At first, perhaps, the graffiti was just diverting. But it’s made its way into our lives steadily, becoming part of Facebook cover photos that say something about the self in that moment. We now text and email each other graffiti we find on our own, and we take video of ourselves coming upon it in odd places.

We’ve assembled some of our randomly gathered images into our digital work and installations. Our strategic curation of graffiti has steadily reoriented our work, culling from our own memories the power of unexpected texts, words and images stumbled upon that provoke, as an embodied reaction, a critical engagement, a wow, a shared laugh, an "aha."

 

Graffiti is often itself an act of dis/orientation. Some of it just tags the environment, designed to mark a space as owned in a subterranean geography. But much of it disrupts the nearly seamless flow of corporate colonization of public spaces. We think, for instance, of Banksy or Keith Haring, whose work posed material interruptions of spatial narratives that otherwise kept us moving along—nothing to see here, get back to work, go shopping. “Live Here, Work Here, Play Here.” Graffiti can dis/orient the spatial spectacles of our everyday lives, tactically turning attention to cracks in the narrative, contradictions and incommensurabilities in the paved-

over stories we otherwise tell ourselves to get through the day.