Akira football stickers
Posted: January 28, 2024 Filed under: street art | Tags: Akira, comics, football, Göttingen, German, manga, reception, sports, stickers, street art Leave a commentOn the streets of Göttingen, Germany, supporters of the local football (soccer) club have pasted stickers with characters from Ōtomo’s manga.
This first one with Kaneda’s face I have known for many years. It says “Antifa Ultras Göttingen 05”. But there are two other motifs which I have spotted only recently:
And another one with Kaneda and “Block F”:
Interestingly, all three motifs are taken from the same scene early in the manga (pages 41 and 46 in the 1st volume of the Japanese collected edition): the third sticker shows Kaneda’s face when he first sees Kei as she is entering the Harukiya bar. Kei’s sticker image is taken from the panel directly after. Kaneda’s face from the first sticker is based on a panel a few pages later, when he accidentally runs into Takashi again while chasing after Kei and Ryu.
The images were transferred from the manga to the stickers almost unaltered, only the more intricate parallel hatching was removed or simplified – and, of course, the sticker images are mirrored, as they were most likely copied from the (flipped) German edition of the manga.
On the one hand, it’s surprising that the football supporters haven’t chosen more iconic images from Akira – e.g. laser gun-wielding Kaneda, pill-popping Tetsuo, or Kaneda with his motorcycle – but on the other hand, the defiant gazes of the three rather nondescript (i.e. not necessarily sci-fi) figures chosen already create a subtle countercultural vibe that might have appealed to the sticker designer(s).
Conference paper “Making Use of Pre-existing Street Art Object Metadata” published
Posted: May 13, 2023 Filed under: street art | Tags: conference, graffiti, metadata, publication, street art Leave a comment
Last year I presented a paper at the goINDIGO symposium in Vienna, and the proceedings of that conference have now been published as an Open Access volume titled document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes. Proceedings of the goINDIGO 2022 International Graffiti Symposium, which you can find here: https://journals.ap2.pt/index.php/indigo/issue/view/48.
I enjoyed catching up with that field of study once more after a long hiatus, both in preparation of my paper and during the event. You can access my contribution directly at https://journals.ap2.pt/index.php/indigo/article/view/708/434. Here’s the abstract:
In graffiti and street art studies, we are currently facing a paradoxical situation: vast numbers of publications relevant to our field—some of them academic, most of them not; from journal papers to coffee-table books—are continuously being published, but even the scholarly-oriented among them typically provide only sparse data about individual graffiti pieces and street art objects. It is rare to find complete metadata records containing information about the artist, the precise location, measurements, and the date of completion. Efforts are being made by individual projects and researchers to gather comprehensive and structured metadata, but those efforts take time and yield only small amounts of data. While it is important that these efforts are continued, a different, complementary approach is proposed here that aims to ‘quickly and dirtily’ gather ‘messy’ data. The idea is to make use of work that has already been carried out instead of trying to describe the same artworks in better ways time and again. This requires us to learn how to deal with incomplete data from vastly different sources. Effectively, such an approach lowers the threshold for data sources to become useful for street art researchers. Almost anything can become a valuable resource, even amateur websites (including abandoned ones) and print publications about local and obscure street art. This paper demonstrates how to extract object metadata from street art websites and digitised printed books, and how to feed it into a database that can be a potential treasure trove of street art object data.
There are many more interesting papers in that volume, though, and I encourage you to check them out. In fact, there is another contribution which lists me as an author: a transcript of a roundtable discussion cheekily named “Creators vs Academics” in which I wasn’t even a panelist, I merely chimed in once! Listing all who participated in the discussion as authors is a bold move – or perhaps simply diligent and transparent.
New article “Towards the scholarly documentation of street art” published
Posted: December 30, 2015 Filed under: street art | Tags: disciplinarity, documentation, graffiti, metadata, methodology, object-based research, publication, referencing, standardization, stencil graffiti, street art Leave a comment
As regular readers of this weblog will know, one of my research interests besides comics is street art, and stencil graffiti in particular. Now my first journal article in this field has been published. It is titled “Towards the scholarly documentation of street art” and is contained in the first issue of Street Art & Urban Creativity, a new Open Access journal. You can get the PDF of the issue at http://www.urbancreativity.org/uploads/1/0/7/2/10727553/journal2015_v1_n1_web_final.pdf (my article is on pp. 40-49).
Here’s the abstract:
It is generally acknowledged that street art is a particularly ephemeral art. For instance, graffiti are usually actively removed, thus existing for sometimes only a few days. Otherwise, they deteriorate gradually due to the effects of the weather, or are eventually ‘crossed’ by other graffiti, so that they are visible for a few years at best. Therefore, the documentation of street art should be of paramount importance to researchers. In fact, a lot of photography is being carried out ostensibly to document street art, for both image databases on the Internet as well as printed books and magazines. However, for the most part, this kind of street art photography is not done by (or for) scholars but rather by (and for) the general public. In any case, this practice usually does not fulfill even the lowest scholarly standards of documentation. One can be considered lucky to find any metadata for such pictures – for example, the artist’s name, an approximate location (usually on a city or district level), or the date on which the picture was taken, if at all. Furthermore, the selection of photographed works is highly biased due to the personal tastes of the photographers or the accessibility of the work. In order for street art documentation to be useful for research, providing further data is necessary, such as a more precise location, references to other instances of the same work, and the dimensions of the work. In this article, the current inadequate state of documentation in street art research is surveyed, and a model for the online documentation of stencil graffiti is presented that demonstrates the feasibility of some of these requirements.
Stencil graffiti website goes semantic
Posted: April 21, 2013 Filed under: street art | Tags: age, art history, chronology, contemporary art, Freiburg, geography, German, graffiti, Linked Data, Linked Open Data, painting, RDFa, semantic web, spray painting, stencil graffiti, street art, website Leave a comment
As a first step towards releasing the information on my stencil graffiti website as Linked Open Data, I have now created XHTML+RDFa files for all graffiti. They can be found in the directory http://graffiti.freiburg.bplaced.net/lod/, or by clicking on the RDFa icon in each entry. These files contain only two pieces of information so far (not counting ID and licence): place and date. Now that they have been normalised (to the W3C Basic Geo and Dublin Core vocabulary, respectively) and cast in standard RDFa syntax, it should be easy to query and analyse this data, and to re-use it in mashups.
I did a short presentation on this conversion recently, the slides of which can be found on SlideShare (in German). The next steps are obvious: there is still a lot of information on the website that could be normalised, expressed in RDFa, and added to the XHTML files. Once I’ve got round to that I’ll post about it. As a good resource for getting started with Linked Open Data, I recommend Ed Summers’s recent paper “Linking Things on the Web: A Pragmatic Examination of Linked Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums”.
Stencil graffiti website: the biggest and best update yet
Posted: February 24, 2013 Filed under: street art | Tags: art history, Freiburg, German, graffiti, organ donation, painting, spray painting, stencil graffiti, street art, website Leave a comment
Once again it’s been a while since I last updated my website, Schablonengraffiti in Freiburg-Mittelwiehre. There are some noteable things about yesterday’s update:
- There are now over 200 stencil graffiti (i.e. pictures + metadata) documented on the website – 203 to be precise. For the record, no. 200 is a heart near the Max Planck Institute.
- This piece is also part of a larger, multi-medial series advocating organ donation. It consists of several stencil graffiti showing hearts and lungs (nos. 182 – 185, 199 – 200, plus more instances of these motifs on Sedanstraße which I haven’t photographed yet), a spray-painted slogan (which you can see on the picture of no. 185), and stencilled paste-ups (pictured here but not included on the website).
- There is another three-coloured piece now, “Lausbuben” (nos. 188 – 190, though no. 190 is only two-coloured). I guess it refers to a sprayer crew of the same name. (The first three-coloured piece in Mittelwiehre, at least since I started the website, would be no. 174 with three different shades of grey.)
- I’ve discovered two more instances (nos. 192 – 193) of the “Mikey Wilson” piece (no. 168), and on these newly found graffiti the words “I HATE NAZIS” are legible. I hadn’t been able to discern the writing on no. 168 before, so the anti-fascist connotation had escaped me completely.
I hope to get round to updating the website more frequently in the future, and I also have some exciting changes to the data structure in mind – more about that in a later post.
Stencil graffiti website updated
Posted: May 5, 2012 Filed under: street art | Tags: art history, Freiburg, German, graffiti, painting, pochoirs, stencil graffiti, street art, website 1 Comment
I have just updated my website, Schablonengraffiti in Freiburg-Mittelwiehre [stencil graffiti in Freiburg-Mittelwiehre], adding 11 new pieces, including the iconic lion’s head pictured here. While doing so, I realised it has been almost a year since the previous update (July 2011), due to my less and less frequent visits to Freiburg. Although graffiti in this part of Freiburg have quite long runs on average, many pieces must have been sprayed and buffed between this website update and the last. Does that mean the website has missed its aim to record all stencil graffiti activity in Mittelwiehre? Not quite. It still works well as an extensive and thus representative sample of the totality of stencil graffiti pieces in the city district. This is a major difference to most other street art websites that arbitrarily select only the “best” pieces. The former, broader approach is valuable – and even necessary – for a street art history that doesn’t focus on the big names. Maybe one day, the data gathered on Schablonengraffiti in Freiburg-Mittelwiehre will prove useful for graffiti studies. In the meantime, enjoy the lions, the Stewie Griffins (from Family Guy), Mikey Wilson (a.k.a. the middle finger kid), the hip hop monkey…
The 650-Cent Plague 