Spin out company launches crowd-made graffiti
An InfoLab21 spin-out company has exhibited a unique piece of crowd-created graffiti with a little help from the iPhone.
Digital art company BigDog Interactive (BDI) exhibited their invention “Graffito” at Vintage@Goodwood celebration on (August 13-15th 2010) in front of an audience of thousands.
Graffito allows anyone paint on a projection screen using their iPhone touchscreen, or by dancing around with their iPhone. Anyone at the event could join in at the same time, scrawling on a 30-foot LED projection screen with digital paint.
Inspired by the underground 80s hip hop scene, Graffito pays homage to guerrilla street art and turns it into a celebration of pop culture on a massive scale.
It can also be played online and has had over 6,500 downloads since going live just two weeks ago. The online version runs continuously, so that anyone online can draw graffiti at any time with anyone else from anywhere in the world.
Graffito is a collaborative effort between several UK partners who are experimenting with next generation digital live art and is supported by Horizon Digital Economy Research (Research Councils UK grant EP/G065802/1). The partners are: BigDog Interactive (lead); the Interactional Sound and Music Group, Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London; Mixed Reality Lab and Horizon Digital Economy Research, University of Nottingham; Proboscis; and, the University of Glasgow.
The Graffito app is free, and is available for download on the AppStore http://graffito.bigdoginteractive.com
To see photos of Graffito in action visit or the GraffitoApp Flickr page.
http://www.graffito.bigdoginteractive.com/gallery.htm
About the Artists
Graffito is a collaborative effort between 5 UK partners inspired by the Information Age who are experimenting with next generation digital art.
BigDog Interactive is a small company of creative computer programmers who invent mobile applications, interactive art installations, and live events (www.bigdoginteractive.com).
The Interactional Sound and Music group at the world-leading Centre for Digital Music explores new ways of encountering sound from interactive art to real time data sonification, and has been instrumental in a number of art-science commissions and exhibitions (www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/digitalmusic/interactional.html).
Proboscis is an artist-led studio that combines artistic practice with commissioning, curatorial projects, design and consultancy to explore social, cultural and creative issues (www.proboscis.org.uk).
The Mixed Reality Lab is a dedicated studio facility where computer scientists, psychologists, sociologists, engineers, architects and artists collaborate to explore the potential of ubiquitous, mobile and mixed reality technologies to shape everyday life (www.mrl.nott.ac.uk).
The SumGroup at University of Glasgow mixes theory, user experience design and system design to develop ubiquitous computing applications for public settings (http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/people/personal/matthew/DCS/Sumgroup.html).
Vintage@Goodwood was the first of what will be an annual music and fashion led celebration of creative British cool from the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s inspired by Britain’s rich and creative cultural heritage.