Abstract
Abstract. Graffiti is a short-lived form of heritage balancing between tangible and intangible, offensive and pleasant. Graffiti makes people laugh, wonder, angry, think. These conflicting traits are all present along Vienna's Donaukanal (Eng. Danube Canal), a recreational hotspot – located in the city's heart – famous for its endless display of graffiti. The graffiti-focused heritage science project INDIGO aims to build the basis to systematically document, monitor, and analyse circa 13 km of Donaukanal graffiti in the next decade. The first part of this paper details INDIGO's goals and overarching methodological framework, simultaneously placing it into the broader landscape of graffiti research. The second part of the text concentrates on INDIGO's graffiti documentation activities. Given the project's aim to create a spatially, spectrally, and temporally accurate record of all possible mark-makings attached in (il)legal ways to the public urban surfaces of the Donaukanal, it seems appropriate to provide insights on the photographic plus image-based modelling activities that form the foundation of INDIGO's graffiti recording strategy. The text ends with some envisioned strategies to streamline image acquisition and process the anticipated hundreds of thousands of images.
Highlights
Graffiti and street art are multifaceted, 'self-authorised' (Blanché, 2015) forms of personal expression that exploit the public space using a visual intervention
From colourful murals, anarchistic symbols on bridge pillars to bike stand writings (Figure 1). This ever-evolving nature and constant need to reinvent itself are characteristic of graffiti and street art (Lewisohn, 2009; Kimvall, 2014), but they explain the lack of scholarly agreement on the scope of these terms
INDIGO wants to ensure the digital survival of a large part of Vienna's graffiti-scape and disclose new socio-political-cultural insights
Summary
Graffiti and street art are multifaceted, 'self-authorised' (Blanché, 2015) forms of personal expression that exploit the public space using a visual intervention. This paper considers 'graffiti' to be the umbrella term for all mark-making practices, including engravings, paintings, sprayings, stickers, and other personal expressions attached to public (urban) surfaces in legal or illegal ways. This definition allows us to state that graffiti have been created for millennia (Lovata and Olton, 2015). The phenomenon remains fascinating and debateable because it continually fluctuates between tangible and intangible heritage, between vandalism and art, between graphical and textual, between legal and illegal, between subversive and humorous, between pleasingly acceptable and socio-political criticism These contradicting features are present along the Donaukanal (Eng. Danube Canal) in the city centre of Vienna (Austria). The first steps towards generating a base 3D model of the whole research zone are covered, along with some strategies that the INDIGO team currently explores to acquire and process the anticipated hundreds of thousands of graffiti photographs
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