This Week in Local Graffiti: AJAX Backlash? / Fascinating Twitter Project of the Week

Like most scenesters, we've watched Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop numerous times and are now completely fascinated by "street art" in all its forms.

Surely Larryville's most prolific (and dullest) "tagger" right now is AJAX, whose moniker (and nothing but his moniker) appears everywhere.

Here it is on the Allen Press building at 11th and Mass. Get busy, other Larryville taggers! AJAX is owning Allen Press!




















But are we beginning to see a backlash against AJAX's dullness? Below is a message we spotted in the alley behind Louise's Downtown. Is this the work of a jealous, homophobic skate-punk tired of AJAX getting all the press (a skate-punk who is either unaware of the usual spelling of his chosen slur or was perhaps frightened away mid-"faggot")? Or is this, more interestingly, the work of AJAX himself, who simply wants to make it look like someone else's attack on his work but actually serves as the starting point of a more "meta" phase in his Larryville graffiti career? We're going with the latter theory.

Chip: "Actually, I'm going with the former theory."



















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We use Twitter to make snarky comments about local culture, but we're fascinated by people who put Twitter to more profound artistic uses. Photographers Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman's upcoming project "Desertscapes," works like this:

"When Larson or Shindelman come across an evocative tweet sent from someone’s smartphone, they note the recorded geolocation and—GPS in hand—hunt down where that 140-character dispatch originated. Once in location, the photographers snap a shot of the surroundings and present the image and text side by side" (Utne Reader).

Larsen explains: “We think of these photos as historical monuments to small, lived moments. It also grounds the virtual reality of social networking data streams to the physical world, while examining how the nature of one’s physical space may influence online presence.” (Utne Reader).

Chip: "If they traced my tweets in this fashion, they'd reveal the many places where I have experienced boners. Some of those places would surprise you."

Here's an example from the project, and you can see more here .