3D Printing And Graffiti Markup Language Create Street Art Of The Future

Immortalizing a moment—that’s Kodak’s job, right?

Evan Roth would say otherwise. Roth is an accomplished digital media artist who approaches his work with a hacker philosophy. As pop culture, time, and space speed by, Roth’s work encourages us to think about pauses and stillness.

One of his most characteristic and well-known projects is Graffiti Analysis. As its namesake suggests, Graffiti Analysisis an extensive ongoing study in the motion of graffiti. The project consists of custom-created software designed for graffiti artists to create a visualizing element to the subtle gestures that go into creating a tag. The motion data from the graffiti is documented, analyzed, and then translated into Graffiti Markup Language (.gml) files. The specialized XMLformat is designed to be compatible with the archiving process of the graffiti motion data.

But the project does not stop there. One of Roth’s recent developments is a continuation of Graffiti Analysis called Cap (Graffiti Analysis Series). This sculpture series came to life by analyzing graffiti artists’ movement through space (similarly to the previous project) with the added step of translating that data into a 3D printed model. Roth used algorithms to capture the motions of Cap—an artist featured in the 1983 documentary Style Wars. The finished sculptures are made from Chrome-dipped ABS Thermoplastic.