Category Archives: street art

street art

Smell Graffiti

3 Comments

smellgraffiti

While in Vienna earlier this month, I got the chance to get to know artist Mitchell Heinrich and his new “smell graffiti” project. What if instead of tagging a wall with paint, you tagged it with a scent? You could make a stinky subway platform smell like freshly cut grass. As an added bonus the scents are not permanent; they eventually evaporate leaving no trace.

Mitch explains:

Graffiti as a medium has remained largely unchanged since early humans were painting cave walls. The style and purpose has evolved over the centuries, but still nobody has successfully broken free of its visual nature. From this line of thinking smell graffiti has emerged. Harnessing modern chemistry and appropriating technology invented for industry I am working on a new way to make a statement in a public space.

Scent is interpreted by the limbic system which is very closely tied to emotion and memory. This leads me to believe that interacting with people using scent can potentially be a much more powerful medium than paint since people experiencing it can’t help but react to it. The goal of this project is to realize the potential of smell as art and to explore different ways of using it to interact with people.

Check on the step-by-step guide to creating your own smell graffiti cans at Instructables.

street art

Linoleum Asphalt Mosaics

2 Comments

Becky Stern produced this video for Craftzine, sister site to Make Magazine. It’s a nice instructional video on how to create your own linoleum asphalt mosaics.

They explain:

Linoleum asphalt mosaics, also called Toynbee Tiles, are artworks permanently embedded in pavement. In this video I’ll show you how to construct your own from inexpensive materials. You can get real linoleum (don’t use vinyl flooring) for this project by ordering free samples online. By cutting out a mosaic design in the linoleum and sandwiching it between layers of paper, wood glue, and asphalt crack filler, you can affix the mosaic very permanently to an asphalt surface, such as your driveway. You may choose to use a heat gun to make the linoleum easier to cut, or even a laser cutter. The earliest examples of these tiles were found in the 70s and 80s on streets in Philadelphia, all bearing the same (or very similar) message: “Toynbee idea / in Kubrick’s 2001 / resurrect dead / on planet Jupiter.” They are speculated to have been created by the same person until they began to gain a following.

street art

Aakash Nihalani’s Tape Art

1 Comment

wall1

wall2

tape3

Aakash Nihalani is a Brooklyn based artist who works with the medium of tape in public places around New York.

He explains:

My work is created in a reaction to what we readily encounter in our lives, sidewalks and doorways, building and bricks. I’m just connecting the dots differently to make my own picture. Others need to see that they can create too, connecting their own dots, in their own places.

activism, marketing, street art

Calling Bullshit on Illegal Ads

21 Comments

npa1

Here’s the deal: There’s a company called National Public Advertising Outdoor that puts up advertisements on sides of buildings and other public places in New York and other big cities. The ads they put up are illegal. They do not have a permit. They city is not getting paid. Instead, they pay the landlords of the buildings they use. Citizens are forced to look at advertising all over NYC because this company has illegally plastered their ads all over town. For whatever reason, the city looks the other way and rarely cracks down on them.

This spring, Jordan from The Public Ad Campaign blog organized a massive grassroots retaliation against the illegal billboards. See our coverage here and here. In short, an army of artists whitewashed 120 different illegal billboards and replaced them with art. NPA Outdoor was furious and sent out teams to put their ads back up in a matter of hours. A few artists even got arrested after being caught in the act by police.

Since the takeover, NPA Outdoor has added a new notice to all of their billboard sites. As you can see in the photo above, it reads, “Coming soon to this location: a chance to win these posters and other prizes inside.” They are trying to find a loophole in their bullshit illegal business. It’s illegal for a landlord to put an advertisement on the side of his building, but it’s not illegal to put up a sign advertising products that are for sale inside. So by putting up this bullshit notice that claims you can win the posters inside the store, NPA is trying to get around the law. They’re smart to add the phrase “coming soon,” because if you go in ANY of the stores that have this notice, you’ll find that there are no posters. It’s all bullshit. I’ve personally asked people in a half-dozen stores for more information on “winning” the posters and every clerk has looked at me like I was an idiot. They had no idea what I was talking about, because there is no drawing for posters. It’s bullshit.

Recently Posterchild and Jason Eppink set out to call NPA Outdoor on their bullshit. The duo replaced NPA’s notice with one of their own.

npa2

npa3

Why won’t the city crack down on New York’s true graffiti problem?