In December of 2009 self professed copy right violator and graffiti artist Evan Roth photographed over 2,400 graffiti tags found in each of Paris’s 20 districts. Photographs were then archived, tagged and sorted by letter. The ten most commonly used letters by Paris graffiti writers (A,E,I,K,N,O,R,S,T and U) were identified for further study. Evan explains that the sets are not intended to display the “best” graffiti tags in Paris, but rather aim to highlight the diversity of forms ranging from upper case to lowercase, simple to complex and legible to cryptic. His work is now on display at the Foundation Cartier-Born in the Streets graffiti exhibition in Paris. Click here to see the video Graffiti Taxonomy
Recently Roth and artist/developer Chris Sugrue created an app that allows graffiti artists to create and database multidimensional tags. This app is part of an ongoing study on the motion of graffiti. Artists use the app to create four dimensional tags that can be saved as GML (graffiti markup language). This project is open source and invites others to use the archived data to create new application and visualizations.
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