Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Evan Roth At Vox Populi

Report from the Miriam Singer from the Vox Populi Speakeasy Series as part of Philagrafika 2010


Evan Roth is an artist with interests in technology, tools of empowerment, open source, and popular culture.
Roth is all about giving out software programs for free. His book is available online for free. And he is interested in making otherwise expensive operating mechanisms available for free or as inexpensive as possible.

His lecture at Vox Populi was a live streaming presentation from Paris. Roth spoke about the overlap of art, graffiti, technology, data visualization, hip hop, and free culture. As part of Speakeasy-Philagrafika 2010 Independent Projects lecture series.

One of his target audiences is
The Bored At Work Network, the audience of people willing to waste time on the computer. I have never experienced a web cam lecture, so I felt like I was in the future, and even though I am not bored at work, I could spend a lot of time on his website.

He had a ton of insight. I have been thinking all weekend about this insight into creating projects, and as he put it,
"Good things happen in year, great things happen in a weekend."

His lecture at Vox Populi is online, so if you missed this you can still experience it. His website is very exciting with links, instruction manuals, video, images, type...but I think it was important to hear him speak about it all, in the format of the lecture.

Above image is of a print installed in NYC. Graffiti Taxonomy. This project presents isolated letters from various graffiti tags, reproduced in similar scales and at close proximity. The intent of these studies is to show the diversity of styles, as expressed in a single character. This was reproduced from photographs of tags taken in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Allow me to paraphrase from my notes:

Evan Roth is interested in Art that isn't boring, and Activism that isn't tired. Roth is interested in the free cultural movement and is looking forward to the day artists (for example rappers) talk about open source code.

Graffiti is free. As in free beer (which we had at Vox Populi), and free--as in free speech. Graffiti has completely changed the way cities look, and he promotes open source programs as a way to change the way the Internet looks. He fell in love with graffiti as a pedestrian. He has approached it with his skill sets from architecture, computer software design, engineering, and research.

Check out his impressive
bio. He is a inventor, scholar, visual artist, and bad ass.

He is interested in software that inserts small interventions into the larger system of the Internet. This is much like a graffiti artist with a spray can and or wheatpaste, who is making small interventions into the cityscape. The Internet is his favorite graffiti technology, next to a spray paint can. I will end this with the image below of a handshake between computer hackers and graffiti artists...

1 comment:

Emilie said...

Hello,

I thought you would be interested to know that Evan Roth will be curating a modern art festival this summer (July 2nd until July 10th) in France. You will be able to discover his work with the Graffiti Analysis, as well as 17 other artists including : Mark Jenkins, Aakash Nihalani, Theo Watson and many others...
For any other info, feel free to check out our webite at : www.lesgrandestraversees.com.