Graffiti Research Lab

The Graffiti Research Lab ain't nothing new for writers and street artists. But it is a revolution. Where'd these guys come from?  Where are they going?

We sat down with Evan Roth and James Powderly to talk about the past, present, and future of "grafitti."



Chief Magazine: What are your backgrounds? What did you specialize in before coming to New York City? And what were your general interests.

James Powderly: Well, in school, growing up, I rode a skateboard and played in rock bands, and eventually, after having dropped out of school for a while, went to college.  I went back to school for music, and stuck it out doing music, and studying some creative writing in my copious free time.

What did you play?

James: Well, I played guitar and piano, and I played percussion in the community orchestra and in the university orchestra because we had to have a bunch of ensemble credits. But in guitar, there’s not a lot of ensemble opportunities if you’re mediocre. I wasn’t a great performer, so I studied theory and composition.  And from that theory and composition background, I kind of got a little more into math, and kind of got over some of my hurdles with that, and ended up playing around with computers and became kind of the music lab manager.   Still kind of doing conventional stuff. And then when I got some sequencing software where I’d record with a device like the one that’s recording us here, I’d mix that stuff up on the computer and make, like these big sequence sort of concrete music things. I was really into, like, Pierre Schaeffer, and other sort of concrete music composers. So I did that for a while, and that kind of got me to ITP, where I studied interactive art.

ITP. What does that stand for?

James: Um, Interactive Telecommunications Program. It’s like a New York University program that’s sort of like digital art. Evan went to a comparable one.

Oh, you went to one?

Evan Roth: I went to the competing school.

James: A few blocks away.

Evan: At Parsons.

Are you coming from a technical background?

Evan: My story starts with skateboarding also. And then when I was seventeen, applying to schools, I had to find a program that was not offered at Michigan State University, so I could escape Michigan.

Right. That was your exit strategy, wasn’t it?

Evan: I went to University of Maryland to learn how to become an architect. And my plan at the time was to, like, secretly design buildings that would be the best skate spots in the city. You know?

I see.

Evan: You know, transitions and edges, until they were just destroyed with, like, whacks and grinds. And then I did the BFA in architecture. And then worked for one year in Washington, D.C. not as a licensed architect but as a practicing architect in an architecture firm. Then I worked for two years in LA as an architect, and then quit that gig and moved to New York to go to Parsons for graduate school and did a new media art thing there, and that’s kind of…

And that’s how you…

Evan: That’s where I started getting into graffiti, and learned how to write code.

So how did you guys meet?

James: We both applied for the same fellowship and we didn’t know each other and it just so happened that we were two of the four people that got accepted last year. Two years ago. Was that 2005?

Evan: I guess.

James: The sort of tail end of 2005.  All of 2006.

Evan: Yeah. 2005, 2006, 2007 halfway done. Yeah, that makes sense.

So the forming of GRL happened here at iBeam. Is that where it laid its foundation? Were you interested in graffiti based on your skating background? Or was that how you got interested in the form of writing graffiti?

James: I actually don’t have any memory of thinking about graffiti until I lived in New York.  Really, the moment for me was when I had this professor who was from South Africa, and she told me to go and visit the amphitheatre on the East Side Park. Do you remember that place?  She told me, “Go check it out”; that it was this abandoned lot you had to jump the fence.  But it’s awesome, it’s beautiful, sort of all tattooed up. And I climbed in there and saw all that, and I had no idea what the context was for it, but I knew it made for a really awesome sort of post-apocalyptic, hyper-urban scene, you know? And I took a bunch of photos of that and did my first kind of compulsory New York City graffiti project that every sort of digital artist does.

I gotcha. And you, Evan?

Evan: Yeah, sort of similar.  I mean, I was only passively interested in graffiti up until the point I moved to New York. And then I was walking to school a lot from Brooklyn, just because I was a full-time student and didn’t have a job, and so I’d put headphones on and just sort of walk a lot. So then I started taking photos and then, I don’t quite remember when it happened, but I got really entrenched in the writing community and then I saw some of your [Leon Reid] stuff.

There is a slogan on the web page, underneath the Grafitti Research lab quote: “Dedicated to outfitting graffiti artists with open-source technologies for urban communication.” What do you mean by outfitting? Describe that.  Do you mean like James Bond?

James: Early on we kind of made that comparison between what we were doing and what Q Branch would do for Bond in all the movies—Q Branch being the guy, the old man who was like, “Don’t break the toys, Bond!” And he would make these weapons and sort of nonchalantly give this really powerful tool to James Bond, who would be like, “Holy shit!”  And when we initially started showing people some of the things we were working on, they had responses like, “Oh, fuck, we could use that. That’s, simple enough, you know, we could probably do it too.” And coming from a background that’s kind of an engineer, which I did in between school and iBeam, I was just tired of people saying that technologies were neutral, and I was pretty sure that no one would say that a graffiti technology was neutral. And I thought there was something interesting and more honest about that. And that was before I kind of fell in love with it.

And what do you mean by open-source technologies? What does that mean essentially?

Evan: I mean, open source is usually used in software circles, or more traditionally used in software circles. Like, if something’s open source it means that you can not only run the application, but you can read the code that built the application. And so it’s kind of a small thing, but to people who know how to write code, it can mean a lot. If you have access to change it, you can create things like FireFox and Linux. You know, Linux is the best example of open-source because people, upon being given access, have built an operating system that competes with Microsoft and Apple. 

So it’s a very hands-on sort of thing.  

Evan: Yeah. So this is…you know, extending that idea to everything from hardware to how-tos for simple things. A how-to is source code in the sense that it tells you how to make something. So, just like the source code tells you how to build the application, you know, a list of instructions can be that in a physical way.

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James: And that’s also another formal way of just saying “sharing.” It’s like, share your process, share your tools, and in some cases, fortune. You know, the happenstance that you’re doing well, and your peers aren’t. Or whatever. They’re in trouble for doing the same thing. Which in graffiti, you know, there’s always that hilarity. There are the guys who are doing really well, and graffiti for them almost looks like a career, and the guys who are doing really bad, and graffiti for them almost looks like a psychological addiction. A curse of some kind.

All right. Now just describe a couple of these technologies that you’ve developed. I know one of your most popular is the throwies.

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James: So, for people who haven’t seen them, they’re just an LED, which is a light, a magnet, a battery and tape all wrapped together. Once you have that the magnets we use are these really strong rare earth magnets.  The idea is that you have this basic electronic circuit that lights up, which is getting into the territory that advertisers use. When the lights go off, you usually can’t see too much graffiti, unless graffiti writers are smart and will hit spots, like, under lampposts, and stuff like that. But this is one that actually emits light, so that was, we were thinking, a tool that people could use that would kind of be competing with all this, like, advertising.
 
I gotcha. Good. So, do you want to describe the L.A.S.E.R.?

Evan: So, just about the time that we couldn’t stand doing…

James: Doing another throwie project…    

Or talking about it anymore...

Evan: I mean, we were glad to see it kind of get an escape trajectory away from us, and become a project that a lot of people kind of dabbled in.

James: We had talked about this…

Evan:  It was a lot of fun, and if done sort of more technically with a night writer, you could really put a message up. You could write in a more traditional sense. But it just started to seem almost like a parody of itself.
So we were looking for some other shit.

I gotcha.

James: We were literally saying,  “We’ve gotta come up with something that’ll make people not ask for throwies anymore.”

Evan:  And I don’t think we ever thought the L.A.S.E.R. tag thing would be that.  Or at least, I didn’t. But we got invited to go to Rotterdam to just scout a location, which was a whole kind of little peninsula on the other side of the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam.  It’s a place where they didn’t have a lot of development for a lot of years, and they’re building all these skyscrapers. You know, the sort of traditional thing. So there’s all this wreckage of old stuff that’s been abandoned.

And the laser beam.

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Evan: Yeah, yeah. There was this one awesome, like, [Renzo] Piano building, that had this LED screen on one side of it, so you’d see these giant sort of lo-fi animations on it. And from looking at that, we all thought, “Man, it would be cool to be able to make that.” But in real time. Just someway to combine that epic scale with the writing that we really enjoy.

James: So we were sitting there in the parking lot, and whatever. We had talked a little bit about lasers as a way to write text before. But somehow it just occurred to us, like maybe you could use a laser, a high-powered hand-held laser beam, as sort of like a marker, just to get this, “Look at the graffiti writers. You got your laser beams to shoot people in Iraq. Well, we’ve got our laser beams here, too. And we’re going to mark your fucking buildings up.” Initially, we did some tests and it seemed like it could work, just kind of an extension of Evan’s work at Parsons, and then the [trip sessions] with GRL. We got our friend Theo to sit down and think about the code, and he wrote the software for it. And we went and tried it out there for the first time at the spot. The government of the Netherlands had given us quite a bit of money to put on some kind of show, and we kind of came there with a bunch of ideas, all disconnected, and stuck them together right on the spot. And writers started using it, it was a fucking pretty good first try.

The LED throwies are a little bit more accessible to the masses, essentially. Is there a way that the laser beam can be on that same level of accessibility?

James: The way we sort of tackled that one is to have one system built here. It’s like the bikes, the bike mounted with all the power necessary to run it, the equipment necessary to run it. So we call that thing the mobile broadcast unit. And so the idea behind that is that the mobile broadcase unit can put a camera on it and run the L.A.S.E.R. tag software on it. But you could also project a movie, you could also project a video you made against this or that. It could be like, an activist thing.

Right.

James: So we were thinking that could be like a rental. Like activist groups or artists who didn’t have the money to get their own equipment could borrow from us for the night. We’re doing that here, and people are starting to use it a little bit.  More people will start using it soon enough, I think. And now, when people ask us to go to other cities and do this, we try to convince them to build these and leave them behind, and leave them in places we’ve gone to so that they can be, like, a tool for whoever.

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I have a question... It’s called the "Graffiti Research Lab." Do you favor graffiti artists over street artists? Or is there any kind of distinction that you draw between the two?

James: I was thinking about this the other day, and I think the main reason we call it Graffiti Research Lab, in addition to the fact that, as a joke, we had stenciled in the garbage hall “graffiti research.” Because that’s where I had done this stencil to test an electrograph. So it was kind of a joke. This is where graffiti is relegated to, the garbage. I just chose “graffiti” versus street art, probably because of graffiti analysis. It was just a word that appealed to me more. But it was also because during the early days of messing around with stuff, we were just messing around with spray paint and acid etch.

Evan: We wanted, like, street art.

James: We didn’t have a lot of content or anything, really. We had just two mediums. [Conductive] spray paint, and trying to find a way to use acid etch that was not dangerous.

I gotcha.

Evan: It turns out there’s not really that many ways to use acid etch that’s not dangerous. So even though things branched out in a direction that probably resembled, at least for awhile, street art versus graffiti. You know, there…

James: Yeah, we worked that out pretty early on.

I was just noticing the difference because most people would choose the term, the terminology “street artist” because it’s “in” now, rather than “graffiti artist.” And I wanted to know which you guys favored.  Is your technology more for graffiti artists than for street artists?

James: I mean, pre-GRL, when I was working on my thesis project in graduate school, I wanted to make things for graffiti writers.

Right, I see.

James: That was, like, three or four years ago? Is that right? Was it that long ago? It was right when street art was really at the top of its media saturation, and I was really into graffiti writers, and I felt like they were kind of being all swept into jail slowly, while street artists were running around the world collecting crowds and stuff.

And you wanted to…

James: And so I wanted to make software, or make a project that was just for that community. But then once we got started here, we still had a pretty healthy response.  We generally like people who aren’t impressed with what we do, and graffiti writers are always hard to impress.

You guys are very proactive with your own technology.  At what point would you consider yourself grafitti writers also? Or would you like to consider yourself provocateurs or proponents of graffiti artists themselves? How would you categorize yourself? I assume you’re setting an example for other writers, right? Is that correct? Or would you consider yourself a graffiti artist? It’s a difficult question, but it’s an important one, I think.

Evan: It’s so weird, everyone’s got a funny take on that.  I just heard someone say the other day, “Yeah, I mean, he’s maybe a graffiti artist, but he’s not a graffiti writer. He’s not a bomber.” So there’s, like, three classes. There’s the graffiti writer, a street artist, and then, is there a street writer? There’s this wide range. 

Yeah.

Evan: I don’t know. I wish I could write. I wish I was a younger guy, and I’d started sooner and met someone who taught me a lot of shit.  Then I wouldn’t just be scribbling up on the roof at iBeam, or in the back hallway, or something. I almost feel like I missed my chance to be anything other than an old-man prankster. ‘Cause, you know…

Well, it seems like you take joy in designing things that help younger people get the message out there. I know a lot of writers will safeguard their technology, what they develop, for themselves. And obviously you’re not working from that standpoint. What is the benefit of sharing what you have to offer? What do you get from it? Just the satisfaction of knowing that people are using your work?

James: Well, you get, like, a more fertile creative culture. Maybe if everyone does that, if a lot of people had that same kind of attitude you’d have a real nice pot of free stuff to work from as an artist. And I mean, obviously, we take ideas. We steal ideas. You know, we see an idea that an artist did really well, and we take it and use it in another way. People don’t sue us; hip-hop groups don’t sue us for putting their music in the video. It seems like we’ve got a little bit of a culture boiling where people are doing this now. But beyond that, there is a “media befriends the message” type of thing. Like, when you release your project open source, it’s like your project has got wheels, and then you’ve got this other set of wheels on it that it is open source. So it’s going out there as content, and some people are saying, “Oh, look. They’re releasing something that wasn’t open-source in the past in an open-source way.” I think it has a lot to do with why some of the projects in the open lab have been really successful. I mean, it’s either that us and our colleagues in the open lab are just, like, small- to medium-geniuses.

Yeah.

James: Or there’s something about this open source that it brings in audiences of different types coming at it. Including that DIY type. You know, the street art types, the artist types. You know, now we’re even getting the crooks and the felon types.

That kind of brings up another question. With open source, you have a huge amount of people, you know, able to use your technology. Or is there a specific way that you don’t want it to be used?

James: Advertising comes to mind.

Evan: Yeah, advertising. I mean, these are just tantamount to a moot points really, because we’ve released it in such a way that anyone can use it. And I think, on some level, we thought about the technology and wondered, “If everyone used it in the wrong way, would the world be any worse?” And I don’t think it would. The weird thing about advertisers using it is that we’re stealing these tools from advertisers. They already project, but their thick skulls don’t know that they do. They already do interactive, cool stuff like L.A.S.E.R. tag in cities. That capability’s already existent. So when they see our stuff it’s like listening to a Britney Spears remix.  They’re like, “This is so good! It’s like I’ve known this my whole life!” But they did this. We just are trying to make it so other people can do it. But if they didn’t do it, that would make us feel fine too. You know? It’s like, you can make bank doing it too. And a lot of people do. Or at least they get famous, which doesn’t pay as well as people tell me. The advertisers are always going to be able to get their hands on it. So if we like it, they use it, and then, in the same spirit, open source it. But there’s no license that requires that they currently exist for hardware.

Is there any specific person or specific project that has made you feel like, “This is what we made this for?” Or, what conduct would you like to have people use your technology in? Or are there any shining examples of…

James: Seeing the guys from ACC. Like, 2SA and [Denz], the All-City Crew?

Oh, right, right, right.

James: Seeing those guys use the L.A.S.E.R. tag stuff over the last few weeks…

Put a smile on your face.

James:  It was pretty fucking amazing, because they represent that extrem-o graffiti.  They both earned respect, and a kind of critical infamy that has basically put a lot of those guys in that crew in jail, or on the verge of being in jail. Of course, their talents have also put them in, like, rap videos, and t-shirt making, and design.  They’re all amazingly creative people. And then you get to kind of know that about them, and have them use the system. It’s what we thought it was supposed to be. It’s a community-building tool. It’s the same thing we did in Rotterdam.

Evan: The other one I remember feeling good, too, was when we were projecting over those advertisements. ‘Cause that was at a moment when someone was projecting ads in the building, and we had our equipment right there, so we could go up there. Even though it was just this stupid thing that no one ever saw, it was a moment for us where we were like, “We got the same equipment as you guys. And we don’t have to play by the same rules. Here’s what it’s like.” And so we just projected over the top of their thing, and made them shut down.

So that was kind of  crowning achievement.

Evan: It was a crowning achievement. That no one witnessed. And no one cares about.

I know in subcultures people are usually hesitant to accept new technology, and they’ll be quick to write it off. Have you had any kind of criticism from the graffiti community as to the validity of what you’re doing, how you’re advancing technology, and advancing artists’ capability to put their stuff out there?

Evan: I think the criticism comes more from how people define graffiti. So a lot of people, you know, rather rightfully so, treat graffiti as a religion. And they have really specific ideas for what that religion is. And a lot of their definitions exclude a lot of the stuff that we do. And we even agree with them a lot.

James: We use the word “graffiti” a lot, and some people, especially many from the more bombing side, think graffiti is this thing inside a spray can, and that’s it.

Evan: That’s cool.

James: And that’s cool, but when they see us throwing that word around, I think it rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

Evan: Well, I also know a lot of people who get up and comment on threads on the internet don’t like it. I don’t know if any of those people get up in the city. I don’t know if they know how much we go out, like the type of connections that we’ve fucking fought for among graffiti writers in New York. And, you know, [Catzu] told us, at various times, that he refers to some of the people they know as kind of the politicians of graffiti. And he’s like, “You know, they’re not sure.”

James: They’re not sure about it.

Evan: “But at least they’re interested ‘cause you give a shit.” And there’s a little bit of trust because they see you’re not doing commercial shit. So, you know, to that extent, like, hanging out with [Catzu], I don’t really care if you tell me I’m not graffiti at all. I care if he thinks that what I do is graffiti. Cause, like, I know his shit. I read an article that [Dave] said some shit, like, “Whatever.  That’s not graffiti, and that needs to be said.”

Sure.

Evan: And you know we’ve met him at the Eleven Spring thing. And I’m like, “That’s too bad. ‘Cause we were right there, you could have talked to us. While you were painting on the inside of the building, we were hanging some shit on the outside of the building.” We’re in the same business. And they’re like, “Well, you don’t have a can of spray paint.” But you don’t want to see what I can make with a can of spray paint. Like, it doesn’t look good. We’re just using the tools we have.

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So you guys are obviously used to working with permission and without permission. And now I’ve got to ask the question:  have you guys had any trouble with authority?

Evan: Dude, we had some last week.

James: I mean, we’ve never been arrested for it.

Okay.

the most trouble we ever got in wasJames: We’ve never been arrested for anything we’ve done. We’ve  never gotten caught for things that were really bad. There were things that we’ve done that were not so bad and what we really did was wrong. I mean, got caught for doing. It’s hard to know when we got our shit detained in Barcelona. And we had to kind of argue our way out of paying a bill right there on the spot to get it back. Honestly, we got kicked on in Barcelona the most. But the L.A.S.E.R. scares cops in New York. They see that and they’re like, “Well, I think that might make people nervous.” But apparently there’s just not enough of them, or they’re too busy doing legitimate things to really roll up on us.

Give them some time. You’ll fucking get bagged at some point. Give it a couple more years.

James: You’ve been bagged?

Yeah, man.

James: In the Verbs days?

Verbs days, yeah. And just for hopping the turnstile and doing all kinds of shit. I’ve been in handcuffs so many times, just growing up, I don’t know how many times I’ve been in fucking handcuffs. I don’t want to blame it on stereotyping, but it might have something to do with that. It’s like, I know what it’s like to be in the back of a fucking cop car.

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Evan: Well, the racial component just reveals itself in New York City. Half the reason why we think we got so fucked with in Barcelona is that everyone seems to be white there.

Yeah.

Evan: Here, it’s like our friends who are African-American or Latino, are without a doubt, in more trouble than our other friends. You gotta, like, destroy a city like Borf to really get arrested as a white man.

James: That’s not even true, ‘cause there’s a lot of people that do in New York City, too. But it’s ‘cause they’re active writers, or they’re really toy and they just get caught. It’s mostly, I think, because active writers kind of earn that. Everyone else is getting selectively picked off. And if I don’t pay the ticket, maybe they will arrest me next time.

Evan: We did get a ticket for playing audio.

Oh, you did?

James: Yeah.

Oh, ‘cause of the sound. What is it, noise pollution?

James: Yeah.

You both have done work in places besides New York City and the United States. Just what are some of the highlighted cities, or cities that you really enjoyed?

Evan: Hmm. I like the Netherlands.

James: Netherlands is fun.

Evan: I mean, the only reason it’s hard to answer is that we’ve been having so much fun in New York the last few weeks. And don’t you just feel like the stuff we’ve done here feels a lot more real?

James: When we travel, we’re usually invited by some big organization, right?  So we’re usually doing work with, like, arts things, museums, festivals. Those always feel a little lame compared to running around New York.

Evan: The exceptions are also the ones where you kind of get in trouble too. Like, the Barcelona thing was an exception in that we just went out and did out own thing in the city. And they wanted us to do it,  and we had a giant crowd of that was more a detriment to the whole operation than it was a…

James: Like a liability.

Evan: It probably resulted in us getting in trouble so frequently. But I had a really nice time in Norway. But that’s because I like hanging out with rockers. And that was a music [thing]. And I liked to go to the green room. When you’re getting invited someplace it’s nice to be able to go in the green room. And there were all these Japanese beatboxers.

James: That was awesome. Barcelona was fun, too. I mean, the crowd that we pulled in Barcelona is was the biggest spectacle.

Evan: People kept calling it stunts. They were like, “Are you going to do another stunt?” Like, “Yeah. I’m going to dress up and jump off this building.”

James: Yeah, like I’m David Blaine.

Evan: That’s the opposite of what we do, right? Put on a vest and become invisible and put on a clown suit.

James: Like, jump out in front of everybody.

Hell yeah. So have you guys done South America or Asia yet?

James: We have not. Right?

Evan: No. We’re going to the other North America soon. We’re going to Mexico City. We’d love to go anywhere in South America, anywhere in Brazil, for instance, as long as it’s not Nokia asking.

James: We’ve gotten, like, five invites to go to Brazil, and we always get excited and then we see the e-mails, and it’s always for some company. So we need a strings-free invite.

I see.

Evan: But we’re doing Asia too, right? We’re doing…

James: Yeah, we’re doing Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and then China.

That’d be interesting. China, the next empire.

James: Yeah, I know.  I’m telling Evan that this is how we get to be good pets. You know? Good boy, good boy.

Yeah, exactly. Nice boy.

James: Nice Anglo boy. Here’s a bone for you.

I don’t know if you guys want to talk about this, but I understand GRL is going to be leaving iBeam soon? Is that right?

James: At some point.

Evan: It’s inevitable.

What are your plans for the GRL after you’re out of the nest or incubator?

Evan: We have so many kind of pompous-sounding plans.  One of them is that we got invited by the U.S. government to start a branch of government called the Department of Homeland Graffiti.

Are you serious?

Evan: Yeah, and we’re not sure we want to do it. I mean, you know. We don’t support the Bush administration, but this is a great opportunity.

You’ve got to be shitting me, dude. Are you serious? You can’t be fucking serious.

Evan: The Department of Homeland Graffiti might happen. But we definitely have our next project coming up. I mean, the next project that I really want to devote some time to is baseball cards for graffiti writers. But particular baseball cards—

That’d be sweet.

Evan:  Because we have this camera setup.

Yeah, you all have been telling me about this. What is this thing?

Evan: The Ghetto Matrix. So you stand in a matrix thing, and you get these twenty-four shots of you. And you could have a piece up on the wall. You can look at the rotation of the piece, and then on the back it would have your stats. So it’s where you’re from, years in business, time served, number of arrests, number of hits…

James: You know, this makes sense.  I think a lot of what we do is just trying to get graffiti to be like it was in the 90s--just blowing up.  Everybody wanted to do this; it’s part of pop culture in a way that the Mario video game did not do.

Right.

James: I just can picture Peter Malone being so pissed off that little seven and eight year old kids are trading these.

Look, Mommy, I got a Dro!

James: “No, you didn’t! Don’t do this!”

Evan: “Will you trade my Dro for your Sane Smith?”

James:  So we’ll make it a part of pop culture, getting kids hooked on it at an early age.  Making these people look like gods.

Evan: And not only that, you can have toy card instead of rookie cards.  Yeah, that’s where you celebrate all the toys.

Toy cards?

Evan: Because you just gotta have them. And they never get repped. It’s just like Catzu’s book idea--you gotta rep these guys.

He’s gonna go pro in a couple years. He’s a toy now, but you know. Give him a couple years. He’s going to be all over the city.

James: It’s going to be good. We should do the baseball cards.

Evan: I know people think, “Whatever. Graffiti Research Lab. They’re not really graffiti.” If you tell that idea to writers, they’ll love it.

Of course. Of course.

Evan: They’re like, “Goddamn! I can’t wait to get them!”

James: They want their card, man.

Evan:  People like Mark Ecko--there’s no shit-talking against him or anything--but they’re artists or they’re designers. Talented people, also good businessmen--they start these companies. And in a way, they’re supplied with kind of fresh, new content, that will engage young people via street artists and graffiti artists who are making this cool work. And they just kind of take that and plaster it on a t-shirt and change the text or whatever. But you never see it the other way around, where graffiti writers are taking advantage of corporate ideas and trying to get some value out of it. So this could turn into a business where it’s almost like a cooperative. If you get your card, and it sells, then you get some money off of it. I heard AV 1 say the other day,  “You know, we’re only artists when we’re talking to the cops.” That was on his shirt or something. He said, “We’re just repping this artist stuff, you know, until the cops go away.” So the  graffiti writers can get a little taste of the small artist dollars. They’re small. They don’t really pay for anything you want. But it’s the thought that counts, right?




Website
www.graffitiresearchlab.com

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