| Facsimile
Facsimile
Facsimile is a working title for a broad range of activity that emerged from various research projects and collaborations.
Its aim is to promote thinking and debate around visualisations of information and data we digest everyday.
For example, is graffiti a crime or art? What counts as ‘truth’. Whose voice is heard and whose is not? Who has the power to choose what gets ‘known’.
Are voice assistants (as information sources) politically neutral?
We have several projects underway and more in the pipeline and are always keen to collaborate, speak or share.
Take a look at this project to find out more about our latest work.
Graffiti is typographic in style and is formed of words or letter assemblages. In most modern urban built environments one can now see palimpsests of graffiti. Its aesthetic might lead the observer to believe that fabrication required little thought or skill.
However, graffiti requires thinking and skill and requires tools and a raw material. Graffiti “writers” who practice commonly fabricate complex “tags”, “throwups” or “pieces”. The craft practice of graffiti thus involves a relationship between raw material, body, tool and surface. Carmel (2013) has described craft as work that requires tools, skills and insightful judgments. Graffiti is therefore understood as a craft which involves craftmanship.
From: Cook, R., 2024. Crafting a ‘senseplace’: the touch, sound and smell of graffiti. The Senses and Society, 19(2), pp.122-139.
Full article is available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17458927.2024.2337104
Mark making with aerosol paint cans (Ferrell 1995; Ross 2016) emerged around the 1970s in New York (Brewer and Miller 1990). Research of graffiti since then has been extensive but there is a lack of consensus on what is or is not graffiti and what is or is not art or vandalism.
“Graffiti – unauthorized writing or drawing on a public surface”
In the space of a built environment people come into contact with each other (Sennett 2005). As an abstraction or reality, space is not inhabited or physical but experienced as process, and is produced (LeFebvre 1991). The production of space, through the writing of graffiti is “being-in-the-world,” or dasein (Heidegger 2006) and it is about the who, how and where.
Through the practice of graffiti there is a sensory production of space, and through conceptual abstraction and reconfiguration, the crafting of a “senseplace” happens. Rather than remaining as natural spaces (LeFebvre 1991) empty spaces and non-places (Giddens 1991, 1992) physical structures and places such as a wall were encoded as a senseplace.
Find out about our recent projects
Discover our latest articles.
