Graffiti Hackers use Text-message projectors, Paintball printers.

[Ian David]

Graffiti Hackers
Text-message projectors. Paintball printers. Wall-crawling robots. The new crew of tech taggers makes a name for itself.

Who: fi5e
Where: New York City
How: The artist known as fi5e filmed four local taggers as they used a marker attached to a penlight to write their names on sheets of plexiglass. Then he beamed the footage onto office buildings, hospitals, and the stone arch in Manhattan's Washington Square Park, using a digital projector and a laptop running software he wrote that enables him to manipulate the projected images. The result: graffiti on a monumental scale. The project, titled Graffiti Analysis, recently toured the US as part of the Resfest 2005 film festival, bringing fi5e's tag artists to a wider audience.
Word: "If people see a Hell or Avone tag projected in motion at night," fi5e says, "then perhaps the next time they see one in ink, they'll be excited instead of upset."

ART BOT

Who: Designer Jürg Lehni and electronics engineer Uli Franke
Where: Zurich, SwitzerlandHow: Lehni transforms a scanned image into vector graphic paths using Adobe Illustrator and an open source plug-in called Scriptographer. The digital info is then sent to two wall-mounted motors that control a spray paint can rigged to a set of belts. The contraption, dubbed Hektor, then crisscrosses the surface, sketching the illustration. Hektor once reproduced graffiti artwork from the 1982 film Wild Style.
Word: "Graffiti and spray paint are very direct and rather radical means of expression," Lehni says. "Tech art often has a motivation in activism, so the two go well together."

PHONE TAG

Who: Troika artist group
Where: London
How: The SMS Guerrilla Projector - a Nokia cell phone attached to a miniature projector with a long-throw lens - can cast text messages more than 80 feet away onto street signs, buildings, and unsuspecting passersby; once it was even used to beam questions into people's living rooms. Troika members occasionally project a phone number - or hand it out to pedestrians on business cards - so that people can send the team suggested text messages. The artists then select phrases best suited for the location they have in mind: for example, "Where are we all going?" over a road sign, or, next to surveillance cameras, "You are being watched. CCTV monitoring."
Word: "It's a powerful way to exhibit your thoughts and make people react," says Troika member Sebastien Noel. "The effect can be as strong as the most thought-provoking kinds of graffiti."

PAINTBALL PRINTER

Who: De Ponk art co-op
Where: Groningen, the Netherlands
How: Straying away from spray cans and markers, De Ponk throws up graffiti with a paintball rifle modded into a point-and-shoot brush. The gun is mounted on a pan-and-tilt unit that's controlled remotely by a laptop. Software analyzes a digital image and creates a set of coordinates that the device uses to aim and fire ink bullets at three shots per second, essentially turning the paintball gun into a large-scale inkjet printer. De Ponk named the machine PrintBall. Its designs - words, smiley faces, shapes - are primitive. But the co-op hopes to try four-color printing using cyan, yellow, magenta, and black pellets, and eventually wants to take its graffiti bot to the streets.
Word: "Paintball guns are used to simulate war, so we wanted to convert one into a communication weapon," explains a group member who calls himself bnjmn Gaulon.

More:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/graffiti.html