3D printed graffiti

This is reprinted from my older blog, dated June 2014, with minor edits.

What is going on with graffiti right now in 2014? Let’s go back a bit – I grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn in an era of breakin’ crews, graf crews, dj crews – basically the early days of bboy culture and hiphop. I looked up to the older bboys because they were really into what they were doing and represented all the elements. These guys had a passion that the hoodlums didn’t. Plus, girls were into graf, as a pre-teen boy, that was enough motivation to get me to jump in. It was an electric time and in an electric place.

Graffiti, I was into chasing all-city fame, and into beef. Cutting class at Midwood HS to practice down in the dead tracks (old train lines that only ran occasional freights) was the daily routine. It has all since shapeshifted for me… New York is full of non NY’ers. That’s cool, whatever, but the massive new immigration and gentrification brings with it a new style of street artist who wants to stencil and wheat paste on the same streets where classic graf began. The subculture got handed down well enough to those who care, but the look on the streets, overall, changed. All good, things change, it happens, I stopped being grumpy about it.

I work with different tools nowadays, 3d printing being the most fun (I started around 2011). Also cnc, laser cutting, and mold making. I used these to give new form to the old staple, the graf sticker, aka slaps, I treated the concept as an experiment. I custom paint 3d prints of my tag, in the way I envision a full sized piece. As far as i can tell, I’m the world’s first graffiti artist using 3d printing who is actually going out bombing. The dope thing about this fusion is that I can really make things that are more than a tag on a postal sticker… I also have to say hats off to Revs who was welding plasma-cut tags to fire escapes, gates, and fir hydrants, to name a few. The dude must have had a job as a welder and had a mobile welding set up on a truck in order to do that stuff. The permanence of it blew my mind. The flipside for my 3d printed slaps was that I hoped ppl would snag them and give them a new life.

One more thing I’d like to note… I spent quite a bit of time playing with different enamels to get my “marbling” technique down. I’ve always been a fan of the Turkish art form of Ebru and wanted to figure out a similar wet application of color to PLA and ABS 3D prints (update, I started using SLA resin in 2020). you can see some of the results below. Most were accomplished with 99cent store nail polishes.

I got myself scanned at the Makerbot store in soho, New York a few days ago.  If you’d like to see a bit of street experimentation as psychogeography, check out my other post about it here. While Graffiti is it’s own culture, born out of expression from a poor part of society when the planets were all aligning in crazy ways, I can call graffiti a form of psychogeography.