The Graffiti Archive and the Digital City
Lachlan MacDowall, "The Graffiti Archive and the Digital City" in Danny Butt, Jon Bywater and Nova Paul (eds) PLACE: Local Knowledge and New Media Practice (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008)

Excerpt from the introduction:
Forms of new media have regularly appropriated graffiti as a model for their operation, either as an aesthetic device for the design and marketing of commercial hardware and software, or as a conceptual tool for understanding flows of information within contemporary urban environments. In this process of appropriation, graffiti provides both content and concept.

On the one hand, graffiti offers a visual style and a certain sub-cultural cachet that gives emerging technology an illicit, anti-authoritarian resonance. For example, the website for Escape From Woomera, a modification of the PC game Half-life in which players attempt to break out of an Australian refugee detention centre, argues that “the videogame is the most rapidly evolving, exciting, subversive and feared cultural medium in the world today. It's akin to graffiti on the cultural landscape” (Escape from Woomera). The subversive potential of graffiti and videogames was further reinforced by a decision of the Australian Government's Office of Film and Literature Classification to refuse classification to the Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, a video game depicting the activities of a novice graffiti writer in a futuristic city (Marc Ecko; “Australian Government”).

Graffiti also makes available models for thinking about writing, textual interfaces, visual literacies and forms of navigation, sociability and broadcasting in contemporary city spaces. Graffiti practices, particularly the tradition of tagging, model an individualised, highly mobile, geographically engaged subject that is not dissimilar from an ideal, late-capitalist consumer. As Iain Sinclair notes in his analysis of London graffiti, “the [graffiti] tag is everything, as jealously defended as the Coke or Disney decals. Tags are the marginalia of corporate tribalism. Their offence is to parody the most visible aspect of high capitalist black magic” (26).

As Sinclair suggests, graffiti does not provide an escape from the conditions of late capitalism. Not only are graffiti forms now highly commodified and visible in art, design and advertising, the cleaning and prevention of graffiti is itself a significant growth industry, which has also harnessed new media technology. This chapter investigates the complex relationship between graffiti, new media and urban spaces, beginning with graffiti's shift from a marginal cultural practice to a highly visible, global phenomenon across the twentieth century. Secondly, it examines the similarities in the contemporary uses of new media by a range of graffiti stakeholders across three related fields: tagging, archiving and mapping urban space.

References
“Australian Government Classification Review Board Report on Decision - Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure.” Australian Government Office of Film and Literature Classification Web site. 16 March 2006. 16 June 2006. <http://www.oflc.gov.au>

Escape from Woomera Web site. Escape from Woomera Collective. 7 July 2005. <www.escapefromwoomera.org> (no longer operational)

Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure Computer Game. Atari. 14 Feb. 2006.

Sinclair, Iain. Lights Out for the Territory. Granta: London. 1998.