Graffiti Analysis is a software created by Evan Roth, aimed to create visualizations of the motion involved in drawing a graffiti, as well as document and archive the motion data in a database, enabling artists to share their analytical representation of their styles with each other.

This project is so unique and interesting in that it takes something that is intentionally permanent (but that is often forcefully removed from public spaces) and makes it both fleeting and timeless. Fleeting in that the animation shows a beautiful process of the motion of the strokes–the speed, the change in speed, and the direction, and timeless in that all of these data is stored with a markup language called GML, and that is archived into an open database.

A possibility this project could delve into is incorporating sound into the animations, taking a simple, flat audio track of marker writing on paper, or just a music track, and changing its volume or fast forwarding the track at the appropriate times corresponding to the speed and strength of each stroke in the graffiti. I think this would make the animations perhaps a little more engaging.

———————

An add-on I found interesting to use is ofxFlowTools, which simulates fluid effects on screen via camera input. A use case for this is perhaps at a concert or a music festival where there is a lot of body movement among the audience. So there’d be a camera facing the audience, and their actions and movements would cause some kind of fluid effects on the large screen behind the artist on stage, perhaps the kinds or intensity of the effects could depend on the genre of music.