Both books describe the AI revolution and technology’s ability to shift geopolitical power, but draw nearly opposite conclusions.

 

Suleyman argues for robust AI containment, rife with dystopian fears and surveillance solutions. He is CEO of Microsoft AI, and formerly Google Deep Mind (where at both companies employee protests shut down work on military systems).

 

Karp, in stark contrast, argues that restraint is misguided, and America should “without delay commit to launching a new Manhattan Project in order to retain exclusive control over the most sophisticated forms of AI for the battlefield.” He is CEO of Palantir.

 

Here are the excerpts that summarize their AI arguments, starting with similar premises but driving to divergent recommendations:

 

The Technological Republic

Opening line: “SILICON VALLEY HAS LOST ITS WAY.”

“A generation of founders cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of lofty and ambitious purpose — indeed their rallying cry to change the world has grown lifeless from overuse — but often raised enormous amounts of capital and hired legions of talented engineers merely to build photo-sharing apps and chat interfaces for the modern consumer. A skepticism of government work and national ambition took hold in the Valley. Startup after startup catered to the whims of late capitalist culture without any interest in constructing the technical infrastructure that would address our most significant challenges as a nation.” (9)

 

Why? “The most capable generation of coders have never experienced a war or genuine social upheaval.” (10) “The current generation of spectacularly talented engineering minds has become unmoored from any sense of national purpose or grander and more meaningful project.” (11)

 

“The causes of this turn away from defending the American national project, we argue, include the systematic attack and attempt to dismantle any conception of American or Western identity during the 1960s and 1970s. The dismantling of an entire system of privilege was rightly begun. But we failed to resurrect anything substantial, a coherent collective identity or set of communal values, in its place.” (13)

 

“In this book, we make the case that the technology sector has an affirmative obligation to support the state that made its rise possible.” (11)

 

The Software Century

“The newest forms of artificial intelligence, known as large language models, have for the first time in history pointed to the possibility of artificial general intelligence (AGI) — that is, a computing intellect that could rival that of the human mind when it comes to abstract reasoning and solving problems. It is not clear however that the companies building these new forms of AI will allow them to be used for military purposes. We make the case that one of the most significant challenges that we face in this country is ensuring that the U.S. Department of Defense turns the corner from an institution designed to fight and win kinetic wars to an organization that can design, build, and acquire AI weaponry — the unmanned drone swarms and robots that will dominate the coming battlefield.” (12)

 

“The United States since its founding has always been a technologic republic, one whose place in the world has been made possible and advanced by its capacity for innovation.” (15)

 

“An unwinding of the skepticism of the American project will be necessary to move forward. We must bend the latest and most advanced forms of AI to our will, or risk allowing our adversaries to do so as we examine and debate, sometimes it seems endlessly, the extent and character of our divisions. Our central argument is that—in this new era of advanced AI, which provides our geopolitical opponents the greatest opportunity since the last world war to challenge our global standing—we should return to that tradition of close collaboration between the technology industry and the government. It is that combination in pursuit of innovation with the objectives of the nation that will not only advance our welfare but safeguard the legitimacy of the democratic project itself.” (15)

 

“We have now, nearly eighty years after the invention of the atomic bomb, arrived at a similar crossroads in the science of computing, a crossroad that connects engineering and ethics, where we will again have to choose whether to proceed with the development of a technology whose power and potential we do not yet fully apprehend.” (18) “It is not at all clear—not even to the scientists and programmers who build them—how or why the generative language and image models work.” (19)

 

“The risks of proceeding with the development of artificial intelligence have never been more significant. Yet we must not shy away from building sharp tools for fear they might be used against us. The potential integration of weapons systems with increasingly autonomous AI software necessarily brings risks, which are only magnified by the possibility that such programs might develop a form of self-awareness and intent. But the suggestion to halt the development of these technologies is misguided. It is essential that we redirect our attention toward building the next generation of AI weaponry that will determine the balance of power in this century, as the atomic age ends, and the next.” (26)

 

“This next era of conflict will be won or lost with software. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on AI is set to begin. The risk, however, is that we think we have already won.” (28)

 

“The decisive wars of the future will be driven by artificial intelligence, whose development is proceeding on a far different, and faster timeline than in the past. A fundamental reversal of the relationship between hardware and software is taking place. For the 20th century, software has been built to maintain and service the needs of hardware, from flight controls to missile avionics, and fueling systems to armored personnel carriers. With the rise of AI and the use of large language models on the battlefield to metabolize data and make targeting recommendations, however the relationship is shifting. Software is now at the helm, with the hardware—the drones on the battlefields of Europe and elsewhere—increasingly serving as the means by which the recommendations of AI are implemented in the world.” (45)

 

“Yet the level of investment in such technologies, and the software systems that will be required for them to operate, is far from sufficient (at 0.2% of the defense budget). The U.S. government is still focused on developing a legacy infrastructure—the planes, ships, tanks, and missile—that delivered dominance of the battlefield in the last century but will almost certainly not as central in this one.” (45)

 

“Other nations, including many of our geopolitical adversaries, understand the power of affirming shared cultural traditions, mythologies, and values in organizing the efforts of people. They are far less shy than we are about acknowledging the human need for communal experience.” (217)

 

“What we need is more cultural specificity—in education, technology and politics—not less. The vacant neutrality of the current moment risks allowing our instinct for discernment to atrophy. We must now take seriously the possibility that it will be the resurrection of a shared culture, not its abandonment, that will make possible our continued survival and cohesion.” (216)

----------------------------

And from The Coming Wave:

 

“Having been up close to this unfurling revolution over the last decade and a half, I am convinced that we’re on the cusp of the most important transformations of our lifetimes.” (16) “We really are at a turning point in the history of humanity.” (78)

 

“At the heart of the coming wave lie two general purpose technologies of immense promise, power, and peril: artificial intelligence and synthetic biology.” (17)

 

“Four key features that explain why this isn’t business as usual: these technologies are inherently general and therefore omni-use, they hyper-evolve, they have asymmetric impacts, and in some respects, they are increasingly autonomous.” (17)

 

“The foundation of our present political order will be further weakened by a series of shocks amplified by the wave: the potential for new forms of violence, a flood of misinformation, disappearing jobs, and the prospect of catastrophic accidents.” (17)

 

“The coming wave of technologies threatens to fail faster and on a wider scale than anything witnessed before. Containment is not, on the face of it, possible. And yet, containment must be possible. (19)

 

“Proliferation of new technology is the default. Civilization’s appetite for useful and cheaper technologies is boundless. This will not change.” (31)

 

“History tells us that technology diffuses, inevitably, eventually to almost everywhere, from the first campfires to the fires of the Saturn V rocket. Incentives are overwhelming. Capabilities accumulate; efficiencies increase. Waves get faster and more consequential.” (34)

 

“Technology’s unavoidable challenge is that its makers quickly lose control over the path their inventions take once introduced to the world.” (35) “Thus, technology’s problems have a tendency to escalate in parallel with its capabilities, and so the need for containment grows more acute over time.” (36)

 

HAVE WE EVER SAID NO?

“Unhappy at the prospect of unregulated mass production of knowledge and culture, the Ottoman empire tried to ban it. Istanbul did not possess a sanctioned printing press until 1727, nearly three centuries after its invention.” (38)

 

“Technologies are ideas, and ideas cannot be eliminated.” (41) “For most of history, the challenge of technology lay in creating and unleashing its power. That has now flipped; the challenge of technology is about containing its unleashed power, ensuring it continues to serve us and our planet.” (48)

 

A CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION

“Technology is a set of evolving ideas. New technologies evolve by colliding and combining with other technologies. Invention is a cumulative, compounding process. It feeds on itself.” (56) “General-purpose technologies are accelerants. Invention sparks invention.” (92)

 

“Of course all programs in the future will ultimately be written by AIs, with humans relegated to, at best, a supervisory role.” (69)

 

(He then gives a cursory nod to robotics, quantum computing, and fusion energy as amplifiers of the mega wave)

 

“The coming decades will be defined by the convergence of biology and engineering. At the center of this wave sits the realization that DNA is information, a biologically evolved encoding and storage system.” (79) “Already genetically engineered organisms account for 2% of the U.S. economy through agricultural and pharmaceutical uses.” (88)

 

ASYMMETRY: A COLOSSAL TRANSFER OF POWER

“Never before have so many had access to such advanced technologies capable of inflicting death and mayhem.” (106)

 

“Over time, technology tends toward generality. What this means is that weaponizable or harmful uses of the coming wave will be possible regardless of whether this was intended. Simply creating civilian technologies has national security ramifications. What’s different about the coming wave is how quickly it is being embedded, how globally it spreads, how easily it can be componentized into swappable parts, and just how powerful and above all broad its applications could be. It unfurls complex implications for everything from media to mental health, markets to medicine. This is the containment problem supersized.” (112)

 

“A paradox of the coming wave is that its technologies are largely beyond our ability to comprehend at a granular level yet still within our ability to create and use. In AI, the neural networks moving toward autonomy are, at present, not explainable.” (114)

(I have described this process of creation as more akin to parenting than programming.)

 

“In China, Go wasn’t just a game. It represented a wider nexus of history, emotion, and strategic calculation. AlphaGo [AI-built with RL, beating a human champion] helped focus government minds even more acutely on AI. Today, China has an explicit national strategy to be the world leader in AI by 2030 ‘making China the world’s primary innovation center’ from defense to smart cities” (120)

 

“In terms of volume of AI research, Chinese institutions have published a whopping 4.5x more AI papers than U.S. counterparts since 2010, and comfortably more than the U.S., U.K., India and Germany combined.” (121)

 

“China installs as many robots as the rest of the world combined. It built hypersonic missiles thought years away by the U.S. In 2014, China filed the same number of quantum technology patents as the U.S.; by 2018 it filed twice as many.” (122)

 

“Shortly after becoming President in 2013, Xi Jinping made a speech with lasting consequences. ‘Advanced technology is the sharp weapon of the nation state,’ he declared. ‘Our technology still generally lags that of developed countries, and we must adopt an asymmetric strategy of catching up and overtaking.’” (123) “Any world leader could make the same point. Technology has become the world’s most important strategic asset” (124)

 

“In the Manhattan Project, America had conducted an arms race against phantoms, bringing nuclear weapons into the world far earlier than other circumstances." (126)

 

FRAGILITY AMPLIFIERS:

"Technology is ultimately political because technology is a form of power. Wherever power is today, it will be amplified. Whether it’s commercial, religious, cultural, or military, democratic or authoritarian, every possible motivation you can think of can be dramatically enhanced by having cheaper power at your fingertips. This will be the greatest, most rapid accelerant of wealth and prosperity in human history.” (164)

 

“The cost of military drones has fallen 1000x over the last decade. AI-enhanced weapons will improve themselves in real time. AI cyberweapons will continuously probe networks, adapting themselves autonomously to find and exploit weaknesses… a worm that improves itself using reinforcement learning, experimentally updating its code with each network interaction” (166)

 

“Now powerful, asymmetric, omni-use technologies are certain to reach the hands of those who want to damage the state. The nature of the features favors offense: this proliferation of power is just too wide fast and open.”

 

“A Carnegie Mellon study analyzed more than 200 million tweets discussing COVID-19 at the height of the first lockdown. 82% of influential users advocating for ‘reopening America’ were bots. This was a targeted propaganda machine, most likely Russian, designed to intensify the worst public health crisis in a century.” (172)

 

“More than half of all jobs could see many of their tasks automated by machines in the next seven years. Automation is unequivocally another fragility amplifier.” (179)

 

“The history of humanity is, in part, a history of catastrophe. Pandemics feature widely. Two killed up to 30% of the world population” (205) “We know what a lab leak might look like in the context of amplifying fragility… the omnicron variant of COVID infected a quarter of Americans within 100 days of first being identified.” (209)

 

THE DYSTOPIAN TURN

“Technology has penetrated our civilization so deeply that watching technology means watching everything. With the architecture of monitoring and coercion being built in China and elsewhere, the first steps have arguably been taken. If zombielike states will sleepwalk into catastrophe, their openness and growing chaos a petri dish for uncontained technology, authoritarian states are already gladly charging into this techno-dystopia, setting the stage, technologically if not morally, for massive invasions of privacy and curtailments of liberty. And on the continuum between the two, there is a chance of the worst of all worlds: scattered but repressive surveillance and control apparatuses that still don’t add up to a watertight system. Catastrophe and dystopia.” (217)

 

“Make no mistake: standstill spells disaster. I think it’s easy to discount how much of our way of life is underwritten by constant technological improvements. A moratorium on technology is not a way out; it’s an invitation to another kinds of dystopia, another kind of catastrophe. Even if it were possible, the idea of stopping the coming wave isn’t a comforting thought. Maintaining, let alone improving, standards of living needs technology. Forestalling a collapse needs technology. The costs of saying no are existential. And yet every path from here brings grave risks and downsides. This is the great dilemma.” (221)

 

“For progress there is no cure. Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration.” — John von Neumann in 1955

 

CONTAINMENT MUST BE POSSIBLE

“On paper, regulation looks enticing, even obvious and straightforward; suggesting it lets people sound smart, concerned, and even relieved. It’s a simple way to shrug off the problem. It’s also the classic pessimism-averse answer. As we have seen, governments face multiple crises independent of the coming wave—declining trust, entrenched inequality, polarized politics, to name a few.” (226)

 

After this thoughtful discussion of the problems facing us, the final 40 pages on containment remedies rang hollow to me, more wishful thinking than implementable solutions to the grand dilemma. Rather than quote them all, I will list:

Narrow AI instead of general systems that are harder to contain. An “Apollo program for technical safety.” More safety researchers. Automating alignment research. Resource caps on training compute. Crypto-protecting model weights limiting how widely they could be copied. Bulletproof off switch. “Audits are critical to containment.” “Keeping close tabs on significant data sets that are used to train models.” KYC for AI API access. Scan for harmful code. “Encrypted back doors” (!) Buy time with choke points: “China spends more on importing chips than it does on oil.” (249) “Skills too are a choke point: the number of people working on all the frontier technologies discussed in this book is probably no more than 150,000.” (251) A new generation of corporations. Heavier government involvement: “I think the government needs to get way more involved, back to building real technology, setting standards, and nurturing in-house capability.” (259) but… he then suggests that the government “above all needs to log all the ways technology causes harm—tabulate every lab leak, every cyberattack, every language model bias, every privacy breach—in a publicly transparent way so everyone can learn from failures and improve.” (260) Licensing labs to restrict access. Overhaul taxation “to fund security and welfare as we undergo the largest transition of value creation¬—from labor to capital—in history. If technology creates losers, they need material compensation.” (261) A new tax on robots and autonomous systems. UBI. New world government entities – a “World Bank for biotech or a UN for AI” Precautionary principles: “pause before building, pause before publishing” a “Pandemic Test Ban Treaty to stop working with pathogens or gain-of-function research.

 

“Technology is not a niche; it is a hyper object dominating human existence.” (236)

 

“The wave and its central dilemma need containment, need an intensified, unprecedented, all-too-human grip on the entire technosphere. It will require epic determination over decades across the spectrum of human endeavor.” (286)

 

“Looking at the myriad paths forward, it seems containment fails in many of them. The narrow path must be walked forever from here on out, and all it takes is one misstep to tumble into the abyss. The blunt challenge of containment is not a reason to turn away; it’s a call to action, a generational mission we all need to face.” (278)

without sticker.

Please do not use without permission.

Barcelona (Spain).

15/01/2011 - SonyAlpha.es: Afotar la Sagrada Familia.

 

In Spanish "without eating or drinking" is an expression that is to say that something is undeserved, or when a situation is fortuitous.

 

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La reflexión: santimbphotos.blogspot.com

Ohne Nachwuchs.

Graffiti (plural; singular graffiti or graffito, the latter rarely used except in archeology) is art that is written, painted or drawn on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from simple written words to elaborate wall paintings, and has existed since ancient times, with examples dating back to ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire (see also mural).

 

Graffiti is a controversial subject. In most countries, marking or painting property without permission is considered by property owners and civic authorities as defacement and vandalism, which is a punishable crime, citing the use of graffiti by street gangs to mark territory or to serve as an indicator of gang-related activities. Graffiti has become visualized as a growing urban "problem" for many cities in industrialized nations, spreading from the New York City subway system and Philadelphia in the early 1970s to the rest of the United States and Europe and other world regions

 

"Graffiti" (usually both singular and plural) and the rare singular form "graffito" are from the Italian word graffiato ("scratched"). The term "graffiti" is used in art history for works of art produced by scratching a design into a surface. A related term is "sgraffito", which involves scratching through one layer of pigment to reveal another beneath it. This technique was primarily used by potters who would glaze their wares and then scratch a design into them. In ancient times graffiti were carved on walls with a sharp object, although sometimes chalk or coal were used. The word originates from Greek γράφειν—graphein—meaning "to write".

 

The term graffiti originally referred to the inscriptions, figure drawings, and such, found on the walls of ancient sepulchres or ruins, as in the Catacombs of Rome or at Pompeii. Historically, these writings were not considered vanadlism, which today is considered part of the definition of graffiti.

 

The only known source of the Safaitic language, an ancient form of Arabic, is from graffiti: inscriptions scratched on to the surface of rocks and boulders in the predominantly basalt desert of southern Syria, eastern Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia. Safaitic dates from the first century BC to the fourth century AD.

 

Some of the oldest cave paintings in the world are 40,000 year old ones found in Australia. The oldest written graffiti was found in ancient Rome around 2500 years ago. Most graffiti from the time was boasts about sexual experiences Graffiti in Ancient Rome was a form of communication, and was not considered vandalism.

 

Ancient tourists visiting the 5th-century citadel at Sigiriya in Sri Lanka write their names and commentary over the "mirror wall", adding up to over 1800 individual graffiti produced there between the 6th and 18th centuries. Most of the graffiti refer to the frescoes of semi-nude females found there. One reads:

 

Wet with cool dew drops

fragrant with perfume from the flowers

came the gentle breeze

jasmine and water lily

dance in the spring sunshine

side-long glances

of the golden-hued ladies

stab into my thoughts

heaven itself cannot take my mind

as it has been captivated by one lass

among the five hundred I have seen here.

 

Among the ancient political graffiti examples were Arab satirist poems. Yazid al-Himyari, an Umayyad Arab and Persian poet, was most known for writing his political poetry on the walls between Sajistan and Basra, manifesting a strong hatred towards the Umayyad regime and its walis, and people used to read and circulate them very widely.

 

Graffiti, known as Tacherons, were frequently scratched on Romanesque Scandinavian church walls. When Renaissance artists such as Pinturicchio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, or Filippino Lippi descended into the ruins of Nero's Domus Aurea, they carved or painted their names and returned to initiate the grottesche style of decoration.

 

There are also examples of graffiti occurring in American history, such as Independence Rock, a national landmark along the Oregon Trail.

 

Later, French soldiers carved their names on monuments during the Napoleonic campaign of Egypt in the 1790s. Lord Byron's survives on one of the columns of the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion in Attica, Greece.

 

The oldest known example of graffiti "monikers" found on traincars created by hobos and railworkers since the late 1800s. The Bozo Texino monikers were documented by filmmaker Bill Daniel in his 2005 film, Who is Bozo Texino?.

 

In World War II, an inscription on a wall at the fortress of Verdun was seen as an illustration of the US response twice in a generation to the wrongs of the Old World:

 

During World War II and for decades after, the phrase "Kilroy was here" with an accompanying illustration was widespread throughout the world, due to its use by American troops and ultimately filtering into American popular culture. Shortly after the death of Charlie Parker (nicknamed "Yardbird" or "Bird"), graffiti began appearing around New York with the words "Bird Lives".

 

Modern graffiti art has its origins with young people in 1960s and 70s in New York City and Philadelphia. Tags were the first form of stylised contemporary graffiti. Eventually, throw-ups and pieces evolved with the desire to create larger art. Writers used spray paint and other kind of materials to leave tags or to create images on the sides subway trains. and eventually moved into the city after the NYC metro began to buy new trains and paint over graffiti.

 

While the art had many advocates and appreciators—including the cultural critic Norman Mailer—others, including New York City mayor Ed Koch, considered it to be defacement of public property, and saw it as a form of public blight. The ‘taggers’ called what they did ‘writing’—though an important 1974 essay by Mailer referred to it using the term ‘graffiti.’

 

Contemporary graffiti style has been heavily influenced by hip hop culture and the myriad international styles derived from Philadelphia and New York City Subway graffiti; however, there are many other traditions of notable graffiti in the twentieth century. Graffiti have long appeared on building walls, in latrines, railroad boxcars, subways, and bridges.

 

An early graffito outside of New York or Philadelphia was the inscription in London reading "Clapton is God" in reference to the guitarist Eric Clapton. Creating the cult of the guitar hero, the phrase was spray-painted by an admirer on a wall in an Islington, north London in the autumn of 1967. The graffito was captured in a photograph, in which a dog is urinating on the wall.

 

Films like Style Wars in the 80s depicting famous writers such as Skeme, Dondi, MinOne, and ZEPHYR reinforced graffiti's role within New York's emerging hip-hop culture. Although many officers of the New York City Police Department found this film to be controversial, Style Wars is still recognized as the most prolific film representation of what was going on within the young hip hop culture of the early 1980s. Fab 5 Freddy and Futura 2000 took hip hop graffiti to Paris and London as part of the New York City Rap Tour in 1983

 

Commercialization and entrance into mainstream pop culture

Main article: Commercial graffiti

With the popularity and legitimization of graffiti has come a level of commercialization. In 2001, computer giant IBM launched an advertising campaign in Chicago and San Francisco which involved people spray painting on sidewalks a peace symbol, a heart, and a penguin (Linux mascot), to represent "Peace, Love, and Linux." IBM paid Chicago and San Francisco collectively US$120,000 for punitive damages and clean-up costs.

 

In 2005, a similar ad campaign was launched by Sony and executed by its advertising agency in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami, to market its handheld PSP gaming system. In this campaign, taking notice of the legal problems of the IBM campaign, Sony paid building owners for the rights to paint on their buildings "a collection of dizzy-eyed urban kids playing with the PSP as if it were a skateboard, a paddle, or a rocking horse".

 

Tristan Manco wrote that Brazil "boasts a unique and particularly rich, graffiti scene ... [earning] it an international reputation as the place to go for artistic inspiration". Graffiti "flourishes in every conceivable space in Brazil's cities". Artistic parallels "are often drawn between the energy of São Paulo today and 1970s New York". The "sprawling metropolis", of São Paulo has "become the new shrine to graffiti"; Manco alludes to "poverty and unemployment ... [and] the epic struggles and conditions of the country's marginalised peoples", and to "Brazil's chronic poverty", as the main engines that "have fuelled a vibrant graffiti culture". In world terms, Brazil has "one of the most uneven distributions of income. Laws and taxes change frequently". Such factors, Manco argues, contribute to a very fluid society, riven with those economic divisions and social tensions that underpin and feed the "folkloric vandalism and an urban sport for the disenfranchised", that is South American graffiti art.

 

Prominent Brazilian writers include Os Gêmeos, Boleta, Nunca, Nina, Speto, Tikka, and T.Freak. Their artistic success and involvement in commercial design ventures has highlighted divisions within the Brazilian graffiti community between adherents of the cruder transgressive form of pichação and the more conventionally artistic values of the practitioners of grafite.

 

Graffiti in the Middle East has emerged slowly, with taggers operating in Egypt, Lebanon, the Gulf countries like Bahrain or the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and in Iran. The major Iranian newspaper Hamshahri has published two articles on illegal writers in the city with photographic coverage of Iranian artist A1one's works on Tehran walls. Tokyo-based design magazine, PingMag, has interviewed A1one and featured photographs of his work. The Israeli West Bank barrier has become a site for graffiti, reminiscent in this sense of the Berlin Wall. Many writers in Israel come from other places around the globe, such as JUIF from Los Angeles and DEVIONE from London. The religious reference "נ נח נחמ נחמן מאומן" ("Na Nach Nachma Nachman Meuman") is commonly seen in graffiti around Israel.

 

Graffiti has played an important role within the street art scene in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), especially following the events of the Arab Spring of 2011 or the Sudanese Revolution of 2018/19. Graffiti is a tool of expression in the context of conflict in the region, allowing people to raise their voices politically and socially. Famous street artist Banksy has had an important effect in the street art scene in the MENA area, especially in Palestine where some of his works are located in the West Bank barrier and Bethlehem.

 

There are also a large number of graffiti influences in Southeast Asian countries that mostly come from modern Western culture, such as Malaysia, where graffiti have long been a common sight in Malaysia's capital city, Kuala Lumpur. Since 2010, the country has begun hosting a street festival to encourage all generations and people from all walks of life to enjoy and encourage Malaysian street culture.

 

The modern-day graffitists can be found with an arsenal of various materials that allow for a successful production of a piece. This includes such techniques as scribing. However, spray paint in aerosol cans is the number one medium for graffiti. From this commodity comes different styles, technique, and abilities to form master works of graffiti. Spray paint can be found at hardware and art stores and comes in virtually every color.

 

Stencil graffiti is created by cutting out shapes and designs in a stiff material (such as cardboard or subject folders) to form an overall design or image. The stencil is then placed on the "canvas" gently and with quick, easy strokes of the aerosol can, the image begins to appear on the intended surface.

 

Some of the first examples were created in 1981 by artists Blek le Rat in Paris, in 1982 by Jef Aerosol in Tours (France); by 1985 stencils had appeared in other cities including New York City, Sydney, and Melbourne, where they were documented by American photographer Charles Gatewood and Australian photographer Rennie Ellis

 

Tagging is the practice of someone spray-painting "their name, initial or logo onto a public surface" in a handstyle unique to the writer. Tags were the first form of modern graffiti.

 

Modern graffiti art often incorporates additional arts and technologies. For example, Graffiti Research Lab has encouraged the use of projected images and magnetic light-emitting diodes (throwies) as new media for graffitists. yarnbombing is another recent form of graffiti. Yarnbombers occasionally target previous graffiti for modification, which had been avoided among the majority of graffitists.

 

Theories on the use of graffiti by avant-garde artists have a history dating back at least to the Asger Jorn, who in 1962 painting declared in a graffiti-like gesture "the avant-garde won't give up"

 

Many contemporary analysts and even art critics have begun to see artistic value in some graffiti and to recognize it as a form of public art. According to many art researchers, particularly in the Netherlands and in Los Angeles, that type of public art is, in fact an effective tool of social emancipation or, in the achievement of a political goal

 

In times of conflict, such murals have offered a means of communication and self-expression for members of these socially, ethnically, or racially divided communities, and have proven themselves as effective tools in establishing dialog and thus, of addressing cleavages in the long run. The Berlin Wall was also extensively covered by graffiti reflecting social pressures relating to the oppressive Soviet rule over the GDR.

 

Many artists involved with graffiti are also concerned with the similar activity of stenciling. Essentially, this entails stenciling a print of one or more colors using spray-paint. Recognized while exhibiting and publishing several of her coloured stencils and paintings portraying the Sri Lankan Civil War and urban Britain in the early 2000s, graffitists Mathangi Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A., has also become known for integrating her imagery of political violence into her music videos for singles "Galang" and "Bucky Done Gun", and her cover art. Stickers of her artwork also often appear around places such as London in Brick Lane, stuck to lamp posts and street signs, she having become a muse for other graffitists and painters worldwide in cities including Seville.

 

Graffitist believes that art should be on display for everyone in the public eye or in plain sight, not hidden away in a museum or a gallery. Art should color the streets, not the inside of some building. Graffiti is a form of art that cannot be owned or bought. It does not last forever, it is temporary, yet one of a kind. It is a form of self promotion for the artist that can be displayed anywhere form sidewalks, roofs, subways, building wall, etc. Art to them is for everyone and should be showed to everyone for free.

 

Graffiti is a way of communicating and a way of expressing what one feels in the moment. It is both art and a functional thing that can warn people of something or inform people of something. However, graffiti is to some people a form of art, but to some a form of vandalism. And many graffitists choose to protect their identities and remain anonymous or to hinder prosecution.

 

With the commercialization of graffiti (and hip hop in general), in most cases, even with legally painted "graffiti" art, graffitists tend to choose anonymity. This may be attributed to various reasons or a combination of reasons. Graffiti still remains the one of four hip hop elements that is not considered "performance art" despite the image of the "singing and dancing star" that sells hip hop culture to the mainstream. Being a graphic form of art, it might also be said that many graffitists still fall in the category of the introverted archetypal artist.

 

Banksy is one of the world's most notorious and popular street artists who continues to remain faceless in today's society. He is known for his political, anti-war stencil art mainly in Bristol, England, but his work may be seen anywhere from Los Angeles to Palestine. In the UK, Banksy is the most recognizable icon for this cultural artistic movement and keeps his identity a secret to avoid arrest. Much of Banksy's artwork may be seen around the streets of London and surrounding suburbs, although he has painted pictures throughout the world, including the Middle East, where he has painted on Israel's controversial West Bank barrier with satirical images of life on the other side. One depicted a hole in the wall with an idyllic beach, while another shows a mountain landscape on the other side. A number of exhibitions also have taken place since 2000, and recent works of art have fetched vast sums of money. Banksy's art is a prime example of the classic controversy: vandalism vs. art. Art supporters endorse his work distributed in urban areas as pieces of art and some councils, such as Bristol and Islington, have officially protected them, while officials of other areas have deemed his work to be vandalism and have removed it.

 

Pixnit is another artist who chooses to keep her identity from the general public. Her work focuses on beauty and design aspects of graffiti as opposed to Banksy's anti-government shock value. Her paintings are often of flower designs above shops and stores in her local urban area of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some store owners endorse her work and encourage others to do similar work as well. "One of the pieces was left up above Steve's Kitchen, because it looks pretty awesome"- Erin Scott, the manager of New England Comics in Allston, Massachusetts.

 

Graffiti artists may become offended if photographs of their art are published in a commercial context without their permission. In March 2020, the Finnish graffiti artist Psyke expressed his displeasure at the newspaper Ilta-Sanomat publishing a photograph of a Peugeot 208 in an article about new cars, with his graffiti prominently shown on the background. The artist claims he does not want his art being used in commercial context, not even if he were to receive compensation.

 

Territorial graffiti marks urban neighborhoods with tags and logos to differentiate certain groups from others. These images are meant to show outsiders a stern look at whose turf is whose. The subject matter of gang-related graffiti consists of cryptic symbols and initials strictly fashioned with unique calligraphies. Gang members use graffiti to designate membership throughout the gang, to differentiate rivals and associates and, most commonly, to mark borders which are both territorial and ideological.

 

Graffiti has been used as a means of advertising both legally and illegally. Bronx-based TATS CRU has made a name for themselves doing legal advertising campaigns for companies such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Toyota, and MTV. In the UK, Covent Garden's Boxfresh used stencil images of a Zapatista revolutionary in the hopes that cross referencing would promote their store.

 

Smirnoff hired artists to use reverse graffiti (the use of high pressure hoses to clean dirty surfaces to leave a clean image in the surrounding dirt) to increase awareness of their product.

 

Graffiti often has a reputation as part of a subculture that rebels against authority, although the considerations of the practitioners often diverge and can relate to a wide range of attitudes. It can express a political practice and can form just one tool in an array of resistance techniques. One early example includes the anarcho-punk band Crass, who conducted a campaign of stenciling anti-war, anarchist, feminist, and anti-consumerist messages throughout the London Underground system during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In Amsterdam graffiti was a major part of the punk scene. The city was covered with names such as "De Zoot", "Vendex", and "Dr Rat". To document the graffiti a punk magazine was started that was called Gallery Anus. So when hip hop came to Europe in the early 1980s there was already a vibrant graffiti culture.

 

The student protests and general strike of May 1968 saw Paris bedecked in revolutionary, anarchistic, and situationist slogans such as L'ennui est contre-révolutionnaire ("Boredom is counterrevolutionary") and Lisez moins, vivez plus ("Read less, live more"). While not exhaustive, the graffiti gave a sense of the 'millenarian' and rebellious spirit, tempered with a good deal of verbal wit, of the strikers.

 

I think graffiti writing is a way of defining what our generation is like. Excuse the French, we're not a bunch of p---- artists. Traditionally artists have been considered soft and mellow people, a little bit kooky. Maybe we're a little bit more like pirates that way. We defend our territory, whatever space we steal to paint on, we defend it fiercely.

 

The developments of graffiti art which took place in art galleries and colleges as well as "on the street" or "underground", contributed to the resurfacing in the 1990s of a far more overtly politicized art form in the subvertising, culture jamming, or tactical media movements. These movements or styles tend to classify the artists by their relationship to their social and economic contexts, since, in most countries, graffiti art remains illegal in many forms except when using non-permanent paint. Since the 1990s with the rise of Street Art, a growing number of artists are switching to non-permanent paints and non-traditional forms of painting.

 

Contemporary practitioners, accordingly, have varied and often conflicting practices. Some individuals, such as Alexander Brener, have used the medium to politicize other art forms, and have used the prison sentences enforced on them as a means of further protest. The practices of anonymous groups and individuals also vary widely, and practitioners by no means always agree with each other's practices. For example, the anti-capitalist art group the Space Hijackers did a piece in 2004 about the contradiction between the capitalistic elements of Banksy and his use of political imagery.

 

Berlin human rights activist Irmela Mensah-Schramm has received global media attention and numerous awards for her 35-year campaign of effacing neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist graffiti throughout Germany, often by altering hate speech in humorous ways.

 

In Serbian capital, Belgrade, the graffiti depicting a uniformed former general of Serb army and war criminal, convicted at ICTY for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnian War, Ratko Mladić, appeared in a military salute alongside the words "General, thank to your mother". Aleks Eror, Berlin-based journalist, explains how "veneration of historical and wartime figures" through street art is not a new phenomenon in the region of former Yugoslavia, and that "in most cases is firmly focused on the future, rather than retelling the past". Eror is not only analyst pointing to danger of such an expressions for the region's future. In a long expose on the subject of Bosnian genocide denial, at Balkan Diskurs magazine and multimedia platform website, Kristina Gadže and Taylor Whitsell referred to these experiences as a young generations' "cultural heritage", in which young are being exposed to celebration and affirmation of war-criminals as part of their "formal education" and "inheritance".

 

There are numerous examples of genocide denial through celebration and affirmation of war criminals throughout the region of Western Balkans inhabited by Serbs using this form of artistic expression. Several more of these graffiti are found in Serbian capital, and many more across Serbia and Bosnian and Herzegovinian administrative entity, Republika Srpska, which is the ethnic Serbian majority enclave. Critics point that Serbia as a state, is willing to defend the mural of convicted war criminal, and have no intention to react on cases of genocide denial, noting that Interior Minister of Serbia, Aleksandar Vulin decision to ban any gathering with an intent to remove the mural, with the deployment of riot police, sends the message of "tacit endorsement". Consequently, on 9 November 2021, Serbian heavy police in riot gear, with graffiti creators and their supporters, blocked the access to the mural to prevent human rights groups and other activists to paint over it and mark the International Day Against Fascism and Antisemitism in that way, and even arrested two civic activist for throwing eggs at the graffiti.

 

Graffiti may also be used as an offensive expression. This form of graffiti may be difficult to identify, as it is mostly removed by the local authority (as councils which have adopted strategies of criminalization also strive to remove graffiti quickly). Therefore, existing racist graffiti is mostly more subtle and at first sight, not easily recognized as "racist". It can then be understood only if one knows the relevant "local code" (social, historical, political, temporal, and spatial), which is seen as heteroglot and thus a 'unique set of conditions' in a cultural context.

 

A spatial code for example, could be that there is a certain youth group in an area that is engaging heavily in racist activities. So, for residents (knowing the local code), a graffiti containing only the name or abbreviation of this gang already is a racist expression, reminding the offended people of their gang activities. Also a graffiti is in most cases, the herald of more serious criminal activity to come. A person who does not know these gang activities would not be able to recognize the meaning of this graffiti. Also if a tag of this youth group or gang is placed on a building occupied by asylum seekers, for example, its racist character is even stronger.

By making the graffiti less explicit (as adapted to social and legal constraints), these drawings are less likely to be removed, but do not lose their threatening and offensive character.

 

Elsewhere, activists in Russia have used painted caricatures of local officials with their mouths as potholes, to show their anger about the poor state of the roads. In Manchester, England, a graffitists painted obscene images around potholes, which often resulted in them being repaired within 48 hours.

 

In the early 1980s, the first art galleries to show graffitists to the public were Fashion Moda in the Bronx, Now Gallery and Fun Gallery, both in the East Village, Manhattan.

 

A 2006 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum displayed graffiti as an art form that began in New York's outer boroughs and reached great heights in the early 1980s with the work of Crash, Lee, Daze, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. It displayed 22 works by New York graffitists, including Crash, Daze, and Lady Pink. In an article about the exhibition in the magazine Time Out, curator Charlotta Kotik said that she hoped the exhibition would cause viewers to rethink their assumptions about graffiti.

 

From the 1970s onwards, Burhan Doğançay photographed urban walls all over the world; these he then archived for use as sources of inspiration for his painterly works. The project today known as "Walls of the World" grew beyond even his own expectations and comprises about 30,000 individual images. It spans a period of 40 years across five continents and 114 countries. In 1982, photographs from this project comprised a one-man exhibition titled "Les murs murmurent, ils crient, ils chantent ..." (The walls whisper, shout and sing ...) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

 

In Australia, art historians have judged some local graffiti of sufficient creative merit to rank them firmly within the arts. Oxford University Press's art history text Australian Painting 1788–2000 concludes with a long discussion of graffiti's key place within contemporary visual culture, including the work of several Australian practitioners.

 

Between March and April 2009, 150 artists exhibited 300 pieces of graffiti at the Grand Palais in Paris.

 

Spray paint has many negative environmental effects. The paint contains toxic chemicals, and the can uses volatile hydrocarbon gases to spray the paint onto a surface.

 

Volatile organic compound (VOC) leads to ground level ozone formation and most of graffiti related emissions are VOCs. A 2010 paper estimates 4,862 tons of VOCs were released in the United States in activities related to graffiti.

 

In China, Mao Zedong in the 1920s used revolutionary slogans and paintings in public places to galvanize the country's communist movement.

 

Based on different national conditions, many people believe that China's attitude towards Graffiti is fierce, but in fact, according to Lance Crayon in his film Spray Paint Beijing: Graffiti in the Capital of China, Graffiti is generally accepted in Beijing, with artists not seeing much police interference. Political and religiously sensitive graffiti, however, is not allowed.

 

In Hong Kong, Tsang Tsou Choi was known as the King of Kowloon for his calligraphy graffiti over many years, in which he claimed ownership of the area. Now some of his work is preserved officially.

 

In Taiwan, the government has made some concessions to graffitists. Since 2005 they have been allowed to freely display their work along some sections of riverside retaining walls in designated "Graffiti Zones". From 2007, Taipei's department of cultural affairs also began permitting graffiti on fences around major public construction sites. Department head Yong-ping Lee (李永萍) stated, "We will promote graffiti starting with the public sector, and then later in the private sector too. It's our goal to beautify the city with graffiti". The government later helped organize a graffiti contest in Ximending, a popular shopping district. graffitists caught working outside of these designated areas still face fines up to NT$6,000 under a department of environmental protection regulation. However, Taiwanese authorities can be relatively lenient, one veteran police officer stating anonymously, "Unless someone complains about vandalism, we won't get involved. We don't go after it proactively."

 

In 1993, after several expensive cars in Singapore were spray-painted, the police arrested a student from the Singapore American School, Michael P. Fay, questioned him, and subsequently charged him with vandalism. Fay pleaded guilty to vandalizing a car in addition to stealing road signs. Under the 1966 Vandalism Act of Singapore, originally passed to curb the spread of communist graffiti in Singapore, the court sentenced him to four months in jail, a fine of S$3,500 (US$2,233), and a caning. The New York Times ran several editorials and op-eds that condemned the punishment and called on the American public to flood the Singaporean embassy with protests. Although the Singapore government received many calls for clemency, Fay's caning took place in Singapore on 5 May 1994. Fay had originally received a sentence of six strokes of the cane, but the presiding president of Singapore, Ong Teng Cheong, agreed to reduce his caning sentence to four lashes.

 

In South Korea, Park Jung-soo was fined two million South Korean won by the Seoul Central District Court for spray-painting a rat on posters of the G-20 Summit a few days before the event in November 2011. Park alleged that the initial in "G-20" sounds like the Korean word for "rat", but Korean government prosecutors alleged that Park was making a derogatory statement about the president of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, the host of the summit. This case led to public outcry and debate on the lack of government tolerance and in support of freedom of expression. The court ruled that the painting, "an ominous creature like a rat" amounts to "an organized criminal activity" and upheld the fine while denying the prosecution's request for imprisonment for Park.

 

In Europe, community cleaning squads have responded to graffiti, in some cases with reckless abandon, as when in 1992 in France a local Scout group, attempting to remove modern graffiti, damaged two prehistoric paintings of bison in the Cave of Mayrière supérieure near the French village of Bruniquel in Tarn-et-Garonne, earning them the 1992 Ig Nobel Prize in archeology.

 

In September 2006, the European Parliament directed the European Commission to create urban environment policies to prevent and eliminate dirt, litter, graffiti, animal excrement, and excessive noise from domestic and vehicular music systems in European cities, along with other concerns over urban life.

 

In Budapest, Hungary, both a city-backed movement called I Love Budapest and a special police division tackle the problem, including the provision of approved areas.

 

The Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 became Britain's latest anti-graffiti legislation. In August 2004, the Keep Britain Tidy campaign issued a press release calling for zero tolerance of graffiti and supporting proposals such as issuing "on the spot" fines to graffiti offenders and banning the sale of aerosol paint to anyone under the age of 16. The press release also condemned the use of graffiti images in advertising and in music videos, arguing that real-world experience of graffiti stood far removed from its often-portrayed "cool" or "edgy'" image.

 

To back the campaign, 123 Members of Parliament (MPs) (including then Prime Minister Tony Blair), signed a charter which stated: "Graffiti is not art, it's crime. On behalf of my constituents, I will do all I can to rid our community of this problem."

 

In the UK, city councils have the power to take action against the owner of any property that has been defaced under the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 (as amended by the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005) or, in certain cases, the Highways Act. This is often used against owners of property that are complacent in allowing protective boards to be defaced so long as the property is not damaged.

 

In July 2008, a conspiracy charge was used to convict graffitists for the first time. After a three-month police surveillance operation, nine members of the DPM crew were convicted of conspiracy to commit criminal damage costing at least £1 million. Five of them received prison sentences, ranging from eighteen months to two years. The unprecedented scale of the investigation and the severity of the sentences rekindled public debate over whether graffiti should be considered art or crime.

 

Some councils, like those of Stroud and Loerrach, provide approved areas in the town where graffitists can showcase their talents, including underpasses, car parks, and walls that might otherwise prove a target for the "spray and run".

 

Graffiti Tunnel, University of Sydney at Camperdown (2009)

In an effort to reduce vandalism, many cities in Australia have designated walls or areas exclusively for use by graffitists. One early example is the "Graffiti Tunnel" located at the Camperdown Campus of the University of Sydney, which is available for use by any student at the university to tag, advertise, poster, and paint. Advocates of this idea suggest that this discourages petty vandalism yet encourages artists to take their time and produce great art, without worry of being caught or arrested for vandalism or trespassing.[108][109] Others disagree with this approach, arguing that the presence of legal graffiti walls does not demonstrably reduce illegal graffiti elsewhere. Some local government areas throughout Australia have introduced "anti-graffiti squads", who clean graffiti in the area, and such crews as BCW (Buffers Can't Win) have taken steps to keep one step ahead of local graffiti cleaners.

 

Many state governments have banned the sale or possession of spray paint to those under the age of 18 (age of majority). However, a number of local governments in Victoria have taken steps to recognize the cultural heritage value of some examples of graffiti, such as prominent political graffiti. Tough new graffiti laws have been introduced in Australia with fines of up to A$26,000 and two years in prison.

 

Melbourne is a prominent graffiti city of Australia with many of its lanes being tourist attractions, such as Hosier Lane in particular, a popular destination for photographers, wedding photography, and backdrops for corporate print advertising. The Lonely Planet travel guide cites Melbourne's street as a major attraction. All forms of graffiti, including sticker art, poster, stencil art, and wheatpasting, can be found in many places throughout the city. Prominent street art precincts include; Fitzroy, Collingwood, Northcote, Brunswick, St. Kilda, and the CBD, where stencil and sticker art is prominent. As one moves farther away from the city, mostly along suburban train lines, graffiti tags become more prominent. Many international artists such as Banksy have left their work in Melbourne and in early 2008 a perspex screen was installed to prevent a Banksy stencil art piece from being destroyed, it has survived since 2003 through the respect of local street artists avoiding posting over it, although it has recently had paint tipped over it.

 

In February 2008 Helen Clark, the New Zealand prime minister at that time, announced a government crackdown on tagging and other forms of graffiti vandalism, describing it as a destructive crime representing an invasion of public and private property. New legislation subsequently adopted included a ban on the sale of paint spray cans to persons under 18 and increases in maximum fines for the offence from NZ$200 to NZ$2,000 or extended community service. The issue of tagging become a widely debated one following an incident in Auckland during January 2008 in which a middle-aged property owner stabbed one of two teenage taggers to death and was subsequently convicted of manslaughter.

 

Graffiti databases have increased in the past decade because they allow vandalism incidents to be fully documented against an offender and help the police and prosecution charge and prosecute offenders for multiple counts of vandalism. They also provide law enforcement the ability to rapidly search for an offender's moniker or tag in a simple, effective, and comprehensive way. These systems can also help track costs of damage to a city to help allocate an anti-graffiti budget. The theory is that when an offender is caught putting up graffiti, they are not just charged with one count of vandalism; they can be held accountable for all the other damage for which they are responsible. This has two main benefits for law enforcement. One, it sends a signal to the offenders that their vandalism is being tracked. Two, a city can seek restitution from offenders for all the damage that they have committed, not merely a single incident. These systems give law enforcement personnel real-time, street-level intelligence that allows them not only to focus on the worst graffiti offenders and their damage, but also to monitor potential gang violence that is associated with the graffiti.

 

Many restrictions of civil gang injunctions are designed to help address and protect the physical environment and limit graffiti. Provisions of gang injunctions include things such as restricting the possession of marker pens, spray paint cans, or other sharp objects capable of defacing private or public property; spray painting, or marking with marker pens, scratching, applying stickers, or otherwise applying graffiti on any public or private property, including, but not limited to the street, alley, residences, block walls, and fences, vehicles or any other real or personal property. Some injunctions contain wording that restricts damaging or vandalizing both public and private property, including but not limited to any vehicle, light fixture, door, fence, wall, gate, window, building, street sign, utility box, telephone box, tree, or power pole.

 

To help address many of these issues, many local jurisdictions have set up graffiti abatement hotlines, where citizens can call in and report vandalism and have it removed. San Diego's hotline receives more than 5,000 calls per year, in addition to reporting the graffiti, callers can learn more about prevention. One of the complaints about these hotlines is the response time; there is often a lag time between a property owner calling about the graffiti and its removal. The length of delay should be a consideration for any jurisdiction planning on operating a hotline. Local jurisdictions must convince the callers that their complaint of vandalism will be a priority and cleaned off right away. If the jurisdiction does not have the resources to respond to complaints in a timely manner, the value of the hotline diminishes. Crews must be able to respond to individual service calls made to the graffiti hotline as well as focus on cleanup near schools, parks, and major intersections and transit routes to have the biggest impact. Some cities offer a reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of suspects for tagging or graffiti related vandalism. The amount of the reward is based on the information provided, and the action taken.

 

When police obtain search warrants in connection with a vandalism investigation, they are often seeking judicial approval to look for items such as cans of spray paint and nozzles from other kinds of aerosol sprays; etching tools, or other sharp or pointed objects, which could be used to etch or scratch glass and other hard surfaces; permanent marking pens, markers, or paint sticks; evidence of membership or affiliation with any gang or tagging crew; paraphernalia including any reference to "(tagger's name)"; any drawings, writing, objects, or graffiti depicting taggers' names, initials, logos, monikers, slogans, or any mention of tagging crew membership; and any newspaper clippings relating to graffiti crime.

Without any digital camera.

Sans appareil photo numérique.

Ohne Digitalkamera.

  

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Presentata al Salone dell'Automobile di Francoforte del 1951, la 220 era chiamata a sostituire la 230 W153, con la quale condivideva in pratica la stessa struttura telaistica, ad X con tubi a sezione ovale, utilizzata tra l'altro anche sulle più piccole 170V e 170S. Di questi modelli, tra l'altro, la 220 riprende anche l'impostazione stilistica decisamente retrò, tipica dei modelli del periodo immediatamente antecedente la Seconda guerra mondiale. La differenza estetica principale stava nel frontale, dove trovavano posto nuovi fari dal design più moderno, inglobati nei parafanghi.

La 220 è stata prodotta in tre varianti di carrozzeria, ancora separata dal telaio: berlina, cabriolet (a 2 o a 4 posti) e coupé. La berlina è stata di gran lunga la preferita dal pubblico, con 16.066 esemplari prodotti, mentre le cabriolet hanno totalizzato 2.275 esemplari e le coupé solamente 85 esemplari, anche a causa del fatto che la coupé è stata introdotta solo nel 1954, quando già mancava poco alla cessazione della produzione e quando la berlina non era più in produzione.

Le vere novità stavano nel motore M180 da 2.2 litri, primo 6 cilindri Mercedes-Benz del dopoguerra e primo superquadro della Casa tedesca, un motore di tipo monoalbero in testa, contrariamente al 2.3 litri della sua antenata, che era ad asse a camme laterale e valvole laterali. Con una potenza massima di 80 CV, questo motore spingeva la 220 ad una velocità massima di 140 km/h.

Il cambio era a 4 marce con frizione monodisco a secco, l'impianto frenante era idraulico a 4 tamburi e le sospensioni erano a ruote indipendenti con avantreno a triangoli trasversali e retrotreno a semiassi oscillanti.

La 220 proponeva anche alcune chicche per l'epoca, come la serratura di sicurezza per evitare l'apertura accidentale delle portiere, ed l'impianto di riscaldamento ottenibile a richiesta.

I prezzi di vendita delle 200 W187 erano di 11.925 marchi per la berlina, di 15.160 e 18.860 marchi per le due varianti di cabriolet previste e di ben 20.850 marchi per la coupé.

Tra il 1952 ed il 1953 venne realizzata una serie speciale di 220 (41 esemplari) con carrozzeria torpedo, destinate alle forze di polizia.

Nel 1954, come già detto, la berlina è stata tolta di produzione, sostituita dal modello 220S Ponton. Rimase in produzione solo la coupé, equipaggiata dal 2.2 litri M180 in versione leggermente più potente (85CV), montato sulle prime 220S berlina. La 220 Coupé W187 è stata tolta di produzione l'anno seguente, a sua volta rimpiazzata dalla versione coupé della 220S.

Durante la produzione del modello, vennero realizzati anche 47 telai nudi, destinati ad altre carrozzerie.

 

The Mercedes-Benz W187 is a luxury car produced by Mercedes-Benz from 1951 to 1955. Introduced at the Frankfurt Motor Show in April 1951, the W187 was powered by a single overhead camshaft inline six-cylinder M180 engine and available as a saloon, coupé, and cabriolet, all designated with the 220 model name. Despite its pre-World War II reputation as a manufacturer of luxury cars, in the immediate post-war years Mercedes-Benz produced only four-cylinder-engined passenger cars. The W187 Mercedes-Benz 220 and flagship W186 Mercedes-Benz 300 Adenauer introduced together in 1951 were the first Mercedes to once again feature six-cylinder engines.

The styling was similar to that of the Mercedes-Benz 170S except that the 170's freestanding headlights were for the 220 integrated into the fenders for a slightly more modern look. Two different cabriolet models were built, conceived as exclusive sporting cars of exclusive character, but these only sold 1,278 and 997 for the "A" (2-door, 2/3-seat) and "B" (2-door, 4-seat) versions, respectively.

In December 1953, just as the saloon and cabriolet "B" models were about to be replaced, a "Cabriolet A" derived W187 Coupé was announced for 1954. The Mercedes-Benz sales department let it be known that this development was a direct response to pressing requests from leading celebrities of the time.

During 1953 the manufacturer replaced the conventionally flat windscreen on the 2/3 seater "Cabriolet A" with a slightly curved screen, which also found its way on to the new coupé: this was a way of highlighting the sporting nature of both models. Nevertheless, the coupé once fitted, as many were, with a steel sunroof, was at the end of 1953 offered for 22,000 Marks which was nearly twice the price for the standard W187 "Limousine", and only 85 of the W187 coupés were actually sold. Between August 1952 and May 1953, 41 special soft top "OTP" bodied W187 220s were produced for the police.

All 220s used newly developed M180 six cylinder 2195cc engine producing 80 hp DIN (86 SAE) (59 kW). In contrast with the rather old fashioned look of the car's body, the new engines attracted much attention in the motoring press, being the first new engine presented by Mercedes-Benz in more than ten years.

The valves were operated by short rocker arms from an overhead camshaft. The engine was unusual in Europe at this time in having oversquare cylinder dimensions with a bore of 80.0mm and a stroke of only 72.8mm, which facilitated the design of an efficient cylinder head. The manufacturer claimed a top speed of 140 km/h (87 mph) for the saloons and 145 km/h (90 mph) for the cabriolets which was faster than the 52 PS (38 kW) powered 170S Cabriolet which the cabriolet version of the W187 replaced and from which its bodywork was derived. The new six-cylinder engine would form the basis, repeatedly enlarged and upgraded as the years went on, for a long line of six-cylinder engines powering mainstream Mercedes-Benz models including the six-cylinder version of the early S-Class models in the 1970s. Because of the extra power in what was, by modern standards, a heavy car, the W187 was equipped with Duplex drum brakes.

With the sedan/saloon bodied cars about to be delisted by the manufacturer in May 1954, in April 1954 the "Cabriolet A" and its Coupé derivative were fitted with a new higher compression 85 PS (63 kW) engine that had been developed for the soon to be announced Ponton bodied Mercedes-Benz W180. These faster sporting versions of the W187 continued in production for a further year. The 220 saloon was replaced by the W105/W180 line in 1953. The coupé and cabriolet continued until August 1955.

The saloon went out of production in May, 1954; the Cabriolet models continued for another 15 months until August 1955. The body of the W187 saloon was closely modelled on the 1938 Mercedes-Benz W153, and despite the modern engine that powered it, already looked old fashioned to many observers on the day it was introduced. Two years earlier, in 1949, the Borgward Hansa had served notice that car design had moved on since the 1930s, and the manufacturer's own 1953 W120 confirmed that "modern" European cars were following the North American trend to lower wider bodied designs. This has been seen as an explanation for the W187's own unusually short production run of slightly above three years for the saloon and less than five years for the longest lived of the Cabriolet models.

The W187 was immediately replaced with the Ponton bodied six cylinder Mercedes-Benz 220a (W180). When the cabriolet was withdrawn in 1955 there was no direct successor. However, slightly more than a year later the all-new Mercedes-Benz 220S Cabriolet and Coupé appeared, respectively in July and October 1956, using, like the saloon on which they were based, a modern ponton style body.

Without the blur

A sequela do "Pilares da Terra", do Ken Follett, também este livro se passa em Kingsbridge, dois séculos mais tarde, e envolvendo parte dos descendentes das personagens originais. Também este vale muito a pena ler, uma história bem construída, interessante, cheia de altos e baixos. Talvez não tão bom como o inicial, mas não perde como habitualmente as sequelas que tentam viver da predecessora costumam :) Gostei muito!

 

Sequel to "Pillars of the Earth", by Ken Follett, this one also takes place in Kingsbridge, two centuries later, with some of the first book's characters descendants. It is a good story, well written with an intelligent plot, full of ups and downs. Maybe not as good as the first one, but nonetheless a really good book.

 

Sinopse

A obra é protagonizada pelos descendentes dos personagens de seu romance de maior sucesso, "Os pilares da terra". Desta vez, Follett acompanha a trajetória de quatro crianças que presenciam um cri­me e se comprometem a mantê-lo em segredo. Apesar das diferenças sociais que os separam em plena Idade Média, pelas três décadas seguintes suas vidas seguem se entrelaçando, em encontros e de­sen­contros que geram todo tipo de sentimento, do maior amor ao ódio mais profundo.

in Sinopse do Livro

 

On the day after Halloween, in the year 1327, four children slip away from the cathedral city of Kingsbridge. They are a thief, a bully, a boy genius and a girl who wants to be a doctor. In the forest they see two men killed.

As adults, their lives will be braided together by ambition, love, greed and revenge. They will see prosperity and famine, plague and war. One boy will travel the world but come home in the end; the other will be a powerful, corrupt nobleman. One girl will defy the might of the medieval church; the other will pursue an impossible love. And always they will live under the long shadow of the unexplained killing they witnessed on that fateful childhood day.

World Without End is the sequel to The Pillars of the Earth. However, it doesn’t matter which you read first. The second book is set in the same town, Kingsbridge, but takes place two hundred years later, and features the descendants of the original characters

in Ken Follett

Without telling you all about it, I will say Saturday’s Modern Day Drama is really something great to see. It is really encouraging to bring families together, and at the end, there are very few dry eyes in the house.

ⓒRebecca Bugge, All Rights Reserved

Do not use without permission.

 

Loggia delle Benedizioni, the northern entrance to the church, was designed by Domenico Fontana (1543-1607), a late Renaissance architect. The name, the Loggia of Blessings, comes from the practice of the newly elected Pope to give his blessing standing up there on his first day having possession of the cathedral.

 

The Basilica of Saint John Lateran has the full name of Papal Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran (in Italian: Arcibasilica papale di San Giovanni in Laterano). The complete name of the church, in Latin, is Archibasilica Sanctissimi Salvatoris et Sanctorum Iohannes Baptista et Evangelista in Laterano. It ranks first among the four Papal Basilicas (major basilicas) in Rome since it is the cathedra (seat) of the bishop of Rome. It also holds the title of ecumenical mother church for Roman Catholics.

 

The church has old roots, dating back to 324 - but you can't really see that in the current building. It was rebuilt several times under different popes - and the most prominent style in the church today is the Baroque. Francesco Borromini worked much with the interior of the church, on behalf of Pope Innocent X, in the middle of the 17th century.

 

The president of France is ex officio the first and only honorary canon of the basilica - an inheritance from the kings of France who held that title since Henri IV (who died in 1610).

33rd Annual NYC DYKE MARCH along 5th Avenue at 35th Street in NYC on Saturday evening, 28 June 2025 by Elvert Barnes Photography

 

Elvert Barnes WITHOUT APOLOGIES / LGBTQ Public Displays of Affection Archives at elvertxbarnes.com/withoutapologies

 

Follow NYC DYKE MARCH at www.facebook.com/dykemarchnyc

 

Elvert Barnes PROTESTS 2025 at elvertxbarnes.com/protests

 

Elvert Barnes 55th NYC GAY PRIDE 2023 at

elvertxbarnes.com/nyc-gay-pride

 

Elvert Barnes GAY PRIDE docu-project at elvertxbarnes.com/gaypride

 

Elvert Barnes June 2025 at exbphoto.com/2025

Back at the National Arboretum, the exploration continues. We venture down to the grove of Himalayan Cedar (Cedrus deodara) and take a moment to explore what happens to the DoF as we jiggle about f-numbers.

 

Not without good cause, the site for the new National Capital was variously described as "a good sheep station spoiled" or "a cemetery with lights". The latter is a bit unkind. If this was a cemetery, it must have mastered the art of daily resurrection, or parking would be easier.

 

Once those sheep were replaced with arguably less useful livestock, there wasn't much more than hot air among its outputs. There was good cause to explore alternatives! Here, in the middle of nowhere, isolated from industry, agriculture and reality this place was a drain on the treasury of an emerging nation. With that in mind, some of those inspired by King O'Malley's thesis that "cold climates have produced the greatest geniuses" set about trying to prove he was correct. Take the backyards in the suburb of Red Hill. They were made big enough for an orchard, productive gardens or a house cow. True, there was a dairy over at Duntroon, and later on Dairy Flats. What about all the other corporeal needs?

 

Around the city, on it's poshest golf course, and here about this hill, one of those smarties set about planting things that might be useful: trees. Varieties of trees which bore fruit or were valuable for timber were plonked into any bit of ground thought suitable. True, there were arboreta in the mountains — the Brindabellas and on the flanks of the Bimberi Wilderness. Here closer to the city, some of the plantings were of a commercial nature. The grove of Himalayan Cedar, or what remains after partial destruction by fire, was more a trial plot with an intent for commercialisation, sitting as it did between a pine forest and a cork oak plantation. Today it's been grafted onto the side of the National Arboretum, as have the cork oaks. Little mention of the other cork oak plantings is ever made these days — unglamorously sitting next to a roadway.

 

Was the tree planter a clever man? Most of the fruitful street plantings have been ripped out because of less clever residents who complained that they made a mess on the footpath. Don't get me started! We'd better move on, or we'll be here all day.

   

without comment - shit weather...

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FKA Twigs, the girlfriend of actor Robert Pattinson, has gone out of the clothes for a photo shoot for V Magazine. The pictures are on the magazine‘s website.

In the photos, the 26-year-old musician just a skin-colored underpants, she also has a lot of chains and she holds her arms over...

Robert Pattinson girlfriend poses without top

celepop.com/robert-pattinson-girlfriend-poses-without-top/

 

Without advance lever

 

Collage Creation by Franz Murtas

 

Franz Murtas : - franzmurtas.com -

 

MEMBER OF OLTRE COLLAGE COLLECTIVE

 

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The Belle 12'' doll standing, supported by a Kaiser stand. She is wearing her pink winter outfit, with her cape off. Her ponytail was a bit messy after taking it out of the hood of the cape, so I combed it to make it as neat as I could. It was curly, and off center. There was a nice pink bow in her hair above the ponytail. The pink and red dress was covered in glitter, which did shed. The half length sleeves had large ruffled cuffs. Belle looks dainty in her pink dress without the cape and hood. I also left out the bluebird in these poses.

 

Detailed photos of the dolls in the Beauty and the Beast Deluxe Doll Set, deboxed. They include the 1/6 scale Beast, Belle and Gaston dolls, and the Philippe plush. Beast and Belle are in their winter outfits. I show Beast and Belle both with and without their capes. The bluebird figurine is included with Belle when she has her cape on. Beast is not that stable free standing, so I support him with a Kaiser stand for these photos.

 

I just got the Beauty and the Beast Deluxe Doll Set ($79.95) from my local Disney Store (on Thursday June 30, 2016). The accessory figures look really detailed and well done. In fact, I like Chip better in this set than the one with the new Classic Belle doll. Also the bluebird looks nicer than the one with the new Classic Snow White. Belle and Beast are in their winter outfits. Belle also has her blue peasant outfit and her yellow ball gown. Beast also has his formal outfit. Philippe is way too small, but is a very cute plush. I like this set way better than the ones for Aladdin or Sleeping Beauty.

Ozi from Brazil with Noname from France, pasted in Paris as part of street art without borders

Without a doubt, the kids love getting their picture taken.

id on flower would be grateful thank you.

Photo by Vicky Victoria

* www.facebook.com/moonlightdestiny

* Please do not reupload without my permission.

* Please credit my by linking the source.

* Thank You

 

Photos by Vicky Victoria

 

* www.facebook.com/moonlightdestiny

 

* Please do not reupload without my permission.

 

* Please credit by linking the source.

 

* Thank You

 

If you got your pic taken by a black girl with a Nikon or if she was in a teal wig and black and white lolita dress, or purple wig with blue science starfleet uniform, that was me. I only say black female photographer because I don't think I saw many myself so I might stand out.

 

Doll Panel/Meet - www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.627022080661553.1073741...

 

GI Joe Photoshoot - www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.627022780661483.1073741...

 

Mortal Kombat Photoshoot - www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.627025710661190.1073741...

 

Pacific Rim - www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.627028160660945.1073741...

 

Dragon Con Parade - www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.627032520660509.1073741...

 

Dragon Con Cosplay - www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.627043787326049.1073741...

 

Best Of Dragon Con Photos (Flickr Version) -

 

Best of Dragon Con Photos (Tumblr Version + Videos) - spockuhura-is-flawless.tumblr.com/tagged/dragoncon2013

 

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La MK2, nota anche come Mark II è stata un’autovettura di lusso prodotta dalla Jaguar dal 1959 al 1967 solamente in versione berlina. Fu sostituita da due modelli, la 240 e la 340, che vennero commercializzati dal 1967 al 1969. La MK2 successe alla 2.4-litre ed alla 3.4-litre, prodotte dal 1957 al 1959. Quando fu lanciata la MK2, le due vetture vennero ridenominate, retrospettivamente, Mark I. Quest'ultima non era stata esente da critiche, sia per il comportamento stradale poco sportivo (soprattutto della 2.4) che per alcune soluzioni tecniche non all'avanguardia (come i freni a tamburo), così, nel 1959, la Casa decise di aggiornarla per adeguarla al nuovo decennio. Le modifiche furono notevoli, sia sotto l'aspetto estetico che sotto quello tecnico. Il restyling della carrozzeria si concentrò sulle portiere (con montanti, ora cromati, più sottili e superficie vetrata più ampia), sulla coda (parzialmente ridisegnata), sul parafango posteriore (ridisegnato), su parabrezza e lunotto (ampliati) e, in misura minore, sul frontale (gruppi ottici secondari circolari e mascherina leggermente modificata). Anche gli interni furono oggetto di rivisitazione, soprattutto la plancia, la strumentazione ed i sedili. La MK2 era una vettura veloce, spaziosa e dalla linea gradevole e seguiva quindi la massima più nota di Sir William Lyons: "grace, pace and space" (cioè "grazia, andatura e spazio", dove per andatura si intendeva "velocità", "brillantezza di marcia"). Era offerta con tre motori, che si differenziavano dalla cilindrata. Tutti e tre erano propulsori della Jaguar XK. Il più piccolo aveva una cilindrata di 2.483 cm³ (2,4 L) ed erogava 120 CV di potenza (più potente di quello della Mark I, grazie alla nuova testata), quello medio era di 3.442 cm³ (3,4 L, 210 CV) ed il motore più grande di 3.781 cm³ (3,8 L, 220 CV). Quest’ultimo era analogo al motore da 3,8 L utilizzato sulla E-Type, dato che aveva componenti in comune come il monoblocco, l’albero a gomiti, le bielle ed i pistoni. I due motori avevano però differenti condotti d’aspirazione ed un diverso impianto d'alimentazione; infatti, in riferimento a quest’ultimo, la E-Type possedeva tre carburatori SU, mentre la Mark II solamente due. Di conseguenza la Mark II era 30 CV meno potente. La testata del motore della Mark II possedeva condotti curvi al contrario di quelli installati sul propulsore della E-Type, che erano invece diritti. Per i mercati al di fuori di quello statunitense, gli esemplari che montavano i motori da 3,4 L erano equipaggiati con carburatori SU doppio corpo mentre quelle con il propulsore da 2,4 L avevano installati dei Solex doppio corpo. Per il mercato statunitense, gli esemplari con motore da 3,4 L e 3.8 L utilizzavano tre carburatori Solex.

I freni divennero a disco su tutte le ruote, mentre il cambio manuale, sempre a 4 rapporti con overdrive, era completamente nuovo (e di produzione Jaguar). Le due versioni di cilindrata maggiore potevano essere equipaggiate, in alternativa, con un cambio automatico a 3 rapporti. Le versioni manuali di 3,8 litri avevano di serie il differenziale autobloccante (optional sulle 3.4 "manuali").

Derivata dalla MK2 era la Daimler 250 V8 (nei mercati europei era nota come Daimler 2,5 V8, ed in seguito come Daimler V8 250), che aveva installato un motore Daimler da 2,5 L. Questo propulsore fu utilizzato per la prima volta sulla Daimler SP250, la quale era conosciuta inizialmente come Daimler Dart, ma "Dart" era un marchio registrato della Dodge e la vettura fu quindi ridenominata a seguito di una controversia legale. Questo motore era fabbricato in lega d’alluminio e quindi era più leggero del motore Jaguar a sei cilindri, il cui monoblocco era fabbricato in ghisa. Avendo minor peso, era ridotta la massa che premeva sulle ruote anteriori, e quindi veniva diminuito il sottosterzo rispetto alle versioni con motore derivato dalla XK, che erano più in difficoltà nelle curve. I modelli Daimler erano riconoscibili dalle caratteristiche scanalature ondulate che erano incorporate nella calandra cromata, che sostituivano il marchio e la statuetta della Jaguar. La produzione della MK2 terminò nel settembre del 1967. Il modello fu sostituito dalla 240 e dalla 340, i cui nomi richiamavano la cilindrata del motore installato, cioè 2,4 L e 3,4 L. Venne anche fabbricata la 380, con motore da 3,8 L, ma non entrò in produzione di serie.

La 240 e la 340 erano modelli di transizione che furono commercializzati per colmare la lacuna fino al lancio della XJ nel settembre del 1968. La produzione della 340 terminò quasi immediatamente, mentre la 240 continuò ad essere fabbricata fino all’aprile del 1969; il suo prezzo era 1.364 sterline, quindi 20 sterline in meno della 2.4-litre del 1956. Il prezzo relativamente basso dei nuovi modelli 240 e 340 era motivato anche dal fatto che la pelle sintetica sostituì quella naturale, oltre che dall’installazione di paraurti più economici. Altri cambiamenti furono la sostituzione dei fendinebbia anteriori con prese d'aria circolari, con i fendinebbia che divennero un optional per il mercato britannico. Il prezzo fu ridotto per competere con la Rover 2000 TC. Le prestazioni della 240 vennero migliorate, rispetto alla 2.4-litre, rendendo più performante la testata del motore 2,4 L con l'arrivo dei condotti di aspirazione diritti, mutuati dalla E-Type, ed un carburatore doppio corpo SU. Grazie a questi miglioramenti, il veicolo poteva superare i 160 km/h, che era superiore rispetto alla velocità massima raggiunta dalla MK2 e ciò portò ad un leggero aumento delle vendite. La Jaguar sostituì la 240 e la 340 con la XJ nel settembre del 1968.

Baumberge - Muensterland, Germany

Rider: www.77designz.com

photos: out of focus productions

A DAY WITHOUT IMMIGRANTS . May Day Boycott . The March to the National Mall . 14th Street between R and S Streets, NW . WDC . Monday afternoon, 1 May 2006 . elvertbarnes-freedom.blogspot.com/2006/09/immigrant-2006-... . Elvert Xavier Barnes Protest Photography

Pretty good poem, seen on the footbridge in Edgeley on Saturday 16th August

I have always thought that Elmstone was the only Kent church without dedication to a Saint/King or Martyr, but it seems East Farleigh has has St Mary foisted upon it.

 

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I have been inside Emstone church just once before, and it was a fine, sunny Saturday morning, and I remembered a church full of light, pouring through stained glass windows.

 

But of the rest of the church, I remembered little. I thought the south side of the church was all windows. It isn't.

 

Visiting the butchers a couple of weeks before, I saw that there was a coffee and scone event happening at Elmstone church.

 

Which is how we came to be travelling to Elmstone after leaving Sittingbourne.

 

Its funny, that around Preston, it seems all roads leads to Elmstone, you just have to find the church among the maze of lanes and dykes.

 

We did find the church, and the churchyard was packed with people on chairs, all eating cream teams; scones, jam and cream.

 

We had eaten an ice cream in Sittingbourne so were not hungry, but I gave them a tenner for the charity they were raising money for.

 

I went round getting shots, being careful, as warned, not to get a child in my shots.

 

The Rood Screen I thought very fine, as was the glass, as before, though an autumnal afternoon this time.

 

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This little known church is an absolute gem but being so close to the greats of Sandwich, Ash and Wingham it will probably always be overshadowed. It is a small Norman church extended by the addition of a north aisle and NW tower in the thirteenth century. The arcade is typical of that period. The priest’s stall is fourteenth century and the tale is told of it being made from a boat in which he was shipwrecked! The pulpit is a stunning late 19c design by ES Prior with Voysey-esque linenfold panels. For a small church there is much stained glass of note. The east windows of chancel and aisle are by William Wailes – bright and strident and strongley drawn. In the north aisle is a window by Burlysson and Grylls and an especially fine Nativity scene by Powell’s. Theirs too is the pair of 7c saints in the south wall but something has gone wrong with the proportion and the heads are strangely placed. In the west window is some medieval glass and there is an outstanding medieval roundel of the Lamb of God in the north chancel window. Top all this off with a fine Norman font and you have a church that is worth the effort to make an appointment to visit.

 

www.kentchurches.info/church.asp?p=Elmstone

 

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ELMSTONE.

THE next parish south-eastward from Stourmouth is Elmstone, called in Domesday, Ælvetone, and in other antient records, Elmerstone. There is only one borough in this parish, viz. Elmstone borough, the borsholder of which is chosen at the court leet of the manor of Preston yearly.

 

THE PARISH of Elmstone is very small, it is a retired unfrequented place, having no village, and only six houses and an half in the parish, which happens from one of the houses standing over the stream, one half of which is in this parish, and the other half in Preston, the Stream, which rises in a pond there, separating the two parishes, and running thence near most of those houses, of which the parsonage is one, towards the river Stour north-eastward. The courtlodge stands near the south side of the parish, having round it a moat, which is supplied by a spring rising just above it, the water from which runs from hence towards the river. At a small distance from hence is the church, on the rise of a hill, round which the land is very heathy and common-like. The parish of Wingham comes up within one field of the church. The whole is uneven ground, the inclosures small, and most of the land very poor. There is no fair held here.

 

THE MANOR OF ELMSTONE was part of the antient possessions of the abbot and convent of St. Augustine, of whom it was held by one Ansfrid. Accordingly it is thus entered in the book of Domesday, under the general title of their lands:

 

Anssrid holds of the abbot, AElig;veltone. It was taxed at half a suling and half a yoke. The arable land is . . . . . . In demesne there is one carucate, and three villeins, with three oxen in one team. In this manor Ansfrid holds half a suling, of the demesne of the monks, and pays from thence to St. Augustine one hundred pence per annum. Godessa held it in see simple, and gave from thence to St. Augustine twenty-five pence in alms every year. In the time of king Edward the Confessor it was worth forty shillings, and afterwards ten shillings, now sixty shillings.

 

After which, it appears to have been held by the eminent family of Leyborne, one of whom Roger de Leyborne held it of the abbot, in the 53d year of king Henry III. And in his descendants it continued till Juliana, daughter of Thomas de Leyborne, stiled from the greatness of her possessions, the Infanta of Kent, died possessed of it anno 41 Edward III. when it escheated to the crown for want of heirs, there being found none who could make claim, to her estates, either by direct or even collateral alliance. (fn. 1) After which king Richard II. in his 11th and 22d years, settled it on the priory of Canons, alias Chiltern Langley, in Hertfordshire, where it remained till the dissolution of that house, anno 30 Henry VIII. when it came into the king's hands, who the next year granted it, with the scite of the priory, and other lands and estates belonging to it, to Richard, suffragan bishop of Dover, to hold for his life, or until he should be promoted to some ecclesiastical benefice of the yearly value of one hundred pounds, which happened before the 36th year of that reign; for the year before that, the king granted to Walter Hendley, esq. his attorney general, his manor and advowson of Elmerstone, alias Elmstone, with the woods and underwoods, late parcel of the above priory, or of the monastery of Dartford, or of one of them, to hold in capite by knight's service, being then of the value of fifteen pounds per annum. He was afterwards knighted, and died in the 6th year of king Edward VI. leaving his three daughters his coheirs, who next year joined in the sale of it to Simon Lynch, gent. of Grove, in Staple, who sold this manor, with the advowson of the church appendant to it, in the beginning of queen Elizabeth's reign, to Mr. William Gibbs, descended from a family who were of the rank of gentility in Devonshire, and settled at Folkestone about Henry VII.'s reign, and bore for their arms, Argent, three pole-axes, sable; the patent of which was confirmed by Robert Cooke, clarencieux. (fn. 2) His descendant of the same name, alienated it at the latter end of king Charles I.'s reign, to Robert Jaques, alderman of London, who kept his shrievalty here in 1669, and was afterwards of Luton, in Bedfordshire, and died possessed of it in 1671, leaving two daughters his coheirs, the eldest of whom, Joane, married Henry Partridge, esq. of Berkshire, and Rebecca, the youngest, John Whitfield, gent. of Canterbury, who shared his estate here between them, and on the division of it, the latter had part of the demesne lands of the manor in this parish, and other farms and lands in the adjoining parishes; but the manor of Elmstone itself, with the appendant advowson, was allotted to the former, in whose descendants it continued down to Henry Partridge, esq. recorder of Lyn Regis, in Norsolk, who died in 1793, on which it came to his son, who is the present owner of it. A court baron is held for this manor.

 

There are no parocbial charities. The poor constantly relieved are about seven, casually four.

 

THIS PARISH is within the ECCLESIASTICAL JURISDICTION of the diocese of Canterbury, and deanry of Bridge.

 

The church is a small building, consisting of a body, a very small north isle, and a chancel, having a square tower, embattled at the north-west corner, in which there are three bells. In the chancel is a handsome monument, with a marble bust at top, for Robert Jaques, esq. formerly an alderman and sheriff of London, and afterwards of Luton, in Bedfordshire, who died in 1671; his arms were, argent on a sess sable, three escallops, or. A monument for Elizabeth, wife of Thomas Hutchesson, rector, obt. 1768. In the south isle is a monument for Henry Whitfield, second surviving son of John Whitfield, esq. of Canterbury, who lived at Preston, obt. 1774. In the church-yard are several tombs for the Gibs's, of this parish and Preston.

 

There is given towards the repair of the church, a house near it, of the yearly value of three pounds, and a house lately burnt down, and two acres of Land, rented at fifty shilling.

 

¶This church is a rectory, the advowson of which has always been appendant to the manor of Elmstone, and as such is now of the patronage of Mr. Partridge, as has been already mentioned before. It is valued in the king's books at 6l. 7s. 8½d. and the yearly tenths at 12s. 9¼d. In 1588 it was valued at 401. communicants thirty eight. In 1640 it was valued at 80l. communicants forty. It is now of the clear yearly certified value of 69l. 2s. 2d.

 

There are five acres of glebe land; at the valuation in king Henry the VIIIth.'s reign there were eight.

 

www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-kent/vol9/pp131-135

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check out my TWILIGHT STORE:

 

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without flash

Railways - 5020 “Trematon Castle” without its tender after overhaul at Swindon Works

October 28, 2023

 

Rotational wind etchings in the sand in morning light.

 

Hiking the Provincetown Dunes

 

Cape Cod National Seashore

Provincetown, Massachusetts

Cape Cod - USA

 

Photo by brucetopher

© Bruce Christopher 2023

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...always learning - critiques welcome.

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A desk without a student to study/do their homework on. Then again, it would be hard to do your homework while sitting on an uncomfortable chair and on a very unstable wobbly desk that's on wheels!

Green Santa handed out reusable bags on Olvera Street in historic Los Angeles on A Day Without A Bag 2012. A few lucky bags contained “golden tickets” that were redeemed with the Eco Elves for $25 Vons gift cards! Photo by Heal the Bay

There's a whole lot of food without flavor, but not much flavor without food.

 

I need to stop taking photos of shiny things and try something new. But I'm still not satisfied. Forks are notoriously difficult to photograph.

 

Also, this was completely different in my head. It was supposed to be sort of low key, with a high up hard light doing most of the work. But the reflections looked bad so I went for this safer version where my fill to the right became my key. I really wanted the image in my head, but I wasn't sure how to accomplish it. Maybe a small softbox or a beauty dish.

 

Light: YN-560 bounced off an umbrella camera right. Another YN-560 through a very small paper diffuser (6 inches across) about four feet up camera left. It isn't doing much. Mostly just fill.

Without using a flash it was very difficult to photograph within this church because of the lack of suitable light. One solution was to leave the main door open but that caused other problems.

  

The Honan Chapel, formally known as Saint Finbarr's Collegiate Chapel or the Honan Hostel Chapel is a small collegiate church located adjacent to the grounds of University College Cork in Cork city, Ireland.

 

The chapel, and its liturgical collection, was produced during the late phase of the Irish Arts and Crafts movement (1894–1925). Both the building and furnishings were designed and produced as a single commission. This accounts for an overall unity of style and design and the rich interplay of Celto-Byzantine motifs in the fabric of the building and the ornate furnishings, altar plate, hangings and vestments. The traditions of Celtic art and Hiberno-Romanesque architecture were blended with tastes for Symbolism (arts) and Art Nouveau popular in Europe before the outbreak of the First World War (1914–18). In Ireland this was known, artistically, as the Celtic Twilight: a time for rediscovering a lost national identity through Celtic art and myths. This is seen in the poetry of W. B. Yeats and the plays of J. M. Synge. Visually, the patrons of the Honan commission were searching for a new sense of Irish national identity on the threshold of political independence from Britain.

Graffiti (plural; singular graffiti or graffito, the latter rarely used except in archeology) is art that is written, painted or drawn on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from simple written words to elaborate wall paintings, and has existed since ancient times, with examples dating back to ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire (see also mural).

 

Graffiti is a controversial subject. In most countries, marking or painting property without permission is considered by property owners and civic authorities as defacement and vandalism, which is a punishable crime, citing the use of graffiti by street gangs to mark territory or to serve as an indicator of gang-related activities. Graffiti has become visualized as a growing urban "problem" for many cities in industrialized nations, spreading from the New York City subway system and Philadelphia in the early 1970s to the rest of the United States and Europe and other world regions

 

"Graffiti" (usually both singular and plural) and the rare singular form "graffito" are from the Italian word graffiato ("scratched"). The term "graffiti" is used in art history for works of art produced by scratching a design into a surface. A related term is "sgraffito", which involves scratching through one layer of pigment to reveal another beneath it. This technique was primarily used by potters who would glaze their wares and then scratch a design into them. In ancient times graffiti were carved on walls with a sharp object, although sometimes chalk or coal were used. The word originates from Greek γράφειν—graphein—meaning "to write".

 

The term graffiti originally referred to the inscriptions, figure drawings, and such, found on the walls of ancient sepulchres or ruins, as in the Catacombs of Rome or at Pompeii. Historically, these writings were not considered vanadlism, which today is considered part of the definition of graffiti.

 

The only known source of the Safaitic language, an ancient form of Arabic, is from graffiti: inscriptions scratched on to the surface of rocks and boulders in the predominantly basalt desert of southern Syria, eastern Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia. Safaitic dates from the first century BC to the fourth century AD.

 

Some of the oldest cave paintings in the world are 40,000 year old ones found in Australia. The oldest written graffiti was found in ancient Rome around 2500 years ago. Most graffiti from the time was boasts about sexual experiences Graffiti in Ancient Rome was a form of communication, and was not considered vandalism.

 

Ancient tourists visiting the 5th-century citadel at Sigiriya in Sri Lanka write their names and commentary over the "mirror wall", adding up to over 1800 individual graffiti produced there between the 6th and 18th centuries. Most of the graffiti refer to the frescoes of semi-nude females found there. One reads:

 

Wet with cool dew drops

fragrant with perfume from the flowers

came the gentle breeze

jasmine and water lily

dance in the spring sunshine

side-long glances

of the golden-hued ladies

stab into my thoughts

heaven itself cannot take my mind

as it has been captivated by one lass

among the five hundred I have seen here.

 

Among the ancient political graffiti examples were Arab satirist poems. Yazid al-Himyari, an Umayyad Arab and Persian poet, was most known for writing his political poetry on the walls between Sajistan and Basra, manifesting a strong hatred towards the Umayyad regime and its walis, and people used to read and circulate them very widely.

 

Graffiti, known as Tacherons, were frequently scratched on Romanesque Scandinavian church walls. When Renaissance artists such as Pinturicchio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, or Filippino Lippi descended into the ruins of Nero's Domus Aurea, they carved or painted their names and returned to initiate the grottesche style of decoration.

 

There are also examples of graffiti occurring in American history, such as Independence Rock, a national landmark along the Oregon Trail.

 

Later, French soldiers carved their names on monuments during the Napoleonic campaign of Egypt in the 1790s. Lord Byron's survives on one of the columns of the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion in Attica, Greece.

 

The oldest known example of graffiti "monikers" found on traincars created by hobos and railworkers since the late 1800s. The Bozo Texino monikers were documented by filmmaker Bill Daniel in his 2005 film, Who is Bozo Texino?.

 

In World War II, an inscription on a wall at the fortress of Verdun was seen as an illustration of the US response twice in a generation to the wrongs of the Old World:

 

During World War II and for decades after, the phrase "Kilroy was here" with an accompanying illustration was widespread throughout the world, due to its use by American troops and ultimately filtering into American popular culture. Shortly after the death of Charlie Parker (nicknamed "Yardbird" or "Bird"), graffiti began appearing around New York with the words "Bird Lives".

 

Modern graffiti art has its origins with young people in 1960s and 70s in New York City and Philadelphia. Tags were the first form of stylised contemporary graffiti. Eventually, throw-ups and pieces evolved with the desire to create larger art. Writers used spray paint and other kind of materials to leave tags or to create images on the sides subway trains. and eventually moved into the city after the NYC metro began to buy new trains and paint over graffiti.

 

While the art had many advocates and appreciators—including the cultural critic Norman Mailer—others, including New York City mayor Ed Koch, considered it to be defacement of public property, and saw it as a form of public blight. The ‘taggers’ called what they did ‘writing’—though an important 1974 essay by Mailer referred to it using the term ‘graffiti.’

 

Contemporary graffiti style has been heavily influenced by hip hop culture and the myriad international styles derived from Philadelphia and New York City Subway graffiti; however, there are many other traditions of notable graffiti in the twentieth century. Graffiti have long appeared on building walls, in latrines, railroad boxcars, subways, and bridges.

 

An early graffito outside of New York or Philadelphia was the inscription in London reading "Clapton is God" in reference to the guitarist Eric Clapton. Creating the cult of the guitar hero, the phrase was spray-painted by an admirer on a wall in an Islington, north London in the autumn of 1967. The graffito was captured in a photograph, in which a dog is urinating on the wall.

 

Films like Style Wars in the 80s depicting famous writers such as Skeme, Dondi, MinOne, and ZEPHYR reinforced graffiti's role within New York's emerging hip-hop culture. Although many officers of the New York City Police Department found this film to be controversial, Style Wars is still recognized as the most prolific film representation of what was going on within the young hip hop culture of the early 1980s. Fab 5 Freddy and Futura 2000 took hip hop graffiti to Paris and London as part of the New York City Rap Tour in 1983

 

Commercialization and entrance into mainstream pop culture

Main article: Commercial graffiti

With the popularity and legitimization of graffiti has come a level of commercialization. In 2001, computer giant IBM launched an advertising campaign in Chicago and San Francisco which involved people spray painting on sidewalks a peace symbol, a heart, and a penguin (Linux mascot), to represent "Peace, Love, and Linux." IBM paid Chicago and San Francisco collectively US$120,000 for punitive damages and clean-up costs.

 

In 2005, a similar ad campaign was launched by Sony and executed by its advertising agency in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami, to market its handheld PSP gaming system. In this campaign, taking notice of the legal problems of the IBM campaign, Sony paid building owners for the rights to paint on their buildings "a collection of dizzy-eyed urban kids playing with the PSP as if it were a skateboard, a paddle, or a rocking horse".

 

Tristan Manco wrote that Brazil "boasts a unique and particularly rich, graffiti scene ... [earning] it an international reputation as the place to go for artistic inspiration". Graffiti "flourishes in every conceivable space in Brazil's cities". Artistic parallels "are often drawn between the energy of São Paulo today and 1970s New York". The "sprawling metropolis", of São Paulo has "become the new shrine to graffiti"; Manco alludes to "poverty and unemployment ... [and] the epic struggles and conditions of the country's marginalised peoples", and to "Brazil's chronic poverty", as the main engines that "have fuelled a vibrant graffiti culture". In world terms, Brazil has "one of the most uneven distributions of income. Laws and taxes change frequently". Such factors, Manco argues, contribute to a very fluid society, riven with those economic divisions and social tensions that underpin and feed the "folkloric vandalism and an urban sport for the disenfranchised", that is South American graffiti art.

 

Prominent Brazilian writers include Os Gêmeos, Boleta, Nunca, Nina, Speto, Tikka, and T.Freak. Their artistic success and involvement in commercial design ventures has highlighted divisions within the Brazilian graffiti community between adherents of the cruder transgressive form of pichação and the more conventionally artistic values of the practitioners of grafite.

 

Graffiti in the Middle East has emerged slowly, with taggers operating in Egypt, Lebanon, the Gulf countries like Bahrain or the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and in Iran. The major Iranian newspaper Hamshahri has published two articles on illegal writers in the city with photographic coverage of Iranian artist A1one's works on Tehran walls. Tokyo-based design magazine, PingMag, has interviewed A1one and featured photographs of his work. The Israeli West Bank barrier has become a site for graffiti, reminiscent in this sense of the Berlin Wall. Many writers in Israel come from other places around the globe, such as JUIF from Los Angeles and DEVIONE from London. The religious reference "נ נח נחמ נחמן מאומן" ("Na Nach Nachma Nachman Meuman") is commonly seen in graffiti around Israel.

 

Graffiti has played an important role within the street art scene in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), especially following the events of the Arab Spring of 2011 or the Sudanese Revolution of 2018/19. Graffiti is a tool of expression in the context of conflict in the region, allowing people to raise their voices politically and socially. Famous street artist Banksy has had an important effect in the street art scene in the MENA area, especially in Palestine where some of his works are located in the West Bank barrier and Bethlehem.

 

There are also a large number of graffiti influences in Southeast Asian countries that mostly come from modern Western culture, such as Malaysia, where graffiti have long been a common sight in Malaysia's capital city, Kuala Lumpur. Since 2010, the country has begun hosting a street festival to encourage all generations and people from all walks of life to enjoy and encourage Malaysian street culture.

 

The modern-day graffitists can be found with an arsenal of various materials that allow for a successful production of a piece. This includes such techniques as scribing. However, spray paint in aerosol cans is the number one medium for graffiti. From this commodity comes different styles, technique, and abilities to form master works of graffiti. Spray paint can be found at hardware and art stores and comes in virtually every color.

 

Stencil graffiti is created by cutting out shapes and designs in a stiff material (such as cardboard or subject folders) to form an overall design or image. The stencil is then placed on the "canvas" gently and with quick, easy strokes of the aerosol can, the image begins to appear on the intended surface.

 

Some of the first examples were created in 1981 by artists Blek le Rat in Paris, in 1982 by Jef Aerosol in Tours (France); by 1985 stencils had appeared in other cities including New York City, Sydney, and Melbourne, where they were documented by American photographer Charles Gatewood and Australian photographer Rennie Ellis

 

Tagging is the practice of someone spray-painting "their name, initial or logo onto a public surface" in a handstyle unique to the writer. Tags were the first form of modern graffiti.

 

Modern graffiti art often incorporates additional arts and technologies. For example, Graffiti Research Lab has encouraged the use of projected images and magnetic light-emitting diodes (throwies) as new media for graffitists. yarnbombing is another recent form of graffiti. Yarnbombers occasionally target previous graffiti for modification, which had been avoided among the majority of graffitists.

 

Theories on the use of graffiti by avant-garde artists have a history dating back at least to the Asger Jorn, who in 1962 painting declared in a graffiti-like gesture "the avant-garde won't give up"

 

Many contemporary analysts and even art critics have begun to see artistic value in some graffiti and to recognize it as a form of public art. According to many art researchers, particularly in the Netherlands and in Los Angeles, that type of public art is, in fact an effective tool of social emancipation or, in the achievement of a political goal

 

In times of conflict, such murals have offered a means of communication and self-expression for members of these socially, ethnically, or racially divided communities, and have proven themselves as effective tools in establishing dialog and thus, of addressing cleavages in the long run. The Berlin Wall was also extensively covered by graffiti reflecting social pressures relating to the oppressive Soviet rule over the GDR.

 

Many artists involved with graffiti are also concerned with the similar activity of stenciling. Essentially, this entails stenciling a print of one or more colors using spray-paint. Recognized while exhibiting and publishing several of her coloured stencils and paintings portraying the Sri Lankan Civil War and urban Britain in the early 2000s, graffitists Mathangi Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A., has also become known for integrating her imagery of political violence into her music videos for singles "Galang" and "Bucky Done Gun", and her cover art. Stickers of her artwork also often appear around places such as London in Brick Lane, stuck to lamp posts and street signs, she having become a muse for other graffitists and painters worldwide in cities including Seville.

 

Graffitist believes that art should be on display for everyone in the public eye or in plain sight, not hidden away in a museum or a gallery. Art should color the streets, not the inside of some building. Graffiti is a form of art that cannot be owned or bought. It does not last forever, it is temporary, yet one of a kind. It is a form of self promotion for the artist that can be displayed anywhere form sidewalks, roofs, subways, building wall, etc. Art to them is for everyone and should be showed to everyone for free.

 

Graffiti is a way of communicating and a way of expressing what one feels in the moment. It is both art and a functional thing that can warn people of something or inform people of something. However, graffiti is to some people a form of art, but to some a form of vandalism. And many graffitists choose to protect their identities and remain anonymous or to hinder prosecution.

 

With the commercialization of graffiti (and hip hop in general), in most cases, even with legally painted "graffiti" art, graffitists tend to choose anonymity. This may be attributed to various reasons or a combination of reasons. Graffiti still remains the one of four hip hop elements that is not considered "performance art" despite the image of the "singing and dancing star" that sells hip hop culture to the mainstream. Being a graphic form of art, it might also be said that many graffitists still fall in the category of the introverted archetypal artist.

 

Banksy is one of the world's most notorious and popular street artists who continues to remain faceless in today's society. He is known for his political, anti-war stencil art mainly in Bristol, England, but his work may be seen anywhere from Los Angeles to Palestine. In the UK, Banksy is the most recognizable icon for this cultural artistic movement and keeps his identity a secret to avoid arrest. Much of Banksy's artwork may be seen around the streets of London and surrounding suburbs, although he has painted pictures throughout the world, including the Middle East, where he has painted on Israel's controversial West Bank barrier with satirical images of life on the other side. One depicted a hole in the wall with an idyllic beach, while another shows a mountain landscape on the other side. A number of exhibitions also have taken place since 2000, and recent works of art have fetched vast sums of money. Banksy's art is a prime example of the classic controversy: vandalism vs. art. Art supporters endorse his work distributed in urban areas as pieces of art and some councils, such as Bristol and Islington, have officially protected them, while officials of other areas have deemed his work to be vandalism and have removed it.

 

Pixnit is another artist who chooses to keep her identity from the general public. Her work focuses on beauty and design aspects of graffiti as opposed to Banksy's anti-government shock value. Her paintings are often of flower designs above shops and stores in her local urban area of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some store owners endorse her work and encourage others to do similar work as well. "One of the pieces was left up above Steve's Kitchen, because it looks pretty awesome"- Erin Scott, the manager of New England Comics in Allston, Massachusetts.

 

Graffiti artists may become offended if photographs of their art are published in a commercial context without their permission. In March 2020, the Finnish graffiti artist Psyke expressed his displeasure at the newspaper Ilta-Sanomat publishing a photograph of a Peugeot 208 in an article about new cars, with his graffiti prominently shown on the background. The artist claims he does not want his art being used in commercial context, not even if he were to receive compensation.

 

Territorial graffiti marks urban neighborhoods with tags and logos to differentiate certain groups from others. These images are meant to show outsiders a stern look at whose turf is whose. The subject matter of gang-related graffiti consists of cryptic symbols and initials strictly fashioned with unique calligraphies. Gang members use graffiti to designate membership throughout the gang, to differentiate rivals and associates and, most commonly, to mark borders which are both territorial and ideological.

 

Graffiti has been used as a means of advertising both legally and illegally. Bronx-based TATS CRU has made a name for themselves doing legal advertising campaigns for companies such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Toyota, and MTV. In the UK, Covent Garden's Boxfresh used stencil images of a Zapatista revolutionary in the hopes that cross referencing would promote their store.

 

Smirnoff hired artists to use reverse graffiti (the use of high pressure hoses to clean dirty surfaces to leave a clean image in the surrounding dirt) to increase awareness of their product.

 

Graffiti often has a reputation as part of a subculture that rebels against authority, although the considerations of the practitioners often diverge and can relate to a wide range of attitudes. It can express a political practice and can form just one tool in an array of resistance techniques. One early example includes the anarcho-punk band Crass, who conducted a campaign of stenciling anti-war, anarchist, feminist, and anti-consumerist messages throughout the London Underground system during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In Amsterdam graffiti was a major part of the punk scene. The city was covered with names such as "De Zoot", "Vendex", and "Dr Rat". To document the graffiti a punk magazine was started that was called Gallery Anus. So when hip hop came to Europe in the early 1980s there was already a vibrant graffiti culture.

 

The student protests and general strike of May 1968 saw Paris bedecked in revolutionary, anarchistic, and situationist slogans such as L'ennui est contre-révolutionnaire ("Boredom is counterrevolutionary") and Lisez moins, vivez plus ("Read less, live more"). While not exhaustive, the graffiti gave a sense of the 'millenarian' and rebellious spirit, tempered with a good deal of verbal wit, of the strikers.

 

I think graffiti writing is a way of defining what our generation is like. Excuse the French, we're not a bunch of p---- artists. Traditionally artists have been considered soft and mellow people, a little bit kooky. Maybe we're a little bit more like pirates that way. We defend our territory, whatever space we steal to paint on, we defend it fiercely.

 

The developments of graffiti art which took place in art galleries and colleges as well as "on the street" or "underground", contributed to the resurfacing in the 1990s of a far more overtly politicized art form in the subvertising, culture jamming, or tactical media movements. These movements or styles tend to classify the artists by their relationship to their social and economic contexts, since, in most countries, graffiti art remains illegal in many forms except when using non-permanent paint. Since the 1990s with the rise of Street Art, a growing number of artists are switching to non-permanent paints and non-traditional forms of painting.

 

Contemporary practitioners, accordingly, have varied and often conflicting practices. Some individuals, such as Alexander Brener, have used the medium to politicize other art forms, and have used the prison sentences enforced on them as a means of further protest. The practices of anonymous groups and individuals also vary widely, and practitioners by no means always agree with each other's practices. For example, the anti-capitalist art group the Space Hijackers did a piece in 2004 about the contradiction between the capitalistic elements of Banksy and his use of political imagery.

 

Berlin human rights activist Irmela Mensah-Schramm has received global media attention and numerous awards for her 35-year campaign of effacing neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist graffiti throughout Germany, often by altering hate speech in humorous ways.

 

In Serbian capital, Belgrade, the graffiti depicting a uniformed former general of Serb army and war criminal, convicted at ICTY for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnian War, Ratko Mladić, appeared in a military salute alongside the words "General, thank to your mother". Aleks Eror, Berlin-based journalist, explains how "veneration of historical and wartime figures" through street art is not a new phenomenon in the region of former Yugoslavia, and that "in most cases is firmly focused on the future, rather than retelling the past". Eror is not only analyst pointing to danger of such an expressions for the region's future. In a long expose on the subject of Bosnian genocide denial, at Balkan Diskurs magazine and multimedia platform website, Kristina Gadže and Taylor Whitsell referred to these experiences as a young generations' "cultural heritage", in which young are being exposed to celebration and affirmation of war-criminals as part of their "formal education" and "inheritance".

 

There are numerous examples of genocide denial through celebration and affirmation of war criminals throughout the region of Western Balkans inhabited by Serbs using this form of artistic expression. Several more of these graffiti are found in Serbian capital, and many more across Serbia and Bosnian and Herzegovinian administrative entity, Republika Srpska, which is the ethnic Serbian majority enclave. Critics point that Serbia as a state, is willing to defend the mural of convicted war criminal, and have no intention to react on cases of genocide denial, noting that Interior Minister of Serbia, Aleksandar Vulin decision to ban any gathering with an intent to remove the mural, with the deployment of riot police, sends the message of "tacit endorsement". Consequently, on 9 November 2021, Serbian heavy police in riot gear, with graffiti creators and their supporters, blocked the access to the mural to prevent human rights groups and other activists to paint over it and mark the International Day Against Fascism and Antisemitism in that way, and even arrested two civic activist for throwing eggs at the graffiti.

 

Graffiti may also be used as an offensive expression. This form of graffiti may be difficult to identify, as it is mostly removed by the local authority (as councils which have adopted strategies of criminalization also strive to remove graffiti quickly). Therefore, existing racist graffiti is mostly more subtle and at first sight, not easily recognized as "racist". It can then be understood only if one knows the relevant "local code" (social, historical, political, temporal, and spatial), which is seen as heteroglot and thus a 'unique set of conditions' in a cultural context.

 

A spatial code for example, could be that there is a certain youth group in an area that is engaging heavily in racist activities. So, for residents (knowing the local code), a graffiti containing only the name or abbreviation of this gang already is a racist expression, reminding the offended people of their gang activities. Also a graffiti is in most cases, the herald of more serious criminal activity to come. A person who does not know these gang activities would not be able to recognize the meaning of this graffiti. Also if a tag of this youth group or gang is placed on a building occupied by asylum seekers, for example, its racist character is even stronger.

By making the graffiti less explicit (as adapted to social and legal constraints), these drawings are less likely to be removed, but do not lose their threatening and offensive character.

 

Elsewhere, activists in Russia have used painted caricatures of local officials with their mouths as potholes, to show their anger about the poor state of the roads. In Manchester, England, a graffitists painted obscene images around potholes, which often resulted in them being repaired within 48 hours.

 

In the early 1980s, the first art galleries to show graffitists to the public were Fashion Moda in the Bronx, Now Gallery and Fun Gallery, both in the East Village, Manhattan.

 

A 2006 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum displayed graffiti as an art form that began in New York's outer boroughs and reached great heights in the early 1980s with the work of Crash, Lee, Daze, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. It displayed 22 works by New York graffitists, including Crash, Daze, and Lady Pink. In an article about the exhibition in the magazine Time Out, curator Charlotta Kotik said that she hoped the exhibition would cause viewers to rethink their assumptions about graffiti.

 

From the 1970s onwards, Burhan Doğançay photographed urban walls all over the world; these he then archived for use as sources of inspiration for his painterly works. The project today known as "Walls of the World" grew beyond even his own expectations and comprises about 30,000 individual images. It spans a period of 40 years across five continents and 114 countries. In 1982, photographs from this project comprised a one-man exhibition titled "Les murs murmurent, ils crient, ils chantent ..." (The walls whisper, shout and sing ...) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

 

In Australia, art historians have judged some local graffiti of sufficient creative merit to rank them firmly within the arts. Oxford University Press's art history text Australian Painting 1788–2000 concludes with a long discussion of graffiti's key place within contemporary visual culture, including the work of several Australian practitioners.

 

Between March and April 2009, 150 artists exhibited 300 pieces of graffiti at the Grand Palais in Paris.

 

Spray paint has many negative environmental effects. The paint contains toxic chemicals, and the can uses volatile hydrocarbon gases to spray the paint onto a surface.

 

Volatile organic compound (VOC) leads to ground level ozone formation and most of graffiti related emissions are VOCs. A 2010 paper estimates 4,862 tons of VOCs were released in the United States in activities related to graffiti.

  

In China, Mao Zedong in the 1920s used revolutionary slogans and paintings in public places to galvanize the country's communist movement.

 

Based on different national conditions, many people believe that China's attitude towards Graffiti is fierce, but in fact, according to Lance Crayon in his film Spray Paint Beijing: Graffiti in the Capital of China, Graffiti is generally accepted in Beijing, with artists not seeing much police interference. Political and religiously sensitive graffiti, however, is not allowed.

 

In Hong Kong, Tsang Tsou Choi was known as the King of Kowloon for his calligraphy graffiti over many years, in which he claimed ownership of the area. Now some of his work is preserved officially.

 

In Taiwan, the government has made some concessions to graffitists. Since 2005 they have been allowed to freely display their work along some sections of riverside retaining walls in designated "Graffiti Zones". From 2007, Taipei's department of cultural affairs also began permitting graffiti on fences around major public construction sites. Department head Yong-ping Lee (李永萍) stated, "We will promote graffiti starting with the public sector, and then later in the private sector too. It's our goal to beautify the city with graffiti". The government later helped organize a graffiti contest in Ximending, a popular shopping district. graffitists caught working outside of these designated areas still face fines up to NT$6,000 under a department of environmental protection regulation. However, Taiwanese authorities can be relatively lenient, one veteran police officer stating anonymously, "Unless someone complains about vandalism, we won't get involved. We don't go after it proactively."

 

In 1993, after several expensive cars in Singapore were spray-painted, the police arrested a student from the Singapore American School, Michael P. Fay, questioned him, and subsequently charged him with vandalism. Fay pleaded guilty to vandalizing a car in addition to stealing road signs. Under the 1966 Vandalism Act of Singapore, originally passed to curb the spread of communist graffiti in Singapore, the court sentenced him to four months in jail, a fine of S$3,500 (US$2,233), and a caning. The New York Times ran several editorials and op-eds that condemned the punishment and called on the American public to flood the Singaporean embassy with protests. Although the Singapore government received many calls for clemency, Fay's caning took place in Singapore on 5 May 1994. Fay had originally received a sentence of six strokes of the cane, but the presiding president of Singapore, Ong Teng Cheong, agreed to reduce his caning sentence to four lashes.

 

In South Korea, Park Jung-soo was fined two million South Korean won by the Seoul Central District Court for spray-painting a rat on posters of the G-20 Summit a few days before the event in November 2011. Park alleged that the initial in "G-20" sounds like the Korean word for "rat", but Korean government prosecutors alleged that Park was making a derogatory statement about the president of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, the host of the summit. This case led to public outcry and debate on the lack of government tolerance and in support of freedom of expression. The court ruled that the painting, "an ominous creature like a rat" amounts to "an organized criminal activity" and upheld the fine while denying the prosecution's request for imprisonment for Park.

 

In Europe, community cleaning squads have responded to graffiti, in some cases with reckless abandon, as when in 1992 in France a local Scout group, attempting to remove modern graffiti, damaged two prehistoric paintings of bison in the Cave of Mayrière supérieure near the French village of Bruniquel in Tarn-et-Garonne, earning them the 1992 Ig Nobel Prize in archeology.

 

In September 2006, the European Parliament directed the European Commission to create urban environment policies to prevent and eliminate dirt, litter, graffiti, animal excrement, and excessive noise from domestic and vehicular music systems in European cities, along with other concerns over urban life.

 

In Budapest, Hungary, both a city-backed movement called I Love Budapest and a special police division tackle the problem, including the provision of approved areas.

 

The Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 became Britain's latest anti-graffiti legislation. In August 2004, the Keep Britain Tidy campaign issued a press release calling for zero tolerance of graffiti and supporting proposals such as issuing "on the spot" fines to graffiti offenders and banning the sale of aerosol paint to anyone under the age of 16. The press release also condemned the use of graffiti images in advertising and in music videos, arguing that real-world experience of graffiti stood far removed from its often-portrayed "cool" or "edgy'" image.

 

To back the campaign, 123 Members of Parliament (MPs) (including then Prime Minister Tony Blair), signed a charter which stated: "Graffiti is not art, it's crime. On behalf of my constituents, I will do all I can to rid our community of this problem."

 

In the UK, city councils have the power to take action against the owner of any property that has been defaced under the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 (as amended by the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005) or, in certain cases, the Highways Act. This is often used against owners of property that are complacent in allowing protective boards to be defaced so long as the property is not damaged.

 

In July 2008, a conspiracy charge was used to convict graffitists for the first time. After a three-month police surveillance operation, nine members of the DPM crew were convicted of conspiracy to commit criminal damage costing at least £1 million. Five of them received prison sentences, ranging from eighteen months to two years. The unprecedented scale of the investigation and the severity of the sentences rekindled public debate over whether graffiti should be considered art or crime.

 

Some councils, like those of Stroud and Loerrach, provide approved areas in the town where graffitists can showcase their talents, including underpasses, car parks, and walls that might otherwise prove a target for the "spray and run".

 

Graffiti Tunnel, University of Sydney at Camperdown (2009)

In an effort to reduce vandalism, many cities in Australia have designated walls or areas exclusively for use by graffitists. One early example is the "Graffiti Tunnel" located at the Camperdown Campus of the University of Sydney, which is available for use by any student at the university to tag, advertise, poster, and paint. Advocates of this idea suggest that this discourages petty vandalism yet encourages artists to take their time and produce great art, without worry of being caught or arrested for vandalism or trespassing.[108][109] Others disagree with this approach, arguing that the presence of legal graffiti walls does not demonstrably reduce illegal graffiti elsewhere. Some local government areas throughout Australia have introduced "anti-graffiti squads", who clean graffiti in the area, and such crews as BCW (Buffers Can't Win) have taken steps to keep one step ahead of local graffiti cleaners.

 

Many state governments have banned the sale or possession of spray paint to those under the age of 18 (age of majority). However, a number of local governments in Victoria have taken steps to recognize the cultural heritage value of some examples of graffiti, such as prominent political graffiti. Tough new graffiti laws have been introduced in Australia with fines of up to A$26,000 and two years in prison.

 

Melbourne is a prominent graffiti city of Australia with many of its lanes being tourist attractions, such as Hosier Lane in particular, a popular destination for photographers, wedding photography, and backdrops for corporate print advertising. The Lonely Planet travel guide cites Melbourne's street as a major attraction. All forms of graffiti, including sticker art, poster, stencil art, and wheatpasting, can be found in many places throughout the city. Prominent street art precincts include; Fitzroy, Collingwood, Northcote, Brunswick, St. Kilda, and the CBD, where stencil and sticker art is prominent. As one moves farther away from the city, mostly along suburban train lines, graffiti tags become more prominent. Many international artists such as Banksy have left their work in Melbourne and in early 2008 a perspex screen was installed to prevent a Banksy stencil art piece from being destroyed, it has survived since 2003 through the respect of local street artists avoiding posting over it, although it has recently had paint tipped over it.

 

In February 2008 Helen Clark, the New Zealand prime minister at that time, announced a government crackdown on tagging and other forms of graffiti vandalism, describing it as a destructive crime representing an invasion of public and private property. New legislation subsequently adopted included a ban on the sale of paint spray cans to persons under 18 and increases in maximum fines for the offence from NZ$200 to NZ$2,000 or extended community service. The issue of tagging become a widely debated one following an incident in Auckland during January 2008 in which a middle-aged property owner stabbed one of two teenage taggers to death and was subsequently convicted of manslaughter.

 

Graffiti databases have increased in the past decade because they allow vandalism incidents to be fully documented against an offender and help the police and prosecution charge and prosecute offenders for multiple counts of vandalism. They also provide law enforcement the ability to rapidly search for an offender's moniker or tag in a simple, effective, and comprehensive way. These systems can also help track costs of damage to a city to help allocate an anti-graffiti budget. The theory is that when an offender is caught putting up graffiti, they are not just charged with one count of vandalism; they can be held accountable for all the other damage for which they are responsible. This has two main benefits for law enforcement. One, it sends a signal to the offenders that their vandalism is being tracked. Two, a city can seek restitution from offenders for all the damage that they have committed, not merely a single incident. These systems give law enforcement personnel real-time, street-level intelligence that allows them not only to focus on the worst graffiti offenders and their damage, but also to monitor potential gang violence that is associated with the graffiti.

 

Many restrictions of civil gang injunctions are designed to help address and protect the physical environment and limit graffiti. Provisions of gang injunctions include things such as restricting the possession of marker pens, spray paint cans, or other sharp objects capable of defacing private or public property; spray painting, or marking with marker pens, scratching, applying stickers, or otherwise applying graffiti on any public or private property, including, but not limited to the street, alley, residences, block walls, and fences, vehicles or any other real or personal property. Some injunctions contain wording that restricts damaging or vandalizing both public and private property, including but not limited to any vehicle, light fixture, door, fence, wall, gate, window, building, street sign, utility box, telephone box, tree, or power pole.

 

To help address many of these issues, many local jurisdictions have set up graffiti abatement hotlines, where citizens can call in and report vandalism and have it removed. San Diego's hotline receives more than 5,000 calls per year, in addition to reporting the graffiti, callers can learn more about prevention. One of the complaints about these hotlines is the response time; there is often a lag time between a property owner calling about the graffiti and its removal. The length of delay should be a consideration for any jurisdiction planning on operating a hotline. Local jurisdictions must convince the callers that their complaint of vandalism will be a priority and cleaned off right away. If the jurisdiction does not have the resources to respond to complaints in a timely manner, the value of the hotline diminishes. Crews must be able to respond to individual service calls made to the graffiti hotline as well as focus on cleanup near schools, parks, and major intersections and transit routes to have the biggest impact. Some cities offer a reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of suspects for tagging or graffiti related vandalism. The amount of the reward is based on the information provided, and the action taken.

 

When police obtain search warrants in connection with a vandalism investigation, they are often seeking judicial approval to look for items such as cans of spray paint and nozzles from other kinds of aerosol sprays; etching tools, or other sharp or pointed objects, which could be used to etch or scratch glass and other hard surfaces; permanent marking pens, markers, or paint sticks; evidence of membership or affiliation with any gang or tagging crew; paraphernalia including any reference to "(tagger's name)"; any drawings, writing, objects, or graffiti depicting taggers' names, initials, logos, monikers, slogans, or any mention of tagging crew membership; and any newspaper clippings relating to graffiti crime.

Navigating dangers to enter refugee camps- land blocks, borders, barricades, people demanding ID, bribes, military, Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City

A free, interactive, awareness-raising event

 

The set contains 2010 photos of the Toronto MSF display- Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City.

Photos © Linda Dawn Hammond / IndyFoto.com 2010, with usage granted to Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF)

 

Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) Donor Enquiries

 

Call MSF at 1 800 982 7903 and ask to speak with one of their Donor Relations team members, or email them at donorrelations@msf.ca

 

2011

Join Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) at

Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City, a free, interactive, awareness-raising exhibit. You'll be personally guided through the camp by an experienced MSF field worker and gain insight into the daily realities of 43 million people uprooted by war and conflict.

 

The exhibit is an outdoor reconstruction of an actual refugee camp, where experienced MSF staff (doctors, nurses, logisticians) guide visitors through a 40 to 60 minute interactive tour explaining the crucial elements for survival in a refugee crisis.

 

DATES & LOCATIONS

 

St. John’s: Bannerman Park, September 8-11, 2011

 

Halifax: Garrison Grounds, September 15-18, 2011

 

Moncton: Riverfront Park, September 22-25, 2011

 

Québec: Place d’Youville, September 29-October 3, 2011

 

We encourage you forward this invitation to anyone you know who may have the opportunity to visit the exhibit.

 

Thank you!

 

In Spring 2010, Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) brought The Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City exhibit to Ontario and Québec on a four-city tour.

Ottawa: Confederation Park, May 13-16, 2010

Montréal: Parc Jeanne-Mance, May 20-23, 2010

Toronto: Christie Pits, May 27-30, 2010

Waterloo: Waterloo Public Square, June 3-6, 2010

The goal of the exhibit is to raise awareness about the plight of the world’s 42 million refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) uprooted by war and conflict.

 

The Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City exhibit is an outdoor reconstruction of an actual refugee camp, where experienced MSF staff (doctors, nurses, logisticians) guide visitors through a 40 to 60 minute interactive tour explaining the crucial elements for survival in a refugee or IDP crisis.

During the tour, each visitor will learn some of the challenges a refugee or IDP faces in trying to access food, shelter, water and medical care. The 740 m2 (8,000 square feet) exhibit is designed to accommodate approximately 800 to 1,200 visitors per day, and consists of the following areas:

•Shelter area

•Food distribution area

•Latrine area

•Water supply

•Health clinic

•Nutrition treatment centre

•Cholera treatment centre

•Vaccination tent

About the Refugee Camp exhibit

Guided by MSF aid workers, visitors are asked to imagine that they are among the millions of people fleeing violence and persecution in, for example, Somalia, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Sudan.

The exhibit is made up of materials used by MSF in its emergency medical work around the world, including emergency refugee housing, a food distribution tent, water pump, health clinic, vaccination tent, therapeutic feeding center, and a cholera treatment center. It addresses questions such as:

•Will I be safe?

•What will I eat?

•How do I find water?

•Can I get medical care?

•Where will I live?

Learn more about the issues refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) face with this interactive guide.

The exhibit is free and open to the public. If you are planning to come with a group of 15 or more please schedule a group visit for your city. Individuals are welcome without reservations.

The Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City was first launched in France in 1995, and has toured in countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America. In 2008, the exhibit attracted close to 30,000 visitors during a 4 city tour of Western Canada and 4 city tour of California.

 

Donor Enquiries

Call MSF at 1 800 982 7903 and ask to speak with one of their Donor Relations team members, or email them at donorrelations@msf.ca