‘Imagine Being a Racist’: goINDIGO 2022’s «Ethics & Legality in Graffiti (Research)» Discussion Round

  • Benjamin Wild
  • Geert J. Verhoeven
  • Norbert Pfeifer
  • Enrico Bonadio
  • DEADBEAT HERO
  • FUNKY '
  • JANER ONE
  • MANUEL SKIRL
  • Massimiliano Carloni
  • Chiara Ricci
  • Christine Koblitz
  • Sven Niemann
  • Ljiljana Radošević
  • Jona Schlegel
  • Alexander Watzinger
  • Stefan Wogrin

Abstract

During the second discussion round of goINDIGO 2022, which took place on Friday, 13 May and was called Ethics & legality in graffiti (research), three out of many invited graffiti creators joined a discussion on (potentially provocative) statements with symposium participants (joining in-person and online). The statements, compiled by Geert Verhoeven in consultation with Benjamin Wild and Norbert Pfeifer, were:

objectivity OVER morals
objectivity OVER consequences
graffiti INCLUDES exploitation
copyright DOES NOT matter
Donaukanal graffiti IGNORES the origins

The three attending graffiti creators agreed to participate following their contact and invitation via Instagram. When introducing themselves, each conveyed their relationship to the Donaukanal and their different levels of experience and exposure within Vienna’s wider graffiti scene. DEADBEAT HERO (active in Vienna since 2014) is a Texan artist mainly focusing on street art while “dabbling in graffiti”. He owns an art studio and regularly interviews Viennese graffiti creators in his Artcade podcast. FUNKY (active intermittently since 2005) is a Bosnian, but Vienna-raised creator practising graffiti “with ups and downs and a lot of breaks like in life”. He was close to the Donaukanal a decade ago, but his central activity zone is now more to the north of Vienna. MANUEL SKIRL (active since 2006) is a Vienna-based creator currently known for his organic structures formed by black and blue lines. The openness and inclusiveness of the Donaukanal scene offered him the chance to begin creating and, in time, to develop his personal style in “more artistic” directions.

Each of the three brought their own perspectives to the discussion of the selected statements, recorded in the following text. However, this text is not a verbatim or sequential account of that discussion. First, although retaining the ‘feel’ of the discussion has been prioritised, the text has been slightly edited for readability, and superfluous content got removed. Second, as is often the way with the most exploratory of dialogues, the main topic of conversation shifted quickly and regularly. Although the five statements were individually framed by Norbert Pfeifer (after which Enrico Bonadio took on the moderator role), the first four statements and their more detailed elaborations have been reduced to two sections to structure the text in a manner that might better serve the reader. This reordering of the transcription means that, in some places, the text does not always flow consecutively in the way it did during the discussion. These places are indicated by […], and they do not only mark hops forward but also hops backward in time.

Finally, it is essential to know that all authors—of which none was a minor—have read this text and confirmed in writing that they were okay with their statements. This agreement notwithstanding, one must understand that these statements were raised in a lively discussion and must also be understood and treated this way.

Author Biographies

Benjamin Wild

Benjamin Wild (°1996) is a PhD student and university assistant at the Photogrammetry unit at the Department for Geodesy and Geoinformation at Technische Universität Wien (TU Wien). He received his Master’s degree from TU Wien in Geodesy and Geoinformation in 2021. Since then, he has been part of the graffiti-centred academic project INDIGO. Before investigating photogrammetric solutions in the context of graffiti research, Benjamin was working in the same department but in the field of environmental microwave remote sensing. What connects both experiences is the interest in understanding our environment better. Be it the amazon rainforest or the graffiti along Donaukanal. Benjamin’s research output can be found at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Benjamin-Wild-5.

Geert J. Verhoeven

Geert J. Verhoeven (°1978) is a senior researcher in archaeology at the LBI AchPro and is currently leading the academic graffiti project INDIGO. He received his Master’s and PhD degrees from Ghent University (Belgium) in 2002 and 2009, respectively. Since 2010, Geert has been working on many 3D modelling, remote sensing and data visualisation topics at the LBI AchPro, a research institute of which he is currently the vice director. In September 2021, Geert took a deep dive into the colourful graffiti world through project INDIGO. His research output can be found at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Geert-Verhoeven-2.

Norbert Pfeifer

Norbert Pfeifer received his PhD. from TU Wien in 2002. He then worked at TU Delft, the University of Innsbruck, and the alp-S Centre for Natural Hazard Management, before taking the position of Professor of Photogrammetry at TU Wien. His research interests are laser scanning and photogrammetry, including sensors, calibration, 3D modelling and application of these models in environmental and cultural heritage sciences. List of publications: https://scholar.google.at/citations?user=-HuwYEMAAAAJ.

Enrico Bonadio

Enrico Bonadio is Reader at City, University of London. He has a PhD from the University of Florence (Italy). He recently edited the “Cambridge Handbook of Copyright in Street Art and Graffiti” (Cambridge University Press 2019) and “Non-Conventional Copyright – Do New and Atypical Works Deserve Protection?” (Elgar 2018). He also authored and published his second monograph entitled (CUP 2023) and edited several other books. Enrico is a member of the Editorial Board of the NUART Journal, which publishes provocative and critical writings on various topics relating to street art practice and urban art cultures. Enrico also published a book entitled “Protecting Art in the Street – A Photographic Guide to Copyright in Street Art and Graffiti’ (Dokument Press, 2020).

Massimiliano Carloni

Massimiliano Carloni (°1990) is currently employed at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (Austrian Academy of Sciences) in Vienna. He completed his PhD in Classical Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa (Italy) in 2019 with a thesis on ancient Greek literature. His primary research interest lies in exploring the use of semantic technologies and metadata standards to describe and render accessible vast collections of diverse materials. In particular, he is interested in graph-based data models and linked open data. This led him to join the academic graffiti project INDIGO in November 2021 and take up the challenge of developing technical solutions for the description and long-term digital preservation of the collected data. His research output can be found at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Massimiliano-Carloni.

Chiara Ricci

Chiara Ricci is a conservation scientist at the Centre for Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage “La Venaria Reale” (CCR). She currently also works as a laboratory technician at the University of Turin. She received a Master’s degree in Science for Cultural Heritage in 2012 and Material Science for Cultural Heritage in 2016. She earned a PhD in Protection of Cultural Heritage in collaboration with the University of Vigo, Spain. After graduation, she had internship experiences at the Getty Conservation Institute (Los Angeles, USA) and the Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España (Madrid, Spain). She carries out scientific investigations on several heritage materials with a multi-analytical approach. In recent years, she has been focusing on the issues of graffiti removal from ornamental stones and street art conservation, participating in the European project CAPuS. Her research output can be found at https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5358-1932.

Christine Koblitz

Christine Koblitz (°1976) is a curator and social media manager focusing on digital outreach and playful interventions. In 2010 she joined Wien Museum and is currently developing an escape game for the Clock Museum. Christine has created several successful Instagram challenges, which also became part of special exhibitions (a.o. #wvo17, #wagner2018, #Augenblick2022). She curated “Takeover – street art & skateboarding “(2019) and events (until 2020). With a law degree, she graduated from the University of Vienna and has experience as a culture manager in theatre, cabaret and music (2001-2010).

Sven Niemann

Sven Niemann is a research assistant in the graffiti research project INGRID and a PhD student at the Institute for German Language and Comparative Literature at the University of Paderborn. His research interests are political graffiti, sociolinguistics and written linguistics. Since 2014, he has been a freelance DJ and journalist, and holds workshops on DJing, music production and podcasting. For the Tourist Information in Paderborn, he has been guiding public graffiti tours since 2018. As a member of the artists’ collective Generation Arts, he actively promotes urban art and the visibility of graffiti in public spaces.

Ljiljana Radošević

Ljiljana Radošević (°1978) is a freelance art history researcher at the association Street Art Belgrade where she is working on developing Urban Heritage Hub project. She holds MA in art history (2005) from the University of Belgrade (Serbia) and MA in management in culture (2007) from the joint program of the University of Arts in Belgrade and the University of Grenoble (France). At the moment, she is in the final stages of finishing her PhD at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) under the title “Understanding Street Art; Street Art in the European Context”. She has been researching graffiti and street art since 2000 and is a curator of the first virtual reality exhibition about Belgrade graffiti and street art. For further information, visit https://streetartbelgrade.com.

Jona Schlegel

Jona Schlegel (°1988) is doing a PhD at the University of Vienna (Austria) on archaeological stratigraphy and spatio-temporal reasoning. Furthermore, she is employed as a junior researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology. She received her Master of Science in Landscape Archaeology at the University of Applied Science and the Free University (Berlin, Germany) in 2018. Since 2017, she has been working with geophysical prospection methods like geomagnetics and ground-penetrating radar. Starting in September 2021, she is part of project INDIGO, focusing on the graffiti thesaurus, spatio-temporal data structuring and web development. Her research can be found at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jona-Schlegel

Alexander Watzinger

Alexander Watzinger (°1973) is a software developer with a special interest in data modelling and the use of web applications within scientific research. His favourite tools are Python, PostgreSQL, Linux, and open-source software in general. He is the lead developer of the OpenAtlas project (https://openatlas.eu). Since 2017, he has been working at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Within INDIGO, Alex will further adapt and develop OpenAtlas for the project’s specific needs and requirements. His scientific research output can be found at https://oeaw.academia.edu/AlexanderWatzinger. His open-source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/craws.

Stefan Wogrin

Stefan Wogrin (°1989) is an art historian and graffiti documenter. In 2001 he founded the “Spraycity “graffiti writing archive (https://spraycity.at), which is also an online platform where 100.000 graffiti photos are accessible online. The archive is based in Vienna. He received his Bachelor of Arts in art history and European ethnology from the University of Vienna in 2017. Since 2001 Stefan is also an active graffiti writer. Furthermore, he photographs graffiti from all different public surfaces in Vienna and the entire Europe. Since 2013, Stefan has also been researching the history of graffiti in Vienna, which is his main research interest. Stefan curated several exhibitions about graffiti, and he is the editor of the “Offline Graffiti Magazine “. The research Stefan is involved in can be found at https://spraycity.at/research.

Published
2023-05-10
How to Cite
Wild, B., Verhoeven, G., Pfeifer, N., Bonadio, E., HERO, D., ’, F., ONE, J., SKIRL, M., Carloni, M., Ricci, C., Koblitz, C., Niemann, S., Radošević, L., Schlegel, J., Watzinger, A., & Wogrin, S. (2023). ‘Imagine Being a Racist’: goINDIGO 2022’s «Ethics & Legality in Graffiti (Research)» Discussion Round. GoINDIGO, 45 - 62. https://doi.org/10.48619/indigo.v0i0.702