About five years ago or so I wrote an essay about "Virtual Graffiti". I talked about contemporary graffiti artists etc. and how the commodifying of graffiti by nature transformed its cultural value and meaning. I also talked about the visual and conceptual components of graffiti culture and their relationship to Internet, information technology and virtual worlds in general. All of this created by a computer, I imagined that graffiti would leave the streets and the general physicality of it, and enter a virtual world completely free of these restraints. I am not down on graffiti at all, I love the art form, but I am interested in seeing where it might be going and what this will mean. Also, in my understanding that it is not literal, it is anticipated to be something completely transformed and other. The concept of graffiti is a starting point that is about getting memes out in the public eye rapidly and effectively. Shepard Fairey's "OBEY" represented the conceptual crossover (from literal to conceptual hive mind) in the streets starting a whole wave of copycats. He was beyond a name or a crew, and prognosticating anonymity in the web. Now the wall is a web page and a cloud. Avoiding literal interpretations it remains new, as in neologism new, in spite of the ever increasing attempt to create a data structure that is more fluid, defined and intelligent.
My opinion is that this has happened. I am not saying I predicted it, but perhaps in my own naive way had a sense of what was going to happen. I think that hash tagging and tag clouds are an expression of this idea. With W3C Semantic Web this is going to get even more translated in its virtuality by hyperlinking, data and ideational expressions with greater speed, relativity and revelatory presence. Hacktivism too is its own version of graffiti mind, seeing the internet as a way to get information out quickly to the largest audience possible.
Street tagging aesthetically has been sort of prescient of the tag clouds that would eventually make their way onto web pages. You might think it is not the same thing, but as we virtualize and cloud our collective consciousness through computing, we might not even be living in the "natural world" as it were. I'm thinking something like Logan's Run, in the sense that our hive mind will take us into another dimension through computing. Therefore, the modes of expression, both legal and illegal will follow to these realms. I do not know anything and I am not saying I know what it is, but this is what I see. How we use it, will decide the next steps in our evolution as creators of metaverses.
