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 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
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.
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.
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
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 : )
Gotta agree; pointless... At least with old fashioned graffiti there was a slim chance that you could view something that was visually pleasing while you contemplated the fact that what you are looking at is basically an act of vandalism.
Now all you get is a word, or a link, that is still an act of valdalism. But there's really nothing to look at. You've got to go look up the actual content using your cell phone, and then it might be something really lame - or worse, a goatse link.
What's the point? How many people are going to take the creator's word that the relevent link will be pleasing/funny/informative/(insert adjective here)? Especially after the first penis-enlargement Grafedia works start showing up. (Hey spammers! Here's a new delivery method for you! Get your victims, er - customers, to actually come to you for a change!)
You know that graffiti has been art for a long time right?
"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 : )
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?
Sounds like a bunch of pricks trying to pretend they are intelligent...
TODO: Something witty here...
i thought the opposite, it reminded me of the kind of things some of my stoner friends would think up... "what if you could click on links i real life.... like on a web page.... but in real life......yea man you could click on it with your phone or something...." but the next day rather than realizing it was dumb they decided to actually do it.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
They replace a picture with a hyperlink to the picture and this elevates it to art?
A big spraypainted mural on the side of a run down building is graffiti elevated to art. This is more like sinking to the level of a phone number in a bathroom stall.
I feel stupider for having been exposed to this idiocy.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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
I'm not at all opposed to self-expression, and shame has nothing to do with it. What I'm opposed to is the $4000 - $5000 that we have to spend to keep our building clean. Just for the record, I do not want to live inside somebody else's self-expression. I believe I should have that freedom, as a part-owner of the building.
Would you agree to let me come to your house and spray paint in any location I choose (be it on your car, your windows, your dog, your music collection, or whatever)? Because I dearly want to express myself in such manner. I promise I won't write anything nasty about you.
On a similar note: if I ever catch someone vandalizing my house I'll happily spray all the paint he carries over his clothes, his body and his vehicle, as an act of self-expression on my part.
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.