S. James Snyder reports on recent developments in graffiti, which has begun to merge its own subculture with that of the Internet. In the long-gone, heady days of the late seventies and eighties, when graffiti had intricate connections to hip hop and other emerging forms of urban youth culture, taggers were seen as dashing underground figures with spray cans, risking life and liberty to create eye-catching designs and placing them on the sides of buildings and subway trains designed to get maximum exposure in the places that counted. "Today," writes Snyder, "in an age dominated by technology and people who spend more time in the virtual world than the real world, graffiti artists must do a whole lot more than spray. For starters, there's the technological know-how of getting your work not just online, but into the social networks and channels populated by fans of the art form. Then there's the aesthetic quandary of how to translate one's work to the Internet. Should it exist as a photo album? A slide show? A graphic? A video?" The New York-based Graffiti Research Lab (G.R.L.) is on the case.
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