• GML + RoboTagger

    A labor-saving device for graffiti artists. An assistive tool or telematic proxy for taggers working in harsh environments. Long-needed relief for graffiti artists with RSI. Or simply, pure research into as-yet-untrammeled intersections of automation and architecture. We give you: the ROBOTAGGER, an industrial robot arm programmed with GML, the new “Graffiti Markup Language” created by Evan Roth and pals at the FAT Lab.

    This quick project came together over the past weekend in CMU’s Digital Fabrication Laboratory (dFAB), directed by my pal, Professor Jeremy Ficca. Inspired by a tweet from Evan Roth, one of the co-creators of GML, we reckoned it would be easy to transcode GML into a file format suitable for robotic CAD/CAM machining. The result is a small Processing utility that converts GML into DXF and CSV (you can download the GML-to-DXF source code here). After tinkering around for a while we developed a pipeline for converting the GML/DXF strokes from 000000book.com into machining paths for the dFAB’s ABB IRB-4400, an eight foot tall industrial robot arm. One of our first tags, which you can see in the video, was made from GML produced by TEMPT ONE (Tony Quan), a graffiti writer with Lou Gehrig’s disease who produced the GML recording with the FAT Lab’s well-known EyeWriter software. Although there’s been a lot of data loss and translation along the way, it’s not completely unreasonable to think of the Robotagger as a prosthesis for Tony. I hope we can pursue this possibility a little further.

    Speaking of future directions, there are lots of interesting research topics latent here in automated calligraphy. We were astonished to realize just how important the force-feedback of pressure is to the visual quality of the drawings. (The first 20 seconds of the video shows what I mean in an extreme way – we shattered a marker and sent ink everywhere when our estimate of the Z-plane turned out to be off by a quarter-inch. Looks like we need to get that force-measuring software extension that ABB sells.) Going forward, we’re interested in exploring robotic performances of higher-dimensional gesture data, such as that produced by Wacom tablets, which provides high-resolution information about the pressure, azimuth and elevation (yaw and pitch) of the tagger’s stylus. Watch this space — I’ll be developing some tools to help the next version of GML encode this information.

    The Robotagger is a collaboration of Jeremy Ficca’s dFAB at CMU; the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon, which I direct; and the FAT Lab’s GML initiative. We used the Sharpie Magnum and the wonderful 2-inch Montana Hardcore markers, which (AFAIK) are the largest magic markers in commercial production. (And of course, for the deep history of prior work blending graffiti and automation, don’t forget to check out the spraycan-enabled Graffiti Writer robot [1998-2000] by the Institute for Applied Autonomy, and Jürg Lehni’s wall-spraying Hektor robot [2002].) [Extra link: RoboTagger on Youtube]

    Posted by golan on Jan 13.10 to , ,   

  • Jesus Saves and fi5e retrospective…

    Jesus Saves was one of the first graffiti writers I got to know when I moved to NYC. I just received an email from him with a link to this compilation video he made of all the projects we worked on together. Most of the footage is from back in the Graffiti Analysis days of 2003 – 2005.

  • He writes that the clip was made by filming the screen and “cutting off the clips from the others 2 only show mines lol i know it sounds greedy but yo i do it 4 the love of my tag”. Check out the rest of his clips on his youtube account here.

  • Most of the applications shown in these videos were made with early pre-release versions of Zach and Theo’s Open Framewerkz

    Posted by Evan Roth on May 06.08 to , , , , , ,   

  • Field Guide for Public Works

      The Field Guide for Public Works Vol. 1:
      Instructors: Andy Bichlbaum, James Powderly, Evan Roth

    Shared resources and public spaces, like our cities, the Internet and the media, are increasingly under attack from the forces of privatization, excess commercialization, censorship, bias and authoritarian control. To offset the inequalities caused by these forces, ordinary citizens are turning to humorous and socially provocative pranks, hacks, infiltration, urban modification and other disturbances to get their voices heard in public and the mass media. The Field Guide for Public Works will be an illustrated instructional guide designed to show citizens how to make tools and use techniques employed by artists and activists to express unpopular and marginalized “truths” and perspectives in the public sphere. Subjects and technologies covered in the Field Guide may include both social and physical engineering, like: corporate infiltration, mobile broadcasting, contagious media, hacking urban systems, on-line satire, ad busting, self publishing and more. From concept to implementation, students will work together with their instructors and peers to create all aspects of the Field Guide using open source software. Over the course of the semester, students will also work in small teams to create, execute and document their own public interventions with voluntary participation from the class and others. The Field Guide will also be an experiment in creating a “print on demand” book and releasing work into the public domain.

    Posted by Jamie Dubs on Mar 05.07 to , , , , ,   

The main goal of this course is to learn to look upon our surroundings in a new way. It is my aim that by the end of this course you will walk around the city differently than when it started. You will know you are getting there when you start to annoy your friends by interrupting conversations to stop and take a photo of what looks to them to be a mess of ink. In GEEK GRAFFITI we will also be making things designed to exist within the city. Succesful projects will use the urban environment as a unique medium and answer the follow questions: “Why is it important that this is outdoors? Would this be any good if it weren’t? Why does it matter that this is done where and how it was? How is this new and, most importantly, why should I care?”

Posted by Jamie Dubs on Mar 02.07 to , , , , , ,   

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