realize you're just using a text message interface to a dictionary lookup.
It seems to me that this is all just Eskimos buying ice cubes in "Original Ice" flavor.
Don't see this elevating anything. Still sounds like scribbling defacing building and such.....
I thought of doing this to market sites [graffiti URLs) but I figured it would be possible to trace who I am and prosecute me for vandalism, no?
I see. Graffiti wasn't art until a white boy did it. Fuck you, whoever came up with the title for this article. I suppose rap wasn't music until Vanilla Ice came along, huh? Things like this cause me to hate crackers.
http://xkcd.com/386/
This is just lame...
I can see art on grafitti, there's real effort to make something nice looking there. People that make really good grafitti has to commit a lot of time to it, just as a "real" painter, only the canvas is different.
But this grafedia is just like write your webpage addres on a bathroom wall!! It takes NO effort, and it will make LOTS of people ruin perfectly good walls with this shit. I can see now, instead of drawing a penis in the bathroon door, people will start to write links to penis-pictures in the same door!!! Wow! What a revolution!!
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
Why do people hate grafitti? because its pointless loutish abuse of a perfectly serviceable wall..... this A) gives grafitti some sort of meaning and sense for non-louts also B) the potential of the medium for advertising etc..... the same sort of thing when IBM grafittied there logo across a city in biodegradable paint..... only difference instead of a pic hyperlink it to a website or something with a use at the end of the day it is a quirky quality different and in a great sense artistic way to use technology ....... however it is complete bulls**t which is prob what makes it appealing to me at least
Doing it by typing in something isn't much different from a URL, not too cool....
Now if someone came up with an incredibly redundant barcode that I could use a cameraphone to snap a pic of. Later on email/sms that photo, where it is processed, link identified, and content returned... it would be equally useless, but a lot cooler!
Graffiti is art about as much as rap lyrics are poetry. There is a tendency in certain egalitarian circles to call absolutely anything art that wants to be (and also a lot that doesn't), but if everything is art, the term has no meaning anymore, and the attempt to elevate something by calling it art although it obviously isn't only results in dragging everything that actually is art down into the dirt. Sadly, that seems to be just as well to those egalitarians.
...it takes someone to file a lawsute and supoena info about the person that "taged" a hyperlink on the side of their car.
-Dc99
How is that different than just scrawling a URL?
All that does is make it harder for those who don't know about Graphedia to use it. It serves no purpose for someone who finds a random link that happens to be advertising. With normal URLs, you follow the link, and it turns out to be an ad, and you ignore it and move on. With Graphedia, you follow the link, get a page that says it was removed because it was an ad, and you ignore it and move on.
The only functional difference other than making it hard for new users to understand is to allow one place (Graphedia) the power to control/censor all graffiti links.
"You can make street art with grafedia, or just leave behind simple calling cards for others wherever you go. You can have running dialogues between authors, or create interactive narratives or poetry in public spaces. Grafedia is a boundless, interactive publishing platform, base, cheap, and easy to use. It is an open system - the places and ways to use it are limitless. With grafedia, every surface becomes potentially a web page, and the entire physical world can be joined with the Internet. "
None of the things in this statement are new because of "grafedia". In fact, url's have been integrated into graffiti before. It's not ohmygodexcitingtechnology. The main problem with your concept is that you have to guess if every word you see on the wall is supposed to have a grafedia address. That's why url's exist. They are uniform, and people will recognize them for what they are.
Find something interesting to do with art. Nobody's going to want to stand in an alleyway and watch some flash animations on their phone and listen to edgy music. I'm sure that outdated professors will probably be impressed by your internet savvy and fake protocols and you will get your masters in art or whatever, but next time try to create something novel.
http://skralljt.fuckyouanddie.com
RM -RF /*
It was all in caps so it wouldn't work, but still. It's the thought that counts, right? (And if it was lowercase and interactive in any way, the results could be interesting to say the least...)
Nothing is gained by having many TLD (top level domains). The purpose of a TLD was to denote what registry to look in as a last resort when looking up a domain name that was otherwise not cached in any of the DNS servers querried.
.earth appended after the country codes, but I doubt I'll have to worry about that.
Way Back When, When The Net Was Small, TLDs were used to distribute the load among the registries. With the advance of technology, there really isn't any functional reason to do so now.
In the mean time, the registry has been used like an index. Rather than look something up first, a person (machines don't care about DNS, just IP addresses) will type in a likely domain name and hope for the best. It is only after failure that they will go to the indexes like Yahoo and Google and look there for the address just like they would look in the phone book.
With the political forces already having created the country TLDs, there is no point at all to having, as you put it, "90's style suffixes appended to internet names".
What is surprising is the number of otherwise smart people who cannot grasp this. Since the DNS system is already difficult for humans to use by itself (eg. coke.com or coke.net or coke.int or coke.org or coke.ny.ny.us) because they are trying to use it like an index rather than a registry, they then advocate adding yet more TLDs. Yet it is the very use of TLDs that has confused the difference between an index and a registry in their minds in the first place, as well as caused the shell-game problem of which TLD to look under first.
Nothing I'm saying in any way reflects on the usefulness of the hierarchical system that is DNS. It is VERY useful to be able to separate www.whatever.the.heck from mx.whatever.the.heck from www.go.to.heck, etc.etc.etc.heck
The issue is TLDs, and TLDs have outlived their usefulness. At some point in the future, there will be a
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics