Graffiti Images Research Articles

Detecting change in graffiti using a hybrid framework

AbstractGraffiti, by their very nature, are ephemeral, sometimes even vanishing before creators finish them. This transience is part of graffiti's allure yet signifies the continuous loss of this often disputed form of cultural heritage. To counteract this, graffiti documentation efforts have steadily increased over the past decade. One of the primary challenges in any documentation endeavour is identifying and recording new creations. Image‐based change detection can greatly help in this process, effectuating more comprehensive documentation, less biased digital safeguarding and improved understanding of graffiti. This paper introduces a novel and largely automated image‐based graffiti change detection method. The methodology uses an incremental structure‐from‐motion approach and synthetic cameras to generate co‐registered graffiti images from different areas. These synthetic images are fed into a hybrid change detection pipeline combining a new pixel‐based change detection method with a feature‐based one. The approach was tested on a large and publicly available reference dataset captured along the Donaukanal (Eng. Danube Canal), one of Vienna's graffiti hotspots. With a precision of 87% and a recall of 77%, the results reveal that the proposed change detection workflow can indicate newly added graffiti in a monitored graffiti‐scape, thus supporting a more comprehensive graffiti documentation.

Applying interactive technology to design an innovative interactive sound installation for sustainment of the Din-Tao culture

ABSTRACT The Din-Tao troupe is the leader of the temple-fair parade; however, the related culture is declining due to rapid social changes. In this study it is tried to combine interactive technology and the Din-Tao culture to design an innovative interactive sound installation, helping to promote the inheritance of the culture. After a literature review, principles for designing such an installation were derived. The desired installation was constructed accordingly with drum sound used to trigger generations of graffiti drawings and background music of Din-Tao troupes. Utilization of the installation was observed, followed by interviews with the participants. The collected data were evaluated to check the effectiveness of the installation, leading to the following conclusions: (1) the use of this installation is a new way for participants to experience the Din-Tao culture; (2) the approach of combining interactive technology with the Din-Tao culture enhances the development and sustainment of the culture; (3) concretization of drum-beating sound into graffiti drawings of Din-Tao troupes encourages the participant to contact the related culture; (4) real-time multimedia feedbacks of graffiti images and Din-Tao music help to attract visitors to participate; (5) presenting Din-Tao activities interactively by the installation helps to increase people<apos;>s interest in the Din-Tao culture.

Point set registration with mixture framework and variational inference

We propose a new point set registration method based on mixture framework and variational inference. A three-phase registration strategy (TRS) is proposed to automatically process point set registration problem in different cases. A Gaussian variational mixture model (GVMM) with isotropic and anisotropic components under the variational inference framework is designed to weaken the effect of outliers. The Dirichlet distribution is applied to govern the mixture proportion of Gaussian components and then distinguishes missing points. We test the performance of our method in contour registration, Graffiti images, retinal images, remote sensing images and 3D human motion, and compare with six state-of-the-art methods. Our method shows favorable performances in most scenarios.

Karen B. Stern. Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. 312 pp.

Reviewed by: Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity by Karen B. Stern Mika Ahuvia Karen B. Stern. Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. 312 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000114 Karen Stern opens a window onto the life of ordinary Jews in the late antique Mediterranean world using an abundant and neglected corpus: graffiti written in Jewish dialects or accompanied by Jewish symbols. Stern demonstrates how [End Page 199] Jews participated in graffiti making in a variety of regions, in an array of public and private places that will dazzle those scholars used to literary sources, which are abstracted from the grittiness of daily life. Stern highlights that surviving legal writings tend to reify differences between Jews, Christians, and others, while graffiti shows Jews sharing worship practices, sporting fandom, and other ritual behavior with inhabitants all over the Mediterranean world. At the same time, as Stern often acknowledges, analyzing the abundance of extant ancient graffiti is rendered difficult by the brevity of graffiti themselves and the fact that ancient sources rarely comment on graffiti. Stern organizes her research thematically into three chapters: the graffiti of devotional spaces, mortuary graffiti, and graffiti in civic spaces. Each of her chapters lays out the evidence with minimal speculation on her part, forcing the reader to try and make sense of the data on their own before she offers her measured and limited hypotheses about the meaning of the extant graffiti at the end of each chapter. In her introduction, Stern guides readers to relinquish their modern understanding of graffiti as a deviant practice, noting that for the ancients it was considered "desirable, even normal" to inscribe one's name on the wall of a synagogue, for example (1). She acknowledges that graffiti is not an emic term but defines graffiti as "always of unofficial character" (quoting Angelos Chaniotis) and finds the capaciousness of this category useful for the many kinds of evidence it amasses for the study of ancient Jewish life (15). Stern places her work in the intellectual trajectory of French theorist Michel de Certeau and German microhistorians. Her intervention is to challenge the "the hegemony of rabbinical texts" for the interpretation of Jewish life; she upholds an approach that centers the archaeological evidence of graffiti in situ "and uses local and regional analogues (often produced by non-Jews) to interpret them—outside of literary texts and outside of twenty-first-century expectations" (8). Rather than reading the rabbis into graffiti, she argues that the data of graffiti have something important to teach us about the rabbis themselves as well as about nonrabbinic Jews. Her first chapter, "Carving Devotion," examines graffiti as a mode of prayer in synagogues, in sacred spaces of other religious communities, at pilgrimage sites, and in open outdoor shrines. As she points out, graffiti reveals "that ancient Jews prayed in a variety of built and natural environments," sometimes alongside other Jews and sometimes alongside others (39). Often the graffiti of devotion, as she terms it, consists only of "I am" and people's names or other very brief statements. She suggests, following Joseph Naveh, that these signature graffiti are "a type of petition, permanently documented in plaster or stone" (51). Literate people encountering this graffiti would read it aloud, reviving the petition, somewhat in the way that we cannot help but read signs or graffiti we encounter as we walk through the world. The relationship between composers of graffiti and later reciters brings to my mind the statement attributed to Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai: "When a student quotes his teacher in this world his lips move in the grave" (B. Yevamot 97a). If the sages were rabbinizing a common idea, it would bear out Stern's assertion that nonrabbinic evidence can illuminate rabbinic texts. [End Page 200] In the chapter on mortuary graffiti, Stern revisits the cemetery of Beth-Sheʿarim. This chapter primarily focuses on a couple of short graffiti texts and the many images found inscribed on the walls there. Many graffiti images are challenging to make sense of: ships, representations of human figures, human figures with weapons, abecedaries, animals...

Alternative fabrics of hegemony: City squares and street graffiti as sites of resistance and interactive communication flow

Abstract This article discusses the symbolic use of town squares and street walls as sites of communicative spaces. This approach looks at the PR role of those locations, i.e. the discourse and the imagery (portrayed in public spaces, graffiti images and street wall writings) that permeate those communicative domains. The obvious motive of their expansion across various cities is to contest the mainstream media and PR industries in favour of a more interactive flow of information in society. Similarly to the stress put by few scholars on the significance of urban spaces in global cities, this article considers the symbolic power of public spaces in Tunisia during and after the revolution of 14 January 2011 as sites of social activism, which may sometimes rival the power of social media networks. I examine its multifaceted forms of youth action in Tunisia to probe the forms of power that have led to current social changes. The study reveals that such squares have played significant roles in developing social relations, establishing connections and building friendships between social groups. After the revolution such spaces have emerged as contested terrains redefined by the new social order. Also graffiti and street art have, on the one hand, signalled the flourishing of a multiplicity of voices that are serving as a watchdog to the Transition to Democracy. On the other hand, such forms of social activism have proven to be effective tools for breaking the government’s monopoly on information dissemination, public opinion and control over the communicative spheres.

Graffittipaintouts

Abstract This picture essay explores the idea of the traces of meaning hinted at in the painted out graffiti images. The rectangles of paint become statements in themselves, disguising and suggesting speculation about the obliterated words.

Facing Images

This paper seeks to articulate the significance of an intimate connection that exists between faces and images. It argues that the manner in which images face us – a picture's turning toward a viewer – is the primary condition of its meaningfulness. The article explicates the significance of an image's facing through a dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas's philosophical understanding of the human face. The analogy I draw between Levinas's notion of the face and the facing (peniyya) of images runs against predominant readings of Levinas which emphasize the Levinasian ambivalence, not to say hostility, toward the visual, and the clear opposition he makes between the face's infinity and the finite and objectifying essence of images. My aim, however, is to show that there is an interesting sense in which Levinas's reflections on the human face offer, perhaps in spite of Levinas, a crucial prism for approaching pictures: I show that the Levinasian face can be understood in a manner that illuminates a dimension of alterity in pictures, one that remains uncontainable and, as such, questions the responsibility of the interpreter and opens up the ethical depth of the image. As a central case study, I turn to a series of provocative graffiti images, chimeric animal-human faces, which were created by Klone, a Tel Aviv-based street artist.

Freight train graffiti: Subculture, crime, dislocation*

In the widespread and growing hip hop graffiti underground, a new subcultural practice has recently become popular: the illegal painting of graffiti on outbound freight trains as a means of sending graffiti images out from their initial, circumscribed points of production into wider circulation. Using ethnographic methods appropriate to such a fluid, dislocated, and visually rich subject of study, I examine the proliferation of freight train graffiti, and the cultural and historical dynamics surrounding it. I also document the ways in which freight train graffiti both reproduces and expands long-standing orientations in the hip hop graffiti underground toward spatial mobility and symbolic expansion. Finally, I explore a variety of cultural and theoretical trajectories that freight train graffiti suggests: the development of criminal and deviant subcultures as dislocated symbolic communities; the interweaving of crime, cultural space, media, and audience; and the emergence of postmodern or anarchistic forms of everyday criminality.