think demux

I don’t know where you live. But I live in London. And I’m seeing more colour on the city walls every day.

Street artists are embracing happytalism (no need for a dictionary, just click it). We’re getting Space Invaders and 8-bit written bright. Decayed pillars restructured with Lego bricks. Buildings transformed into cartoon monsters.

It’s happening globally, which is the most exciting thing about it. I’m sure Os Gemeos must have set much of the paint in motion. But bucketloads of what’s happening now is new and transformative - going well beyond “graffiti” and exploring all the senses. Using every material to hand. Even balloons.

These pictures come from Washington D.C. and are the work of D.BILLY. I’m massively impressed.

Puts a whole new, and knowing, spin on a huge visual trend. Are we kids again? Or clowns?

For more on D.BILLY, posts at Designboom, And I Am Not Lying and PSFK.

Plus check out D.BILLY’s Flickr photostream.

And if you’re feeling the artier side of this new wave of street art, Ian Tait’s written a nice post about sculptural graffiti in Brighton.

Toronto street artist Posterchild went to New York this month and transformed digital ad platforms into stained-glass graffiti installations. Watch the video below. (via)

At the same time, the CutUp Collective are removing London ad posters wholesale, cutting them into thousands of bits, then reconfiguring the display space with their recycled material. (via)

Do corporate identities represent the last big remix taboo? Now that brands are present in social online spaces, will they ever let themselves be personalised?

Or is it left for the street artist to educate them in humanity?

Previously: Brand logos remixed; Skullphone hijacks New York billboards.

Last year in Buenos Aires I was hungry-eyed on the streets. There was protest, performance, politicking and an implacable air of tango. Under the stern skies, always life and movement.

Now, after a winter of work by Blu, the walls have started moving (thanks Kaara for the link).

So what the hell’s happening out there?

You can keep a watchful eye on What’s Up Buenos Aires.

And if you need a motion refill, last month Buenos Aires hosted Punto y Raya (snippet below). Not the same ai ai ai! factor as Blu’s animation, but a bucketload of technique.

Back to basics: dots, lines, movement.

All core for VJs. But with HD and new(ish) sites like Vimeo - not to mention BBC’s iPlayer - everyone needs to stay sharp to movimiento.

It’s a language the whole world’s speaking in. You gotta catch its finer inflections.

Update: Blu, the artist who created the first video, is from Bologna. You can read his blog here. More info about the production here. And a well-gathered overview at Drawn!

Remember when tagging was something a graffiti artist did?

Here’s something a graffiti artist did at the end of Bethnal Green Rd. He - or she? I’ll finish with their tag so you can decide - made their mark with gold.

Whether you do it to walls, photos on Facebook or blog posts, you’re doing the same thing when you tag. You’re splashing on your own interpretation. You could be daubing shit, or you could add glitter.

What’s the nozzle? Can you add; can you do it with style.

No reason your attitude should be different on or offline. Frederik Samuel clocked Paint That Shit Gold this week. It lets you tag or graf any website you like with a gold spraycan.

Tagging keeps growing and paint gets splashed. You can see why.

We want to add our mark. And we’re getting better at it.

Previously: Brazilians tag Brighton. Who was the artist above? (click thumbnail to see the answer big.)

Not a bad job, really. Small office - but one whole wall for a window. Wow.

What are the tips like?

Wait a second… It’s just an ad. And from a company that speaks in German. Well that’s another opportunity lost.

Luckily for everyone in the first world, it’s easy to get a bad job. The trick is keeping it.

It’s harder to get hold of a good job. And when you do it might take hold of you. Pressing more buttons and a kicking when you don’t produce. Without regular oiling, it can make you click into machine mode to protect yourself.

Not in Japan. To evade assailants and superiors you can dress up as machine and stay safe. Although it would involve hours of standing still.

Best way to stay unspotted in the metropolis. But too much robot and no progress. Shame we do it most when there’s greatest pressure. Greatest sense of danger, in public or private.

You can switch off and relax. 

In Japan, crime rates are getting lower. The average age is getting higher. You’ll live, even if you’re a cyborg. You can get a job in a vending machine if it gets too much.

While we’re on that - milk two, please. Anyone else want a cup?

There were suspiciously few dogs on the so-called “Isle of Dogs” last weekend. And I only hope to dear God my camera read this wrong.

Must have blinked and missed a word. Either way, there are absent pieces in this sordid puzzle.

Meanwhile downtown, a White Horse has gone missing. He left this eloquent note to explain his absence:

Phew. No need to fear animal disposal this time. “Kick up the arse” sounds horsey enough to me, too. It can’t be some shadow-written sham.

Two valuable lessons in animal conversation.

1. You’ve got to watch which words you miss out. Or you’ll be misread between the lines.

2. It’s usually best to be clear and direct. Especially if you’ve got nothing to hide and something relevant to say.

Previously: talking to chihuahuas. Seriously: Chris Wilson’s Human Talk. Sincerely: responses to bad, automated humanspeak. 

As they say in Australia. That’s round the other side of the Earth from me right now. Hello from space stilts!

You could send a satellited message like the one above with geoGreeting. It peers down from Google Maps to spell things out with letter-shaped buildings.

Neat, huh?

But there’s a blinking frost about the astro cyclops. We want more freedom to play, less unsolicited surveillance.

Melanie Coles ran free and got drawing on the Earth over in Vancouver. Now we can do find and seek with the satellites instead. Suddenly they seem more friendly. 

(via Neil Perkin . Thanks, Neil. I hope you don’t mind this friendly reference.)

The Canadian art student challenges you to Where’s Waldo using a rooftop and Google Maps. Puts a whole different perspective on geotagging. Paint your tag on buildings instead.

But you’re reading this online. I expect you won’t go square-eyed and anti-social working with pixels.

So let me ask you - do you upload pictures to Flickr? Flickr does geotagging. There’s been geotagging for years - and on a lot of photos. Put those photos together and we’re getting something approaching an Earth-sized 3D digital map.

If this is beginning to sound like alienspeak, I refer you to a far brighter earthling.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas gave the world a glimpse of Photosynth last year at TED. I had to rub my eyes.

Hold tight to to your stilts. Then be sure you watch this. We’re gazing into a distant future. But it’s not light years away, my friend.

I’ve been switching lanes on the walk home. Still can’t believe I never noticed this before on Old Street. Apparently there are others around town.

The body as building. It’s not a new one, but you’ve got to love it. The Central London Osteopathy and Sports Injury Clinic made me think about my back in a way I hadn’t done before. I’m thinking about my back right now just writing about it.

The mind reeled onto this spot of body rocking by Publicis New York, seen on the blog of French maestros Marketing Alternatif a few days ago.

1. If your idea’s to do with the skeleton, use architecture

2. If it’s to do with the organs, take the appliances inside

That’s if you want to transform a building into a body, of course. Personally, at this moment, I’m more concerned with turning an empty juice carton into a drink. It’ll need some imagination.

Two scraps of bin magic on the way home from work today. First up, Will Self’s new novel gets the contextual marketing treatment. People (should) put cigarette butts in bins. This is a bin. The novel is called The Butt. Straightforward enough. Did this get Bloomsbury’s blessing? I don’t know. But as this is a bin on the corner of Brick Lane it’s sure to recycle hot air into conversation and back again. Hipsters can still casually toss their fag ends to the gutter, safe in the knowledge that even though they’ve seen an ad for a novel, there’s no threat they’ll ever have to read one.

Which leads me to wonder, who’s the real star here? Every Sunday, art students and Bohemian nomads hawk bric-a-brac on Brick Lane. There are some literary left-overs on offer, but they’re sold more as material to be mashed up in mixed media pieces than something to read. We’re looking at trash fetishism. Which is exactly what I saw just down the road. 

The Keep Britain Tidy logo gets a remixing. Again, I don’t know who’s responsible - but the conscientious litter dispenser is the star. So, confusingly, is the rubbish itself (you might have to look at the enlarged photo to see what I’m talking about). Are we all heroes in the vast daily consumption of packaged products and the disposal of said packaging?

Well, here’s the London rub. In most built-up areas, there aren’t many bins. Sometimes there aren’t any at all. Bins were the silent victims of terrorism. People put bombs in bins, so the government got rid of them. Leaving us often with nowhere to get rid of our rubbish.

Now the bin star is once again rising, we should take the example of Scotland. I was living in Edinburgh when the smoke ban came in during 2006. The City of Edinburgh did some pretty uncompromising advertising under the banner of ”Aye Butt. Nae Butt“, backed up by a bottom-line: smokers who chucked their butts would be fined.

Public information threats haven’t worked on people who still smoke. But Edinburgh gave something more than a threat. They added silver stub-trays to the tops of most bins.

They gave smokers a design solution, and genuinely made the bin the star. However you perceived the threat, there was absolutely no reason to take the risk. Law-abiding had been made a no-brainer and you’d be worse than a labotomised hipster to eschew it. (And no, “ironic” is not an excuse).

London just needs to take another good, long stare at its most important constellation.