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."
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?
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!
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.
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?
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
In Barcelona, for example, stencils are used a lot for the quickies. So you end up with something done with spray paint, but it looks a lot more finished. Pretty much it's indistinguishable from the other advertisement pollution out there.
The site has some examples of really goodlooking graffiti art.
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
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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.