Abstract
Centred on the theorization, design and implications of the Sydney Graffiti Archive, this article considers how the virtual image archive intervenes in the experience of graffiti to shift negative perceptions about graffiti as damage to cultural heritage. As a parallel discursive arena (see Fraser, 1995; Hauser, 1998), the Sydney Graffiti Archive infiltrates and transgresses normative conceptions of place and cultural narratives through the formation and circulation of unofficial visual discourses embedded in graffiti photographs. This article evaluates the place of the archive as a heuristic device and heterotopic entity and encourages new ways of seeing illicit graffiti, and other everyday digital cultures of commemoration, in that it reshapes present relations to the past through photographic reframing, image digitization, interface design and user engagement. Essentially, this research is about hacking into, recovering and honouring graffiti’s discursive sites to reimagine graffiti’s place as digital heritage.
Introduction
A new spatio-temporal order – digital networks – is beginning to inscribe specific components of the national.
The Sydney Graffiti Archive 1 is part of a broader research that sets out to map, frame, decipher and archive the tensions and dialogues embedded in graffiti’s fragmentary and discursive material assemblages to illuminate Sydney’s contribution to the global graffiti subculture (Edwards-Vandenhoek, 2013). Graffiti’s engagements with time, space and place are understood as a poetic process of revealing and concealing inscriptive marks (through erasure, strike thru, 2 modification and addition of new graffiti) to construct new or hidden narratives (Figure 1). The central premise of this research is that graffiti’s transgression varies across spatio-temporal registers, modes of practice and material placements. From the public thoroughfares and back lanes to the re-energized interiors and murky subterranean recesses of Sydney’s inner suburbs, this research has sought to understand how place can be constructed through graffiti and what its material traces reveal about place in various contexts of production.
Mixed modes of graffiti practice from various temporalities framed in situ. Phillip St, Newtown, May 2007.
Documentary photography is the core constituent of the research method. It provides the means of sampling and archiving the graffiti. It also permits the re-examination of graffiti long after it has been rewritten or erased from the urban landscape, making further interventions possible. As Roland Barthes and Heath (1977: 15) attest, the photographic image is more than simply a static object or channel to represent social behaviour, it is an ‘object endowed with structural autonomy’, which influences the ‘photographic message’. The points of interest in the photographs have been conceived with Barthes’s (1984) notion of the studium and punctum in mind. The studium is the dynamics or cultural interest of the photo as a whole. The punctum is an addition, the detail, and ‘what I add [as an interpreter] to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there’ (Barthes, 1984: 55). Crucially, the punctum acts much like memory, which changes and evolves over time. The punctum may also shift between the time of capture and the time of archivization. It is distinctive and varies between readers.
The knowledge embedded in the graffiti photographs are not only exposed and sampled in single frames but via image montages, which can then be reassembled in the Sydney Graffiti Archive. What Barthes and Heath (1977) refer to as syntax – the production of a new composite discourse from fragments – is a powerful tool in the construction of narrative. Importantly, it is this process of recursive sampling and phrasing that opposes the notion of indexical realism in photographic representation. Photographs (like graffiti) are fragile and fleeting memorials to ‘that-has-been’ (Barthes, 1984: 115). This photo documentation provides the visual means for the interpretation and online dissemination of the graffitist’s engagements and liberations of space from a range of perspectives as well as drawing out graffiti’s past reshaping of place in its varied microclimates 3 over time (Figure 2).
(a) This photograph captures a fragment of time when a range of visual and sensory elements came together in Taussig’s (1993) ‘magic of contact’ to evoke the place that I saw. Despite the complexity of its undecipherable lettering, the graffiti piece blends seamlessly into the prevailing condition of the site, as if it has been slowly revealed over time through the process of degeneration. Moreover, the choice of site is as well considered as the execution. What may have served as an aesthetic trigger, in turn breathes new life into this dilapidated room. Dunlop Slazenger Factory, November 2009. (b) When I returned to the site to reframe this room 1 month later, I encountered a completely different scene; a buffing of the earlier work overlain with two rudimentary pieces. It appears to be a less sensitive response, less in tune with the material dynamics of the space, its colours and textures – the work appears almost out of place. Coupled with harsh lighting, this temporal fragment evokes a very different kind of place, one of chaos and disintegration, one more attune with the artist’s own visual interests and less with the environment. Dunlop Slazenger Factory, December 2009.
The reflexive and interpretative framework developed to afford an effective reading of the material assemblages of graffiti writing and urban art modes framed in situ draws on the socio-semiotic multimodality of Gunter Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (2001, 2006). Multimodality provides the tools for analysing and describing the semiotic resources that graffiti writers and urban artists use to ‘communicate, represent and interact’ (Jewitt, 2009: 15). Multimodality also concerns the use of space, role of the image, gestural marks (such as tagging 4 , throw ups 5 and strike thru) and the visual and linguistic devices and codes used in place-making practices, such as pieces 6 (Jewitt, 2009). Moreover, multimodality can also be harnessed to construct inventories of the modes and semiotic resources (actions, surfaces, contexts, materials, detritus and artefacts, etc.) associated with graffiti production and how they are employed in different contexts. These inventories provide the metadata (e.g. keywords and tags) that have been attributed to the images in the Sydney Graffiti Archive.
The Sydney Graffiti Archive provides the living repository for my photographic impressions of graffiti writing and urban art production taken during the time of the fieldwork (December 2006–January 2011). It foregrounds the multimodal and hypertextual concerns in an exploratory interface and provides a dynamic mechanism through which the material tensions and dialogues of these practiced spaces can be reconstructed and re-experienced by a broader demographic. Additionally, the Sydney Graffiti Archive re-emphasizes the value of the recontextualization of graffiti, as monuments to the past and sites of knowledge in their own right. Crucially, this research is not a call for preservation of sites – as graffiti is an ephemeral practice – but a call for recognition of their fleeting transience and reminders of a time and place.
This article reveals that it is the distancing from the perceived crimes associated with the graffiti act through digital re-presentation (long after the graffiti was produced and/or buffed from its original context) that will enable its complex codes, placements and place(s) to be read and understood in different ways with revitalized significances. This research demonstrates that digital archiving, as both a method and a mode of engagement with graffiti’s traces, provides a working interface to reimagine graffiti’s place in the urban consciousness as digital heritage and constructs alternative narratives about differentiated forms of material culture and place making that have largely gone unrecorded in the past.
Problem context
The publishing sphere is flooded with graffiti and street art anthologies, and websites that celebrate graffiti’s public face promote the cult status of its artists and writers as well as capitalize on the commodification of street art culture (see Eastman et al., 2014; Grevy, 2008; Lewisohn, 2008; Manco, 2002; Sanada and Hassan, 2007; Schiller and Schiller, 2001; Walde, 2007; Young, 2010). The plethora of virtual and printed texts points to graffiti’s pervasiveness and deftness in its penetration and transcendence of perceived social and material divisions as well as geographic boundaries. However, by and large, the perspective taken is a formulaic one, centred on aesthetics, streetscapes and iconic sites. Moreover, these works tend to gravitate towards a disparate classification of singular modes of graffiti production (stickers, stencils, pieces, tags, etc.) (see Ganz, 2006; Walde, 2007), whilst the traces themselves are rarely observed in a detailed way or framed as part of a broader context of production. The decontextualization of graffiti is further reinforced through poorly captioned, framed and amateur photographs (see Sanada and Hassan, 2007; Vassallo and Percival, 2009). ‘For the viewer who has not taken the picture or for someone who does not know the specific context that extends beyond the photograph’s frame, graffiti is presented as place-less and time-less’ (Chmielewska, 2009: 274). This research represents a departure in that it attends to the complex visual codes embedded in the material traces and broader contexts of production in its photo capture, analysis and archivization of graffiti.
This research is also timely in that it enters, engages with and contributes to global debates and discourses about graffiti at a time when there has been a renewed interest in this subculture and its commercialization, its place within urban rejuvenation schemes, coupled with shifts in graffiti practice, legislation and public perception. Despite this, Sydney’s illicit and thriving graffiti subculture has largely been ignored in the scholarly and popular literature to date. It is a core significance of this project. Following on from Rennie Ellis and Turner’s (1975) capture of Sydney’s emergent subculture, the archivization of graffiti shifted to Melbourne, which is regarded as the graffiti and street art capital of Australia 7 (Babington and National Gallery of Australia, 2010). This is not to say that Sydney’s graffiti artists are not actively engaged in the production of graffiti (Vassallo and Percival, 2009). However, gentrification, council crackdowns, heavy fines and anti-graffiti strategies (such as commissioned murals), coupled with the increasing regulation, monetization and institutionalization of street art practices have contributed to the marginalization of its illicit counterparts and the relentless sanitization of public space. However, rather than shutting down, the graffiti subculture has pried open the exterior film of the urban terrain, seizing opportunities for expression and communication on and off the street and within temporary zones of dereliction. What I found in this everyday practice in transition was a place and material assemblage that was to form the raw and expressive cultural matter of this research. Through this reframing, I hope to shift negative perceptions about the social consequence of graffiti. To its end, this research is my tribute to the mythical creatures, characters, musings, identities, scribbles, dialogues, expressions, contestations and monuments of the illicit, transgressive and mundane.
Methodological orientation
This archival dimension of this work extends on Michael Shanks’s (1997, 2001, 2008, 2011) theorizations, which explore the connections between photography, archaeology, design and the archive, as situated modalities that engage and intervene with the dynamic materiality of media and fragmented traces of past communicative practices in the present. Underpinning this is the idea that the examination of graffiti’s hybridized (virtual and otherwise) place and set of practices requires what Shanks refers to as a ‘poetics of assemblage’ (Shanks, 2001: 298). To Shanks, poetics is like ‘dreamwork’, the ‘forging and following [of] connections, [transgressions and juxtapositions] in an indefinite network’ (Pearson and Shanks, 2001: 67). It can also be defined as the gathering together of things or pieces of things into a single context (such as this article, the archive, graffiti site, image frame and so forth). My interpretation of this notion embraces Michel Foucault’s (1972) principle of discontinuity in that it asserts what unifies discourses and informs ‘new histories’ lies in the dispersion, reiteration, transformation and performance of its elements over time (such as stencils). By this Foucault means that there is ‘no grand narrative’, singular, continuous and timeless pre-written past, which is the task of the researcher to restore (Foucault, 1972: 8–10). Rather, there are multiple trajectories, temporalities and pathways to meaning and place in the landscape of graffiti production (see Bakhtin, 1981; Ingold, 2008; Massey, 2005). This in turn enables a permeable, plural and heterogeneous conceptualization and compression of time, trace, space and place. In this light, the space of the image archive can be understood as a production of interrelations (rather than dualisms) of embedded practices, which underscores a rich weave of ongoing narratives, what Ingold (2008) refers to as a lifeworld of entanglement and meshwork of paths, captured within the power geometries of time (Massey, 2005: 9).
The archival imagination
One of the defining characteristics of the modern era has been the increasing significance given to the archive as the means by which historical knowledge and forms of remembrance are accumulated, stored and recovered.
Jacques Derrida (1995: 19) refers to this impulse to archive as the ‘death drive’. Much like tagging, the process of archivization is simultaneously a mode of mark making and memorialization, the leaving of a trace, as observed in the exterior, interior and subterranean contexts of graffiti production, reminding ourselves and others that ‘we were, indeed here’. For Derrida (1995: 19), there would be no desire to archive ‘without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression’. Moreover, the same way that the processes of graffiti re-inscription implies the interconnectedness of the material surface, cultural practice and place, so too the archive can be envisioned as palimpsest in that it stores, erases, compresses and combines impressions and memories from varied spatio-temporalities, which through their remembrance and archivization offer the illusion of permanence (Merewether, 2006).
… the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivisation produces as much as it records the event.
In Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), the study of the archive is compared to learning about the past through its material traces (Merewether, 2006). Foucault’s archaeologist of knowledge aims to recover and reconstruct the archive and to reveal how it shapes present relations to the past through the performance of discourse (see Foucault, 1972; Merewether, 2006: 11). In the same way that the photograph embeds information about graffiti, the archive is a monument or ‘site of action’ (Foucault, 1972: 131) in that it reveals narratives, or the ‘anticipation’ of future knowledge (Shanks, 2007: 283), about graffiti production, in this case, embedded in digital photographs. Moreover, as for Foucault, ‘the archive governs what is said or unsaid, recorded or unrecorded’ (Merewether, 2006: 11). As such, it is not a fixed or finite cultural resource. Digital archives by their open nature are unfinished, selective and updatable (Manovich, 2001). In this respect, the archive produces more than it records in that it is responsive to the user’s ‘active participation’ (Shanks, cited in Callahan, 2010: 420).
Like photography and archaeology, the archive is an act of creative mediation (Shanks, 2007, 2011). The Sydney Graffiti Archive provides the means of sustaining a relationship with graffiti’s material pursuits in an exploratory, affective, multimodal and personal interface. As a mnemonic, the place of the Sydney Graffiti Archive is central to the research case because it contributes to and expands on the acquisition of knowledge about how graffiti can build a sense of place. Further evoking Shanks’s (2001: 298) ‘poetics of assemblage’, the archive is the ‘gathering together’ of the photo archaeological matter of graffiti’s traces and consigning them into a ‘single corpus’ (Derrida, 1995: 3). In this way, the archive serves as a semiotic resource, as there is a potentially infinite array of viewing combinations of the multimodal properties and spatio-temporal locales embedded and tagged in the photographs.
Whilst this archive is an instance of Derrida’s (2005: 3) ‘privileged typology’, which by its very nature omits, curates, privileges and/or conceals and reveals graffiti traces in their capture, the collection of photographs is intended to be representative of my encounters over time. Moreover, as a form of self-archiving, the archive functions as a form of memorialization of my own experiences in the territories of graffiti production. It also foregrounds the multimodal, spatio-temporal and altruistic concerns in an investigative interface to provide a dynamic mechanism through which the photographs can be synthesized, re-experienced and reconstructed by a broader audience. A significant proportion of this collection is dedicated to graffiti’s underexposed material placements, that is, the interior and subterranean, where, importantly, each image in the archive is given equal weight in the collection.
This is achieved through an agile rather than top-down narrative. As a non-preferential form of memorialization, this ensures that it is left to the user to create or inspire new linkages. As a consequence, the archive matures and enriches over time and with the user’s engagements with it. This in turn changes the nature of the graffiti itself through the finding of new meanings about place, responsive to the recomposition of graffiti’s digitized assemblages.
However, as much as it assists with memory and narrative, the archive has the potential to destabilize, open up or fragment remembrance (Merewether, 2006). I agree with Charles Merewether that the archive cannot be described in its totality, even though through its appearance it appears complete. Like photography and archaeology, the archive deals with issues of materiality, absence, decay, erasure and omission (Green, 2006). It is fragile and illusionary and engages with a non-linear narrative (Manovich, 2001) and often ‘chance operations’ (Green, 2006: 53). Even attempts to preserve graffiti in the urban landscape have been fraught with issues of transience and erasure not just weathering or defacement. Some practices (such as screened works and outdoor projections) are not designed to leave any visible residue. Graffiti is an intrinsically ephemeral practice, like song or dance, whose performances are embedded in and preserved in other media – such as recordings or in digital libraries (MacDowall, 2006: 274).
Place as virtual heterotopia
Archival artists seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced physically present.
Illicit graffiti is largely perceived as blight on the built environment (Craw et al., 2006; Hung et al., 2010). Henceforth, the Sydney Graffiti Archive is more than simply a way of sharing the body of imagery analysed in this research. It is an intervention. It intervenes in a discourse about graffiti as a form of cultural heritage and what this means. As Gerard Hauser (1998) confers, learning about public discourse strategies (such as graffiti) enables us to ‘reimagine and restructure’ our relations to the world and gain insights into ‘alternate models of society’ and therefore heritage. It also involves broader matters of conservation, ownership and value, identity and belonging, the shifting capital of knowledge and the way the Internet changes how we distribute it (Galin and Latchaw, 1998).
From this standpoint, graffiti archives have the ability to explore, shift, reflect, infiltrate and transgress normative conceptions of place and cultural practice not just because it frames and represents illicit graffiti online but by what may be communicated through it and by exposing and sharing it with many public audiences. Crucially, the archive affords a parallel discursive arena to challenge perceptions about illicit modes of graffiti in through its re-presentation and raise awareness of its communicative, educational and cultural significances on a global scale (Fraser, 1995). Moreover, unlike the subterranean or interior contexts, the archive is not an illicit or out of bounds space. The virtual realm is open to anyone with Internet access. As such, the archive makes the inaccessible accessible, brings the inside out and reveals and discloses long after graffiti’s trace has been erased from the urban experience. It affords a place to inhabit as well as a way of impacting on meaning making with the same material reference reassembled in different ways through user interaction.
In line with Lachlan MacDowall (2006), this research presents a case for graffiti as cultural heritage rather than damage to it. MacDowall’s (2006) writings on the cultural heritage of graffiti signpost related issues associated with graffiti’s presentation and perception. There have been instances where graffiti or collections of photographs, as in the case of Ellis and Turner’s (1975) photo documentation of the birth of Australian graffiti, are deemed to have historical value because they capture a broader slice of Australiana and/or the political climate of its time. Unfortunately, very little attention has been paid to the ordinary, fragmentary, often confronting texts (Figure 3) and inaccessible spatial experiences, such as the interior or subterranean, until now.
‘YUPPIE SCUM OUT’. Erskineville, March 2007.
In support of the claim that this archive and its photographic tableau intervene in graffiti’s hybrid material assemblage and the public perception of it, the space of the digital archive can also been likened to Foucault’s (1986) heterotopia of time. As a space of otherness, the heterotopia evokes what Edward Soja (1996) refers to as microclimates (or third spaces) that operate in non-hegemonic conditions. As a third space, virtual heterotopias challenge normative modes of spatial practices, what is appropriate, worth recording (in the space of the digital archive) and so on. As Foucault (1986) argues, this is because heterotopias are temporal zones that operate, within, but bypass conventional social structures and power relations, much like the practice of illicit graffiti in public thoroughfares.
I am also drawn to Foucault’s (1986) and Soja’s (1996) metaphor of heterotopia to describe certain digital archived spaces, such as my own, because the Sydney Graffiti Archive suffers from multiple viewing contexts, temporal compression and a largely undefined corpus of users. In this respect, the archive is more a form of displacement than emplacement. It compresses time, space and place and largely anonymous experiences of cultural matter, such as the graffiti and spaces digitized in the photographs. Crucially, as a means of sustainment it affords a distancing from the temporal moment of graffiti’s perceived crime, which in turn provides a means to challenge public perception, and for the graffiti to be read and interpreted in different ways. So, this is the significance of the Sydney Graffiti Archive, maybe not tomorrow but in the decades to come. There is the potential to transform perceptions through interactions with a mainstream audience. This is the intervention enabled by the Sydney Graffiti Archive.
However, it is the design, multimodal interests and digital materiality of the Sydney Graffiti Archive that clarifies its place. As Marion Emery (2010: n.p.), argues ‘collective memory needs images and a spatial framework [virtual or otherwise] to suspend time and insert it within space’. As such, the virtual heterotopia of the graffiti archive offers a world without limits or absences (other than those set by the researcher), with the illusion of permanence, to reveal new sociocultural connections, focused on its attempts to subvert conventional notions. It is also a place where contextual responsiveness is not only a meaning generator but also a cultural heritage marker.
Virtual origins
The Internet has transformed graffiti production as well as the way we view and archive it. Moreover, online space has been transformed into a platform to share, memorialize, preserve, reinvigorate, collaborate, challenge, confront and engage with graffiti’s hybrid assemblages. As Amos Klausner (n.d.) observes, ‘bombing is losing out to blogging’, as graffers and artists harness the tools of the Internet – Flickr, Instagram and Facebook profiles – in the search of online communities and opportunities to view and share graffiti, and as an archive of graffiti, to be influenced, inspired and informed. Virtuality has become a semiotic resource in the graffitist’s tool kit for the infiltration and poetization of place through the process of mimesis and digital representation of graffiti’s trace. This exchange and digitalization of graffiti practices is a testament to the graffitist’s ability to harness the power of technology to get their message out there and to break down perceived material and ideological boundaries with the level of technological savvy and understanding of HTML, image resolutions, digital cameras and new media fitting to their generation.
Virtual travel means that graffiti practitioners no longer require people to visit graffiti sites for their work to be ‘seen’. Moreover, whilst artists and audiences may never have the opportunity to visit graffiti sites around the globe, they can (with a few clicks) acquire knowledge about practitioners, collectives, crews, styles and trends through digital photography and image posts of graffiti online. The Internet has drawn international attention to the artists and writers themselves (such as Banksy), where monetary gains may come through other avenues of practice, such as the online sale of graffiti reproductions, T-shirts and so on. Its accessibility and wide readership points to the suitability of a virtual platform as a medium and mode, through the Sydney Graffiti Archive, to raise awareness of graffiti’s contextually responsive multimodal formations.
The Internet has also assisted with these documentation processes, enabling me to locate and re-experience graffiti sites when it has not been possible to access them. An increasingly monitored and controlled urban landscape also ensures that practices are recorded and records of practice survive online after the work itself has been buffed from the cityscape. In the case of Banksy, the graffiti is quickly removed, sold or stolen, or even rehoused in galleries, yet continues to live on in a depiction of its original setting online. In 1995, Derrida (1995: 17–18) recognized that virtual technology would ‘transform the entire public and private space of humanity’, and since his death has continued to change the face of communication, file-sharing, duplication, exclusivity, copyright, ownership, social interaction and the format of the archive.
This virtual infiltration has ensured photography’s status as a semiotic resource in the production of graffiti. Photography has been incorporated into the final stage of the completion of a piece, mural, paste up and so on. Most graffiti practitioners photograph (and/or video) completed works for their own private collections and then share them online. Over time, artists and writers have become competent photographers, harnessing the power and knowledge of composition, lighting and framing techniques in documenting their work to highlight its best features. Through the posting of images to WordPress sites, Flicker, Facebook pages and Instagram profiles, practitioners acquire infamy through photographs of their works alone. In the case of the Underbelly Project 8 , it is only possible to view the completed works in a digitized format. Whilst my archive adds to this online presence and signposts the presence of others, it constitutes a purpose-built designed interface dedicated to the archivization of Sydney’s graffiti subculture. This article now turns to the design of the archive itself and the factors that have guided its construction.
The Sydney Graffiti Archive
The Sydney Graffiti Archive provides a virtual platform and public forum to engage with graffiti writers, urban artists, commercial bodies, councils, urban planners, graffiti photographers and the general populace. The website has been built using an open-source content management system (CMS). ExpressionEngine is a software system that can manage large volumes of imagery and where changes and updates can be made with ease for people with minimal experience and knowledge of Web programming. It is flexible and responsive authoring software that does not pose limits on content, form or structure of the archive. It affords a user-friendly interface that more virtual explorers are comfortable with, as CMS provides the back end to familiar blog authoring software, such as WordPress. Importantly, the Sydney Graffiti Archive is a public site that lacks formal membership to capture a broader and global range of users. It is possible to subscribe to the blog and receive updates via email. The site’s comments feature requires an email address, which can then be captured for future notifications. I want my work to move from a single voice to a polyphonic voice over time.
The video
A short documentary piece has been designed to promote the archive and to provide a reminder of my time in space as part of the reflexive orientation of the broader research (Figure 4). It highlights the role of the creator in constructing the archive. It situates the researcher as the central character, with camera and body in space, which in turn captures aspects of the visual, affective and reflexive mode, as the researcher moves between varied ambiences – the exterior, subterranean and then into the interior. The video affords a sense of my documentation processes and physical movements in the sites, coupled with the atmospheric qualities of the spaces and traces themselves. It was critical to the fluid, exploratory and dynamic nature of the collection to provide a sense of drift and spontaneity in my movements, as I turn a corner, stumble upon a piece of graffiti, take an impromptu photograph, move on, then return to a particular site to intervene in and frame a more considered engagement with place.
Stills from the Sydney Graffiti Archive preamble.
Interface design
The importance of the design logic is signalled in the archive’s engaging and memorable public presence, which it is hoped will attract and sustain viewers. Crucially, it is also is part of my story of place. The branding provides the site with a bold, identifiable and unique visual presence (Figure 5). It comprises a hybrid-stencilled logotype that combines a hand-modified grunge decorative typeface with a formal italic typeface. The combination of fonts is an endeavour to bridge the informal nature of the content in the collection with the academic and formal orientation of the research. Overall, the aesthetic logic of the archive is minimal, clean, with a clear grid structure, typefaces, readable content and accessible layout, with dynamic features (such as a scrolling image preview and tag cloud), to manage and preview the photographs gathered together in The Collection.
Home page, Sydney Graffiti Archive. Note the brandmark in the top left, the scrolling image preview across the bottom and the tag cloud middle right of the main body of the Home page.
A selection of photographs were chosen from The Collection, desaturated, enlarged and cropped. These provide background treatments for each page template and signpost different areas within the site. It also ensures that the design, form and function of the site do not detract from or overpower the photographs in The Collection, which can be startling and imposing. The fixed length of each image (purposefully longer than the standard web browser) is to encourage the user to employ the scroll bar to view and experience the image in its entirety. This scrolling feature plays on the issues I faced over the course of my documentation, such as selective framing, Barthes’s (1984) punctum, omission, sample size and so on. On every page, the user has the opportunity to engage with different aspects the photograph outside its normal field of vision by scrolling down through the composition. It also provides the illusion of depth to the site.
The design of the archive captures the centrality of graffiti’s hybrid discursive formations and purposefully affords multiple trajectories of virtual experiences with graffiti’s engagements with space. This site comprises non-hierarchical search modalities, what Dallas (2009) refers to as ‘mediating tools’ in the construction of useful representations of the photographs. Each of the photographs have been indexed in at least one of The Collection’s drop down menu search categories on the home page – graffiti mode, material setting, spatial context (interior, exterior or subterranean) and date of photograph (encounter; Figure 6). The sites have also been mapped in relation to other graffiti sites and their photographs, through hyperlinks on the spatial mappings (Dérives) page. This is how the site foregrounds the graffiti’s multimodality, spatio-temporal location and materiality (e.g. surface, tool and semiotic resource) and temporal compression. It is still possible to search in a linear temporality (by date of my encounter with the graffiti) to observe changes in the nature and distribution of particular graffiti sites, settings and so forth over time. The user is also given the option to search spatially (by site type), but it is not a preset narrative. It offers what Lev Manovich (2001: 3) refers to as a ‘hyper-narrative’, which allows for multiple trajectories through a database. As such, users can create their own narratives and connections between modes, images, sites, settings and encounters within the archive. Moreover, there are a number of search options that do not require going through the collection. This includes the directed and spontaneous offerings of the open-source engine, tag cloud (which classifies image tags by their frequency) and scrolling image preview, which appear across the first level of the site’s navigation. Ultimately, the virtual explorer can make various choices and decisions that determine how they navigate the site or what kinds of site data, level of detail or modality they decide to access and explore. In other words, you can jump straight in or take a more informed and considered approach, through the collection page drop-down menu (Figure 6).
The Collection drop-down menus and search modalities (image data).
All of the graffiti photographs have been tagged with additional keywords that encourage and places value on personal and variable categories of significance. Keywords are potentially limitless and reference (often less frequently occurring) graffiti modes, signs or subject matter (e.g. actors and butterflies), practitioners, semiotic resources (e.g. tile and concrete), and modal style (e.g. wild style6). These are searchable via the open-search engine, results page or individual image page. As an exemplar, Figure 7 has been tagged with a selection of keywords that provide additional information about the image capture noted at the time. It is important to iterate that the keywords are not definitive. Additional significances can be added to an individual image (through comments and keywords) by users over time. This digital archive is very much a work in progress. Therefore, tagging the images is unfinished business. Moreover, whilst the user may only search in one category at a time via the collection, the search results lead to other modalities (identified in the drop-down menu) captured in keywords.
Individual Image page. This image highlights the image data (encounter, modes, setting and location) and Keywords chosen at the time of image upload to capture additional information about the mise-en-scéne.
Once a selection has been made via The Collection drop-down menu, tag cloud or open-search engine, the user is taken to the Results page. This page comprises a series of thumbnail images that match the search criteria. The user can further sort these images by date of encounter, relevance, as well as favourites, via the drop-down menu at the bottom of this page. ‘Favourites’ are the researcher’s picks, those images that were referenced and/or analysed in the thesis. The keywords on the Results page have been set up as hyperlinks that makes it possible for users to select one of these tags, change course and search options, which in turn breaks with a more formal or linear narrative.
Clicking on a thumbnail on the Results page (or an image from the slide show preview), the user is led to the Individual Image page (Figure 7). This page presents the selected image in a larger format (which when clicked on a larger version of the image will pop up for a detailed view), site data and keywords. The individual image page also activates the social media features – a Facebook like button and a share option. From this, it is possible to repost or retweet the image on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Stumble Upon, Messenger and so on. The Individual Image page also contains thumbnail previews of related images from the same site and date of encounter, which can be clicked and opened up in their own individual image page. The Comments option appears in a drop-down menu, which is immediately available to all users. It provides a useful way to capture further information (and tags) about these images for future dissemination.
The dérives
The archive also houses the psychogeographic mappings that focus the multimodal analyses. By selecting one of the dérives in the secondary menu in the archive, the user can also embark on an experience of the graffiti’s varied microclimates and my tracings of it, in a virtual environment of sorts (Figure 8). A selection of graffiti sites encountered on these journeys has been referenced numerically and hyperlinked to photographs that correlate to encounters from varied times at that specific locale. The virtual tourist can then print these maps out and embark on a tour of graffiti sites (that follows my own dérive), which in turn provides for a mental comparison of impressions and experiences with the ones packaged online. As for the situationists, the reading of these experiences becomes a performance of ‘one of many possibilities’ (McDonough, 2002), as the observed graffiti may have been rewritten, commented on or buffed from the urban experience.
Individual dérive page, Sydney Graffiti Archive.
Future directions
[As] the architecture of access to the remains of the past this archive serves to sustain and extend the life of the research.
In my role as a co-creator of cultural heritage (Shanks, 2008), the future directive of this archive, as a ‘distributed, heterogeneous information system’ (Dallas, 2009: 217), is to stimulate discussion and contribute to the knowledge base of graffiti writing and urban art practices from a range of varied perspectives – stakeholders, the researcher, the user and the graffiti practitioner. The Sydney Graffiti Archive provides a mechanism to make the research available to the general populace. As discussed, this is significant because very little has been researched or written about Sydney’s graffiti subculture to date. Moreover, it is the distancing from the crimes associated with the graffiti act that enables its complex codes, placements and place to be read and understood in different ways with revitalized significances. As such, the long-term impact and cultural value of the Sydney Graffiti Archive lies in its partially hidden yet to be explored depths and untold stories.
As Susan Hiller argues (2006: 42), ‘If you think about the narrative that collections or assemblages of things make, the interesting thing is that there are at least two possible stories being told simultaneously’. One is the story that the narrator or researcher thinks she or he is telling as well as the storyteller’s narrative. There is also another narrative, the one that the user makes, listens to, understands or imagines on the basis of the same images, just experienced in different ways and at different times (Hiller, 2006). In this regard, the capacity to activate the construction of new plotlines and experiences of graffiti’s place through the production and addition of graffiti photographs (taken by myself and others) within its established framework has largely been achieved through the integration of a Blog.
To date, public engagement with the site has been through the Facebook like button feature and via email. There has been a significant volume of cross posting of graffiti images to Facebook and graffiti fan pages, which has brought new graffiti activity to my attention and raised the profile of the archive. The Blog has also enabled me to post user’s photographs (thereby adding them to the Collection), comment on related graffiti activity, events, performances, post videos and maintain connectivity with like-minded virtual collectives who are actively engaged in co-producing the past in various guises. As it stands, the site has the potential to grow and produce new research in a potentially infinite array of directions that as yet cannot be measured until the graffiti is produced, reproduced and commented on.
Conclusion
The museum and the landscape – these are two of archaeology’s cultural locales.
The virtual heterotopia of the archive creates an open and accessible space with graffiti’s modes, voices, commemorations, contestations, collaborations, secret utterances and musings gathered together in one interface that can be distributed and shared between open-source platforms. The virtual space of the archive affords a place to inhabit as well as a way of impacting on meaning making with the same material reference reassembled in different ways to generate alternative histories, journeys and places. As such, the archive is so much more than a storage device. It involves matters of ownership and value, cultural heritage and its politics, identity and belonging as well as democratising of information (Shanks, 2011). If we think of the work of archival artists, such as Christian Boltanski (Semin, 1998), or archaeologists such as Hal Foster (2003) and Michael Shanks (2008, 2011), there are many ways to rejuvenate or memorialize human, cultural, artistic and scientific endeavours, wartime atrocities as well as the everyday and mundane experiences of material culture, such as graffiti, that focus on the question of the relationships of the human past to place in efforts to conserve and preserve.
This image frames a storied landscape of in between characters, monsters, a My Little Pony toy, added to and defaced by others (note the addition of the speech bubble ‘KIDDI SPIT’, hand drawn and written ‘poop’ and phallus), a militant octopus, a pot smoking cloud character and a paste up speech bubble which reads ‘devon with tomarrto sors’, coupled with thoughts about nuclear power and subcultural territories (through ENOM’s diversion of the No Stopping sign and the spray painted arrow pointing down). The stencilled call to action (centre right) shouts out to others – ‘TELL YOUR STORY’.
To its end, the Sydney Graffiti Archive provides a lasting chronicle of illicit graffiti practice and its jostling for place in an increasingly gentrified and homogenized built environment. It provides a dynamic mechanism through which the material tensions and dialogues embedded in these practised spaces can be reconstructed by a broader demographic. The Sydney Graffiti Archive sustains the educational value of this work and its ontological concerns in the hope that it can shift negative perceptions of graffiti, by focusing in on graffiti's multimodality and material responsiveness. The value of the designed interface also lies in its relocation of the spatial mappings and places of graffiti production into a new, expansive, uncharted and temporally elastic domain of graffiti practice.
As a storied landscape, the graffiti archive embeds partial and parallel narratives that draw from an assemblage of interests, expressions and discourses as diverse as cultural marginalization, gentrification, yuppie infiltration, popular culture, free expression, racism, creative territories, anti-rape sentiments, nuclear disarmament, peace, friendship, typographic revolution, immortalization, daydreams, nightmares, poems, childhood memories and a craving for devon 9 and tomato sauce sandwiches (see Figure 9). These ideas are performed, practised and represented by a diverse, iconic and colourful cast of actors, including militant octopuses, presidents, deceased actors, screaming babies, three-eyed dogs, man symbols, ice cream licking monsters, toys, cartoon characters, human aliases, Carmen Miranda and Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack (Figure 9). The digital archivization of places, practices and narratives like this is incredibly important because it reminds us that although the graffiti will fade, the stories behind them will not.