My contributions to last Sunday’s world building exercise centered around concepts of self-censoring and rejuvenating spaces for free expression – blank walls and screens where everyone’s encouraged to scrawl, write or txt themselves to the world.

So it’s no big surprise that I’m a fan of initiatives like Graffiti Archaeology -

“Graffiti is the chameleon skin of the urban landscape…

Graffiti Archaeology (grafarc.org) captures this process of constant change and makes it visible. Grafarc.org is an interactive, timelapse collage of photographs of certain walls, taken over a span of months or years. The photos are precisely superimposed, so that by moving through the layers, you experience a compressed version of time passing, as old tags are submerged beneath new ones. You can see how one writer’s style changes over the years, or explore the dialogue between writers as they paint over each other’s work. The project also functions as a living archive, since most of the pieces on the site no longer exist in the real world.”

And here’s their Flickr.

Interrogating Public Space is an ongoing series of interviews by Creative Time Curator Nato Thompson with artists, theorists, policy makers, and community organizers about the issues surrounding public space. These questions serve to complicate and broaden the notion of what constitutes a public practice and what mechanisms are available to increase social justice. As the study of space has grown to include multiple discourses, this investigation anticipates finding connecting issues that bring together disparate forms of analysis—from public housing to theme parks to public art to community organizing to interventions.