Last night I organized an “urban art” Dorkbot meeting. Damion Hayes (editor of Dodge and Burn and Director of BLVD Gallery) and Lars Bergquist (artist of No Touching Ground) spoke. Lars works with animal/shamanist graphic images, powerful when layered over giant cement columns under bridges and in industrial neighborhoods. Lars’ flickr.
A few themes emerged for me. First, that urban artists are often disadvantaged, disenfranchised youth who use their creative expression to “claim space”. Second, that they were transforming notions of what is art and where is it expressed – on an urban landscape, in unsanctioned spaces, rather than on the walls of galleries controlled by gallery owners. Lars and Damion showed us one such remarkable group, Graffiti Research Labs, who has been doing innovative work using technology as a medium of expression and tool for public action in urban environments.
Hmm…..sound familiar? People expressing themselves and sharing directly with each other outside the control of authoritative figures? See my last blog post.
One person in the audience asked “what about online?” Damion said that online technology had a big impact on the urban art scene, because urban artists from different regions could document and share with each other, despite the fact that their work was often “buffed out” within days of being displayed. This means you can see a lot more of what’s out there, some urban artist can develop increased fame, but there is also a lot more low quality work to filter through.
The third theme emerged from hearing how Lars’ talked about his work, because the urban environment was really a part of his art. He was using the urban landscape as his medium, not just a canvas. It reminded me of a line of thought I had a while ago when a friend said to me “I don’t know how you have the patience to sit in front of your computer for so long.” I tried to express to her that it was not a matter of patience, in fact the opposite, that the computer and the Internet were creative mediums for me. Many folks have this strange bias that only certain objects are mediums for creativity (paint, clay) and only certain tools are used for creative expression (paint brushes), and they consequently neglect the creative potential of other objects. What if we look around, and think everything is a medium for creativity, everything a tool for expression?
So many aspects of the Internet, and the Social Web in particular, are so new that we have not even begun to truly exploit their creative potential. When you see projects like thesheepmarket.com, or ze frank work, I am completely excited but sense we are only scratching the surface. What amazing cool art could you do, knowing that you have access to millions of people as your creative medium through the Internet, and tools like crowdsourcing and social tagging as your paint brush?
