Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :
1. Fra Biancoshock: “Digital Vandalism vs Vandalism on Digital”
2. CANEMORTO: TOYS
3. Dont Fret and Edwin – London/Chicago Wall Texts
4. Know Hope: “Parallels”

Fra Biancoshock: “Digital Vandalism vs Vandalism on Digital”

Real, Digital, Virtual. These three ways of experiencing the world remain distinct, for now.

With his small experiment captured here on video, Street Artist Fra Biancoshock is examining the ‘looking glass’ – that thin gossamer veil that separates our experience of the world and is trying to puncture it.

“Digital tools allow you to change reality; today an act of protest, vandalism or art can be done sitting comfortably in front of your PC,” he tells BSA.

It’s a conundrum – how much of what you see digitally is real. And if you are pre-disposed to expect never to witness the graffiti or Street Art in person, does it even matter whether it actually existed to begin with?

Fra. is not going to give you that answer directly. “The value of an action (be it a protest, an artwork or a provocation) is in the act, whether it is actually done, and how it is introduced to a virtual audience.”

CANEMORTO: TOYS

Canemorto are back with tales of their exploits as hard running graffiti kings with blunt instruments, namely their heads. With the wink-wink of a comedy troupe, the three are airing their disgust with the various hypocrisies and poseurs that surround them in the street and in the wider Street Art world that would seek to commodify and capitalize on an organic grass-roots culture. And then there are the conservators…

Aside from the entertainment and the dope rhymes, somehow the brutalist long-pole roller characters that Canemorto create supercede the storyline, rising above and frankly mocking the world with a dead-dog stare. Imposters are many – and very possibly there is a scenario where we’re all a bunch of TOYS.

Dont Fret and Edwin – London/Chicago Wall Texts

Graffiti pen pals Don’t Fret and Edwin have been telecommunicating their thoughts and passages and humorous non-sequitors to one another from Chicago and London via TEXTING. Text-based graffiti writing seems like a natural analogue to this digital transmission and this video bears witness to the experience of sharing – with your buddy as a live aerosol printer of your ideas on a wall thousands of miles away.

“It has been an interesting sort of “graffiti pen pals” project,” Dont Fret tells us,  “and with the Brexit vote and our Presidential election madness, our project kind of transformed into 2 artists trying to relate and understand what is happening across each others Atlantic.”

Know Hope: “Parallels”

 There are certain parallels between geopolitical situations in different regions, and the Israeli Street Artist/fine artist KNOW HOPE likes to lead you up to that dividing line and leave you there.

“This is an abbreviated version of video diptychs from the installation ‘Parallels’ presented as part of ‘Wall Drawings – Icônes Urbaines’ commissioned by and currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon.

For this installation, a series of outdoor interventions were created during the artists stay in Lyon.
The documentation of these interventions in-situ were later juxtaposed with other representations of borders or the meeting point of two separate realities, allowing a correspondence and reflection on the notions of territory, identity and our emotional structures.”