[00:00.000 --> 00:01.240]  We're here for the GRL stuff.
[00:01.460 --> 00:10.300]  We're going to do the throwie workshop right now, but it's wicked late, so unless anybody really really really wants to, we're just going to throw on the movie and just get going.
[00:10.400 --> 00:12.060]  We'll do the throwie workshop in the morning downstairs.
[00:12.340 --> 00:13.120]  Is that cool with everybody?
[00:13.980 --> 00:14.380]  No?
[00:15.840 --> 00:18.420]  What time do you want it?
[00:20.900 --> 00:22.800]  Guess we're doing throwies right now then.
[00:33.540 --> 00:35.540]  All right.
[00:36.400 --> 00:38.240]  Back tables, I guess?
[00:49.560 --> 00:50.560]  Yeah.
[01:19.140 --> 01:22.820]  Well, I see that you're still here.
[01:23.900 --> 01:25.460]  Aren't you lonely?
[01:28.100 --> 01:31.980]  Since our darling disappeared.
[01:33.140 --> 01:35.140]  Well, look here.
[01:35.560 --> 01:41.360]  Is that a teardrop in the corner of your pain?
[01:43.260 --> 01:48.760]  Now, don't you try to tell me that it's rain.
[01:51.940 --> 01:58.380]  She went away and left us all alone.
[01:58.380 --> 02:00.680]  The way she planned.
[02:01.760 --> 02:09.620]  Guess we'll have to learn to get along without her if we can.
[02:10.660 --> 02:12.040]  Hello, Celia.
[02:14.980 --> 02:16.800]  I'm going to stand.
[04:55.990 --> 04:57.150]  Bung, ah.
[04:58.050 --> 05:00.130]  Bung, ah, bum, bum, bum.
[05:00.650 --> 05:01.870]  We're all alone.
[05:04.430 --> 05:09.130]  A past... garden, thought it was the best of us.
[05:12.430 --> 05:14.430]  Back, soon, T-K, P-Drum.
[05:14.530 --> 05:15.750]  We're all alone.
[05:15.990 --> 05:22.670]  A anxious 8th ... walking into the habit of from Where the first of them are in the car.
[05:23.190 --> 05:25.130]  You know what the Midwest is?
[05:25.250 --> 05:27.090]  Young and restless, you're restless.
[05:27.350 --> 05:28.990]  Might snatch your necklace.
[05:29.270 --> 05:31.770]  The next day, might check your Lexus.
[05:31.890 --> 05:34.530]  Somebody tell you who Kanye West is.
[05:34.710 --> 05:37.310]  I walk through the valley of the shower, death is.
[05:37.410 --> 05:40.030]  Top floor, if you alone will leave you breathless.
[05:40.370 --> 05:43.250]  Try to catch... I can make a lot of money with you at Jimmy.
[05:43.430 --> 05:45.410]  ...by the Texas, yeah, yeah, now check the method.
[05:45.490 --> 05:48.350]  They be asking us questions, harassing and arrest us.
[05:48.530 --> 05:51.390]  Saying we eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast, huh?
[05:51.390 --> 05:52.750]  Y'all eat pieces of shit?
[05:53.130 --> 05:53.770]  What's the basis?
[05:54.010 --> 05:56.370]  We ain't going nowhere, but got suits and cases.
[05:56.610 --> 05:59.230]  A trunk full of coke, rental car from Avis.
[05:59.410 --> 06:00.370]  My mama used to say,
[06:04.650 --> 06:07.210]  but I'll be gone to November, I got packs to move.
[06:07.450 --> 06:07.650]  I hope.
[06:08.090 --> 06:08.530]  Jesus!
[06:09.250 --> 06:12.830]  God, show me the way, because the devil's trying to break me down.
[06:20.090 --> 06:23.850]  And I don't think there's nothing I can do now to break my mind.
[06:26.670 --> 06:31.070]  Alright, now that the throwies are gone, that took, what, like five minutes to go through 300 throwies?
[06:31.810 --> 06:32.930]  Congratulations, everybody.
[06:33.250 --> 06:33.830]  That was so good.
[06:34.530 --> 06:40.090]  Alright, so, we were going to do some introductions first, and then do the movie, but we're just going to get to the movie.
[06:40.470 --> 06:42.610]  I'm, I'm Michael, I represent GRL Utah.
[06:43.110 --> 06:44.930]  Michael represents GRL Vienna.
[06:45.630 --> 06:47.150]  And we'll just get straight to the movie.
[06:47.290 --> 06:49.790]  We'll do some more introductions after the movie for anybody that cares.
[07:46.420 --> 07:47.860]  My name is Evan Roth.
[07:48.120 --> 07:49.260]  And my name's James.
[07:50.300 --> 07:53.680]  And welcome to the complete first season of the Graffiti Research Lab.
[08:15.650 --> 08:19.770]  The Graffiti Research Lab was a project that started at I-Beam.
[08:19.910 --> 08:22.670]  And in particular in this lab at I-Beam called the Open Lab.
[08:22.990 --> 08:30.210]  And the Open Lab's a, kind of somewhere between a research lab and the tradition of kind of MIT or something.
[08:30.210 --> 08:32.010]  And an art residency.
[08:33.910 --> 08:39.710]  The only thing that's kind of particular, specific to the Open Lab is this idea of open source work.
[08:39.930 --> 08:53.570]  So, when the lab was started, Jonah Peretti and Mike Frooman, they just wanted to make a lab where people could come and work free from sort of all the obstacles that copyright and patents throw up in front of communities.
[08:56.720 --> 08:58.680]  So, the Open Lab was a bit of an experiment.
[08:59.000 --> 09:03.420]  And we were in the inaugural year of this sort of grand public domain experiment.
[09:05.120 --> 09:13.080]  Before I had come into I-Beam, I did a project while I was in graduate school at Parsons called Graffiti Analysis, which dealt with graffiti as a data source.
[09:13.240 --> 09:20.120]  It was meeting with graffiti writers, capturing their tag using a computer vision system, and then projecting it back up around the city.
[09:22.780 --> 09:30.800]  I'd also gone to kind of a digital art technology school, but gotten sort of less interested in making art projects and was more interested in the tech side.
[09:31.020 --> 09:43.060]  So, I actually kind of scammed my way into a job working for a government contractor and was part of the team that developed this thing called the rock abrasion tool that was a device that helped the Mars rover grind into rocks.
[09:43.060 --> 09:47.120]  At the same time, kind of my off time, I was making these sort of little robotic projects.
[09:47.320 --> 09:51.880]  One in particular that I put on Coney Island was a glacier that would move really, really slowly.
[09:52.060 --> 09:54.820]  It was a robotic glacier and measure CO2 levels.
[09:58.040 --> 10:08.950]  But that's when I sort of got interested in seeing technologies in public spaces and seeing people interact with these sort of high-tech systems as opposed to the ones that, you know, live remotely on some other planet for their entire existence.
[10:15.980 --> 10:39.600]  So, we passed around links of our work to each other and I saw some of Evan's graffiti analysis projects and I'd already heard explicit lyrics only and a few other works and I was kind of just struck by the fact that, you know, their documentation, the use of kind of like cool music and video work was kind of moving in this direction that I'd been interested in going myself,
[10:39.820 --> 10:44.220]  which was just finding a way that my projects didn't kind of die on some beach in Coney Island.
[10:44.220 --> 10:46.960]  But had some kind of life afterwards on the Internet.
[10:47.280 --> 10:52.660]  And I'd made some videos and they weren't really working out yet, you know, I still hadn't really gotten people to look at it.
[10:52.740 --> 10:56.020]  And when I saw his, I realized, oh, you just have to add a hip-hop track.
[11:10.400 --> 11:16.200]  I told you about this paint, this conductive paint that existed, that I'd seen in my former vocation.
[11:16.840 --> 11:27.380]  And I always thought, you know, we'd eventually see these graffiti writers who were spraying conductive paint down and making circuits on the walls and adding light and sound and whatever else, kinetic shit into their work.
[11:27.480 --> 11:29.020]  And I just never saw it.
[11:29.760 --> 11:32.000]  They wouldn't let us do it in the sort of main space.
[11:32.400 --> 11:33.920]  They sent me to the garbage hallway.
[11:34.100 --> 11:38.100]  So I was back there with the garbage and junk, but I still couldn't spray aerosol during the day.
[11:38.220 --> 11:39.120]  I had to wait till it was night.
[11:39.640 --> 11:41.240]  And then the next day, I didn't come in.
[11:41.280 --> 11:44.400]  I just called Evan and Jonah and the rest of the people in the lab.
[11:44.420 --> 11:46.060]  And I was like, hey, go check the back hallway.
[11:46.620 --> 11:49.480]  And at that time, I thought it was kind of funny to be in the back hallway.
[11:49.540 --> 11:52.900]  So I'd actually sprayed a stencil on the wall that said graffiti research.
[11:52.900 --> 11:58.460]  And I just sort of said, joking around, go back to the graffiti research lab and check out what we're doing.
[11:58.780 --> 12:02.240]  And so those guys went back there and saw it and they were like, what the f*ck is this?
[12:03.520 --> 12:14.420]  And it wasn't until the media kind of came knocking and asking for interviews that I, I think, got embarrassed that we were the two fellows hanging out in the trash shoot 10 hours a day.
[12:14.740 --> 12:19.340]  That's the best thing that came out of that New York Times article, because we didn't have to hang out in the garbage shoot anymore.
[12:19.340 --> 12:19.820]  Yeah, yeah.
[12:19.940 --> 12:23.780]  But it was literally when the New York Times came and we were like, well, we want to show them the garbage hallway.
[12:24.060 --> 12:28.860]  And they were like, well, there's something kind of weird about that because, you know, it looks like we're hiding it.
[12:28.940 --> 12:30.320]  And I'm like, well, you are.
[12:30.680 --> 12:32.280]  And that probably would look weird.
[12:32.400 --> 12:35.040]  And they were like, well, I guess you could do something on the front of the building.
[12:35.600 --> 12:41.700]  And before the period had been hit on that sentence, I was already on the front of the building, putting GRL on front of I-Beam.
[12:42.240 --> 12:43.560]  That's when the takeover began.
[13:04.290 --> 13:10.590]  We knew that we wanted to use our time with our fellowship to research graffiti, to make tools for that community.
[13:12.410 --> 13:15.490]  But we were thinking about graffiti maybe in a slightly different way.
[13:15.650 --> 13:20.450]  We'd been using that word to mean anything that happens outside in the city without permission.
[13:22.030 --> 13:29.090]  When we were thinking about what's graffiti's relationship with technology, we were also thinking this doesn't necessarily mean high technology.
[13:29.090 --> 13:33.630]  I mean, we've come to think of the spray can as probably the best technology that's ever happened to graffiti.
[13:34.030 --> 13:45.450]  But we were interested in thinking of technology also in the sense of, like, the hacker mentality and how hackers treat software sort of the same way that graffiti writers and street artists treat the city.
[13:45.850 --> 13:51.150]  They look for these systems, they identify them, and then they flip them a little bit to tell something that the city didn't intend to tell.
[13:51.150 --> 13:59.670]  Through our process of research, we got to see the work of a bunch of artists who were doing the same type of thing that we had been doing with technology, this type of hacker mentality.
[13:59.930 --> 14:07.910]  Meaning they were taking systems that already exist and trying to find the easiest way in to create the biggest output effect.
[14:07.910 --> 14:12.150]  There are a lot of graffiti writers and street artists that are already doing this.
[14:12.450 --> 14:24.250]  Someone who will take a feature or a landform that's already in the city and change it slightly, add another replica of it, or in some way modify the city so that everything changes.
[14:24.530 --> 14:25.990]  You kind of can't see it the same.
[14:26.610 --> 14:36.190]  This is a Leon Reed image where he added one security camera so that it not only makes the other security camera non-functional, but sort of makes a statement on surveillance.
[14:37.030 --> 14:40.850]  Mark Jenkins has some of these other ones where he's tied into different systems.
[14:41.170 --> 14:45.450]  This is an example where he's sort of hacked the system of telephone booths.
[14:45.690 --> 14:52.610]  And he's a graffiti technologist too, and he uses packaging tape basically to clone any three-dimensional thing in the city.
[14:52.810 --> 15:00.750]  You wrap it in tape, cut the tape off, bring it back to your house, and you've got a fire hydrant or a lamppost or a phone or whatever.
[15:00.750 --> 15:06.650]  You've just cloned something in the public space, and now you can take it back, reinsert it, modify it, play around with it.
[15:07.830 --> 15:15.610]  People like Leon Reed and Mark Jenkins, I don't live in the UK, I don't live in DC, so I wouldn't have stumbled across a lot of these pieces that have really been influential.
[15:16.010 --> 15:19.050]  Not just like individual pieces, but the whole sort of idea.
[15:19.290 --> 15:22.990]  As much as a physical history of graffiti, there's an oral history of graffiti.
[15:22.990 --> 15:28.710]  The web's a perfect place for this oral history, and it's really thrived on the web.
[15:28.830 --> 15:34.050]  From sites like 12 Ounce Profit and Worcester Collective, Flickr and Photolog, and all over the world.
[15:34.070 --> 15:39.530]  We've all gotten introduced into each other's work, and now this oral history has a slideshow behind it.
[15:39.710 --> 15:44.370]  Just like the trains moved it all over New York City, the Internet moves it all over the planet.
[15:46.230 --> 15:56.530]  And I think if you argue that graffiti is about affecting mind space, like how much are you up in the minds of the public, to ignore the Internet would be to ignore a huge audience.
[15:56.790 --> 16:11.610]  And so that's why this contagious media or viral media is a big part of what we do, and the reason why we view the counts on our YouTube clips as being something that's interesting and not just fame-seeking.
[16:11.610 --> 16:14.830]  Or maybe it's fame-seeking and interesting, but either way...
[16:21.910 --> 16:26.450]  There's a lot of Luddite graffiti artists, and it's totally a legitimate fear.
[16:26.630 --> 16:31.350]  And we are also technophobic, which is something that doesn't often get conveyed about our work.
[16:31.590 --> 16:34.590]  Relative to traditional graffiti, it is more high-tech.
[16:34.770 --> 16:40.870]  But relative to the state of the art, it is considerably lower-tech than your average sort of technology art project.
[16:40.870 --> 16:43.770]  We both worked in very high-tech fields.
[16:44.010 --> 16:47.470]  And we left those jobs, and we didn't get fired, right?
[16:47.550 --> 16:59.190]  We, like, ran as fast as we f*cking could from our corporate technology jobs because we had a growing fear of a type of technological mainstream that was scary as f*ck.
[16:59.350 --> 17:07.240]  I mean, I was working for the Department of Defense on military contracts, and I couldn't believe what people were designing technologies to do.
[17:07.500 --> 17:14.920]  And Evan was watching buildings being erected and, you know, seeing cities sort of become these overdeveloped, saturated consumer media spaces.
[17:15.080 --> 17:22.440]  And we have a lot of peers, engineer architects, friends who are like, you know what, this is a neutral space we work in where we're developing things.
[17:22.580 --> 17:25.860]  They could be used for good, they could be used for bad, but that's not our decision.
[17:26.360 --> 17:27.420]  You know, we're the engineers.
[17:27.860 --> 17:28.960]  We're the architects.
[17:28.960 --> 17:31.160]  You know, we're kind of the front end of this.
[17:31.300 --> 17:33.360]  Let someone else determine how they're going to be used.
[17:36.910 --> 17:39.230]  It was clear to me that these weren't neutral projects.
[17:39.890 --> 17:43.550]  Any tool that's made to harm somebody, they're always kind of bad.
[17:43.710 --> 17:46.650]  Or at least they're always powerful enough to be abused.
[17:46.930 --> 17:55.270]  So with graffiti and an idea of a lab devoted to graffiti, I mean, it seemed obvious to us that what we were doing was something that, you know, they weren't neutral.
[17:55.450 --> 17:56.370]  We thought they were good.
[17:56.590 --> 17:57.910]  The other guys thought they were bad.
[17:58.250 --> 18:00.010]  You know, there wasn't much of a middle ground.
[18:00.870 --> 18:06.010]  I think part of our interest in technology, too, is in technology that empowers people.
[18:06.230 --> 18:17.790]  And sometimes the coolest, highest-tech thing, like a graffiti-writing robot, may be something that's, like, a better story for the media, but it's not necessarily better as a means towards an end in communicating in the city.
[18:17.950 --> 18:23.510]  And so that's why, like, we keep coming back to spray paint as this technology that is extremely empowering.
[18:23.510 --> 18:37.390]  Things like throwies and laser tag, even though they have some high-tech elements that maybe the media might latch onto as sort of a gizmo-type thing, people can actually do this, and they can actually communicate on a scale that's larger than what they would have before.
[18:37.390 --> 18:45.590]  Not just people who are writing sort of big letters on trains with spray cans, but also protesters and activists who are doing things in public.
[18:46.010 --> 18:53.030]  And, you know, this sort of hacktivist culture that we had seen growing, who were combining technology and public space with agendas.
[18:53.030 --> 18:57.370]  They were hacking urban spaces in order to talk about whatever was important to them.
[18:57.470 --> 19:02.010]  I mean, this was all around the same time as the Republican National Convention here in New York City.
[19:02.210 --> 19:14.970]  So this idea of the city as a contested territory was, in all our minds, post 9-11 sort of mentality in New York City, forced everyone to start thinking a little bit differently about their city, almost as like an occupied city.
[19:15.130 --> 19:28.650]  And so from all that, we formed our GRL mission statement, that we are dedicated to outfitting graffiti writers, pranksters, artists, and protestors with open source tools for every communication.
[19:37.490 --> 19:42.370]  Evan continued his work using graffiti writers tags as a data source.
[19:42.570 --> 19:47.770]  We came up with a larger scale way to capture a graffiti writers tag, plus the drips.
[19:48.590 --> 19:54.930]  So this is the drip sessions, which was more research that was based on how to capture the motion of graffiti.
[19:55.330 --> 20:10.650]  The drip sessions, graffiti analysis, laser tag, part of what I think is interesting about it is that you get to actually see the movement that's behind graffiti, and how the fact that these tags are designed to be made quickly in public spaces can influence the way they look visually.
[20:10.870 --> 20:16.390]  We came up with a capture system that, unlike graffiti analysis, which just captured a series of XY coordinates.
[20:16.390 --> 20:18.790]  This actually captured all the pixels in video.
[20:18.970 --> 20:20.270]  It was a really analog system.
[20:20.450 --> 20:27.470]  It was basically just a piece of glass that writers would write on, and it was backlit with a series of 500 and 1,000 watt light bulbs.
[20:28.290 --> 20:36.590]  Another digital projection project we did that would take a sort of different approach was this series of studies called interactive or generative architecture.
[20:36.590 --> 20:40.210]  This one was done by British ninja Theodore Watson.
[20:40.430 --> 20:49.330]  Theo was also a production fellow here at EyeBeam, so we got to work with him for about six months before we kind of realized that probably we could collaborate on something together.
[20:49.530 --> 20:53.430]  Theo's our programmer, audio, video type specialist.
[20:53.790 --> 20:58.530]  He's written a lot of software for us, in particular the software for the laser tag system.
[20:58.990 --> 21:07.050]  And the software he wrote was a generative particle system that would draw lines based on whose lights were turned on and whose lights were turned off.
[21:10.960 --> 21:17.940]  This is an example of a digital system that's directly influenced from how graffiti writers treat the city.
[21:18.260 --> 21:33.180]  The graffiti writers that I'm most inspired by are the ones that don't just treat the city as a blank canvas where they can slap up whatever they want, but are writers that are really smart and intentional with how their tag fits into the city, so this is something that came from that influence.
[21:40.040 --> 21:46.660]  So every once in a while we got to do larger projects in that first sort of six month period.
[21:46.920 --> 21:55.300]  We went to Maker Faire, we went and got a school bus, painted it like SWAT team black, and did our electrograph work on it.
[21:55.500 --> 22:01.020]  But then thought, why don't we just open this bus up, you know, we have some markers, let people just ride on it.
[22:01.020 --> 22:10.640]  People who would normally hate graffiti hear getting a chance to kind of be a part of it, and they would say things like, I'm a middle-aged housewife and I've never done this before, it's a lot of fun.
[22:10.880 --> 22:15.320]  Slowly by surely it would dawn on people who were riding on this bus what was kind of fun about graffiti.
[22:15.680 --> 22:20.720]  So we'd get stuck in these events where we'd be doing workshops with groups of thousands of kids.
[22:20.920 --> 22:26.100]  We kind of realized, oh this is actually also a way to do kind of a graffiti outreach program.
[22:26.740 --> 22:29.200]  train the graffiti writers of the future.
[22:29.580 --> 22:36.960]  I think that's almost like an underlying current to a lot of the work we do, which is almost using technology in some cases like a trick.
[22:37.280 --> 22:41.500]  Because people are easily seduced by technology, they're easily seduced by things that light.
[22:41.800 --> 22:43.480]  Throw-aways are like practically a drug.
[22:43.720 --> 22:49.200]  And so you get those in the hands of people and all of a sudden before they know it, they've done their first sort of public space project.
[22:49.200 --> 22:51.200]  It's like a graffiti gateway drug.
[23:02.460 --> 23:08.000]  An LED throwie consists of an LED, a battery, a magnet, and tape.
[23:08.410 --> 23:17.320]  You combine those all together in a process that is nearly self-explanatory, and you can toss that onto a ferrous metal structure, and they stick.
[23:17.720 --> 23:24.340]  All the materials for throwies were sitting in the lab on a table, because they were the same materials that we used in the electrograph.
[23:25.460 --> 23:32.040]  And one of the parts that Evan was most interested in about the electrograph is the mechanism of attachment, you know, having a magnet stick to something.
[23:32.340 --> 23:36.760]  It was both fast, and it seemed for a city like New York sort of versatile.
[23:37.040 --> 23:41.760]  There's a lot of structures that could go up on, and you could throw it up really, really high, and it would stick.
[23:42.740 --> 23:49.480]  The very first throwie, we just went outside and threw it up on the High Line, which is a giant metal structure that runs throughout the west side of Manhattan.
[23:49.780 --> 23:51.120]  It kind of worked just like we thought.
[23:51.240 --> 23:54.960]  You could get it up high enough to the point where it would be really annoying to have to remove.
[23:55.370 --> 24:03.260]  We just decided that we could make these up with friends and students and go out, and if we threw up a bunch of them, maybe it would be more interesting than if we threw up one.
[24:03.460 --> 24:05.560]  And so we went down to 23rd Street.
[24:05.700 --> 24:06.700]  It was just a couple blocks away.
[24:06.700 --> 24:11.600]  There happened to be a gallery here that has a giant steel wall that wraps around the entire outside of the building.
[24:11.780 --> 24:15.220]  We all walked down there with pockets glowing and threw them up.
[24:15.390 --> 24:20.980]  Probably after about two minutes, people that were on the sidewalk started to just get involved and take them down and throw them back up.
[24:21.100 --> 24:28.000]  That was the first time that we understood that there was something about throwies that was more interesting than just making a building look like a Christmas tree.
[24:28.180 --> 24:38.240]  They had this social factor where people would just see this light and they'd want to get involved, and then you have all of a sudden the 10 people you came with turns into 30 or 40 or 50 or 100 people.
[24:38.580 --> 24:44.620]  You've got people out in the city having fun, making probably what might be their first public space project.
[24:44.820 --> 24:51.460]  We thought we were lucky on that first night that a group of school-age kids, some little hooligan kids came walking by.
[24:51.620 --> 24:56.260]  And we thought, wow, I was really lucky that we had these kids come by who kind of already understood.
[24:56.280 --> 24:58.680]  One of the kids yelled, yo, they bombing it!
[24:58.800 --> 25:00.980]  And they drew all these other people into it and whatnot.
[25:00.980 --> 25:05.960]  But it turned out that it wasn't just luck, that that would happen whoever walked by.
[25:06.120 --> 25:11.410]  If it was a group of, like, Japanese businessmen that had walked by, or a delegation of senators, or whoever.
[25:11.700 --> 25:18.410]  You throw up a throwie, girls start taking their bras off, and, you know, throwies just start hitting shit, and everyone gets into it equally.
[25:20.390 --> 25:26.340]  So we came back and we had footage from that first night from probably about three or four video cameras.
[25:26.340 --> 25:28.120]  We edited up a quick video.
[25:28.620 --> 25:33.760]  I think I stole the music from that Sony Bravia advertisement, sort of as a joke.
[25:33.950 --> 25:40.300]  And fitting with the sort of ethos of the lab, we released a how-to with it, which, like James said, is sort of a ridiculous how-to.
[25:40.540 --> 25:46.820]  But nonetheless, it was like a seven-page manual on how to wrap tape around a bunch of shit.
[25:46.820 --> 25:52.320]  What ended up happening, though, is that instead of people going crazy on the video, people went nuts on the how-to.
[25:52.640 --> 26:05.020]  That was, for me, definitely eye-opening in the sense that opening up your work and giving access to your work to people to make it their own and introducing it to the DIY community instead of just having it be, this is my art project, hands off.
[26:05.500 --> 26:07.500]  It makes your work more accessible.
[26:07.520 --> 26:09.410]  It makes your work more interesting, in a sense.
[26:09.740 --> 26:13.040]  And in the end, it gets you more hits, which is all we're really interested in the end anyway.
[26:13.040 --> 26:23.600]  It was just a demonstration of the fact that this open-source thing wasn't just a generous sharing of our intellectual property, but that this shit was going to make us famous.
[26:31.120 --> 26:38.340]  Within the first three days, there was already a modification of throwies that was reposted on the web.
[26:38.620 --> 26:41.740]  I think it was the first one by that guy, Everything's Digital.
[26:41.740 --> 26:44.480]  He had done a flicker set that showed how to make an on-off tab.
[26:44.760 --> 26:50.890]  Maybe a week later, you had someone making a motion-sensitive throwie, and a week after that, you had another type of throwie.
[26:51.000 --> 27:08.240]  A woman who had been doing a bunch of taxidermy projects actually combined the throwie project with taxidermy and made the rat throwie, which were magnets embedded inside of a taxidermied rat with LEDs in the eyes, and you could turn it on and actually toss it on a car or whatever, and this rat would stick to it.
[27:11.720 --> 27:19.930]  We were looking on Flickr and on YouTube with the tag throwies, and we would find all these images of people making them and taking photos and putting them up online.
[27:20.080 --> 27:20.620]  Normal dudes.
[27:21.100 --> 27:24.180]  People in their hometown supporting their soccer team.
[27:24.450 --> 27:27.260]  Dudes wearing them on their ears, noses.
[27:27.600 --> 27:31.140]  People using them as a substitute for rice at their wedding.
[27:32.310 --> 27:35.080]  Marriage proposals have occurred in throwies.
[27:35.790 --> 27:38.860]  The project was sort of so simple, no one felt like they owned it.
[27:40.020 --> 27:45.020]  And it became this project that didn't exist just on our server, and it wasn't a project that just we updated.
[27:45.500 --> 27:48.520]  People were like, oh, did you go to Gasworks Parks in Seattle?
[27:48.520 --> 27:49.800]  And I'm like, I've never been to Seattle.
[27:49.910 --> 27:51.220]  And they're like, oh, I saw throwies there.
[27:51.220 --> 27:53.340]  These things were happening all over.
[27:54.040 --> 27:55.980]  Video, audio, photos.
[27:56.320 --> 27:57.820]  You know, it made it actually interesting.
[27:58.000 --> 28:04.200]  Every time we did a presentation, we could just go to any one of these sort of Web 2.0 sites and do a search for the throwies tag.
[28:04.340 --> 28:07.430]  And we'd find 25 new photos every time.
[28:10.600 --> 28:14.080]  There were some artists that got in touch with us who wanted to do projects with us.
[28:14.600 --> 28:19.200]  Artists like Mark Jenkins, we'd been a fan of his work, and he had seen some of our stuff.
[28:19.300 --> 28:22.200]  So he contacted us and said, let's collaborate on some project.
[28:22.480 --> 28:25.840]  He was the first artist who said, okay, I get it.
[28:25.960 --> 28:29.780]  You guys are like the lab that makes James Bond's tools for him.
[28:29.860 --> 28:31.940]  And I'm going to be James Bond in this instance.
[28:32.120 --> 28:34.660]  I have these tape sculptures of these forms.
[28:34.920 --> 28:37.380]  I think that lights would look good inside them.
[28:37.680 --> 28:39.280]  Can you guys facilitate that?
[28:39.460 --> 28:40.980]  So basically, Mark came to town.
[28:41.660 --> 28:43.320]  We showed him how to make a throwie.
[28:43.420 --> 28:44.700]  We made a few hundred with him.
[28:44.700 --> 28:46.160]  And then he did all the rest.
[28:46.280 --> 28:48.060]  Found ways to embed them into his work.
[28:48.200 --> 28:50.080]  Came up with a system to kind of hang him inside it.
[28:50.320 --> 28:55.720]  I remember that feeling like one of the first moments where we were really facilitating what we set out to do.
[28:55.800 --> 28:58.780]  More so than when we were just throwing the throwies and making videos.
[28:59.000 --> 29:11.700]  When Mark collaborated with us on the Jesus 2.0 project, it really felt like we had actually made something that a practicing street artist that we were really influenced and had a lot of respect for, used something that we'd done to make work that was his own.
[29:11.700 --> 29:14.960]  Yeah, and appropriately, it was Jesus 2.0.
[29:15.320 --> 29:16.480]  The second coming.
[29:25.890 --> 29:28.210]  It wasn't just artists who were seeing this too.
[29:28.490 --> 29:31.930]  Initially, when we did the how-to, we linked up this company, HB Electronics.
[29:32.630 --> 29:33.410]  A Chinese company.
[29:33.510 --> 29:36.650]  They noticed that we had linked them up and they began sending us emails.
[29:36.650 --> 29:38.170]  This is interesting what you're doing.
[29:38.430 --> 29:41.310]  We kept ordering from them because they were the cheapest guys in town.
[29:41.570 --> 29:47.030]  And before long, they had made a page on their site that was dedicated to throwie packs.
[29:47.190 --> 29:50.230]  And actually, we're also selling batteries in addition to the LEDs.
[29:50.750 --> 29:58.070]  You can imagine how excited they probably were for a sort of pop project that encouraged buying their product and then throwing them away and needing to buy more.
[29:58.210 --> 29:58.370]  Yeah.
[29:58.650 --> 30:02.970]  I mean, it makes sense why they got the throwie pack page up on their website so quick, right?
[30:03.690 --> 30:06.390]  Throwies received as much bad press as good press.
[30:06.390 --> 30:18.370]  And a lot of the bad press was around this issue of sustainability and the fact that we were putting throwaway electronics and the batteries wouldn't last for that long and they would also potentially leak chemicals.
[30:18.650 --> 30:24.230]  And from our perspective, we were thinking there is kind of an input-output ratio that's not really justified.
[30:24.290 --> 30:28.630]  There's not enough content to justify maybe the expense.
[30:28.970 --> 30:34.290]  And we'd actually been thinking about how to do it since the early days of throwie events.
[30:34.450 --> 30:36.990]  You know, how can you write text with throwies?
[30:36.990 --> 30:47.130]  That's a way for me where, depending on what you're writing, if it's something you really mean, it's easier for me to swallow the environmental impact if what you said contributes to the world being a better place.
[30:47.470 --> 30:55.310]  And I think we originally thought we would never get into this sort of content business, but then, you know, you need to make Super Mario Brothers to sell Nintendo.
[30:55.750 --> 31:01.070]  You know, you need that sort of thing that lets people understand that there's something interesting that could happen here potentially.
[31:01.410 --> 31:08.990]  We had some ideas, but we finally kind of perfected a system where you just combine some goods that you can buy at the Home Depot.
[31:09.850 --> 31:13.370]  Foam core, a big painter's pole, edger attachments.
[31:13.730 --> 31:15.290]  You put it together with some glue.
[31:15.510 --> 31:17.470]  We used the laser cutter to cut out all these holes.
[31:17.670 --> 31:24.610]  But basically, you'd make this device where you could write really quickly, really high dot matrix style text in LED throwies.
[31:29.980 --> 31:33.640]  We put it up in some really high places and it stayed there for a long time.
[31:33.640 --> 31:36.620]  It says Crime 2.0 on the west side rail yard.
[31:36.760 --> 31:39.640]  I think it still says Long Live Graffiti right off Broadway.
[31:39.900 --> 31:43.000]  There's definitely some places where it'll stay for a while.
[31:46.230 --> 31:50.210]  People wanted us to come and, you know, use the Knight Rider to advertise.
[31:50.610 --> 31:55.790]  Come to Berlin for vodka companies or Brazil for some other lifestyle magazine or something.
[31:56.030 --> 32:02.610]  It was clear that people saw that there was some advertising potential to these tools early on when they started selling them.
[32:02.610 --> 32:06.050]  But then they want to sell to young people because they're a really big buying demographic.
[32:06.590 --> 32:10.470]  And young people like to see people misbehaving, especially in public space.
[32:10.710 --> 32:17.010]  So MTV straight copied in the exact same style as the initial throwie video.
[32:17.230 --> 32:18.670]  They made a commercial.
[32:18.910 --> 32:22.990]  It wasn't even really trying to sell anything as much as kind of a little...
[32:23.810 --> 32:25.350]  Seasons greetings from MTV.
[32:25.530 --> 32:30.110]  Almost like a little bonus footage for Australia's MTV channel.
[32:30.110 --> 32:40.470]  It was what advertisements always do when they see something cool that they don't have, which is how do they insert their brand into your creative project that they think is going to make MTV look all the cooler.
[32:40.690 --> 32:44.690]  And all the kids looked younger and more revolutionary than us.
[32:44.690 --> 32:57.410]  And that was funny and for me that was much less disgusting than the also Christmas type use that Coca-Cola did where they turned a big metal Christmas tree on in Times Square.
[32:57.610 --> 33:03.710]  And it was spinning around and a bunch of kids all sort of synchronously threw LED throwies onto it.
[33:03.710 --> 33:09.430]  One kid sort of holds one like close to his heart and closes his eyes like he's making a wish.
[33:09.670 --> 33:11.590]  And then opens them up and tosses it.
[33:11.750 --> 33:14.230]  So maybe they had some insane instructions.
[33:14.830 --> 33:21.550]  Even just the Christmas trees with the Coca-Cola logo replaced for the Christ star at the top, I always thought was a nice visual image.
[33:22.070 --> 33:24.670]  Yeah, I just didn't know they celebrated Christmas in China.
[33:26.850 --> 33:28.390]  It was a f*cking spectacle.
[33:29.270 --> 33:30.390]  Wish we could have been there.
[33:30.390 --> 33:31.990]  Yeah, no, it's too bad.
[33:32.210 --> 33:33.190]  They should have sent us an invite.
[33:33.330 --> 33:35.830]  Yeah, I definitely would have made the trip.
[33:36.230 --> 33:42.310]  And then it all culminated in the now infamous Boston Terror Mind Shred 2007.
[33:42.630 --> 33:43.570]  Never forget.
[33:44.250 --> 33:46.290]  That day was pretty for real for us.
[33:46.630 --> 33:52.110]  It was like we knew about September 11th before it happened.
[33:52.370 --> 33:58.590]  We were like on the 70th floor of Tower One of the Boston Terror Mind Shred.
[33:58.590 --> 34:00.390]  But, you know, we were like right there.
[34:01.210 --> 34:11.050]  I teach a class called Geek Graffiti, which is a graduate level course that deals with introducing art and design oriented students to doing work outside.
[34:11.410 --> 34:15.970]  And so one of the former students from that, his name is Todd Vanderlinde, and I think we can call him out.
[34:16.030 --> 34:17.390]  He'll be happy about it probably, right?
[34:17.850 --> 34:25.510]  Former student was in Boston, drunk one night, looks up above this bridge and sees what he would probably have thought to be LED throwies.
[34:25.510 --> 34:31.170]  He takes down this thing from the bridge, this was weeks before anybody ever heard of the Moon Knight, the Boston Terror Mind Shred.
[34:31.330 --> 34:36.670]  He takes photos of it, puts it on Flickr, and the MakeBlog reports on it.
[34:36.710 --> 34:38.810]  And they related it to LED throwies as well.
[34:39.150 --> 34:39.550]  Yeah.
[34:39.750 --> 34:42.570]  No mention of terror, no mention of any sort of threat.
[34:42.850 --> 34:46.230]  They were only reporting on it as, look, here's some circuit boards that we can look at.
[34:46.810 --> 34:49.770]  Also, he titled the photo, Look What I Stole.
[34:49.770 --> 34:50.450]  Right.
[34:50.710 --> 34:54.530]  And then he tagged it with Graffiti Research Lab, which is how we got wrapped into this whole thing.
[35:00.160 --> 35:11.280]  So Vanderlinde, he actually got in his Flickr comments, one of the photos, the marketing guy, whose name is Sam Travis Ewan, he wrote him a comment, because he's trying to be down, because he wants this to blow up on the Internet.
[35:11.460 --> 35:17.080]  So he's like, hey, Vanderlinde, good still, or whatever, good pinch.
[35:17.340 --> 35:19.580]  If you think that's cool, check out this video.
[35:19.580 --> 35:26.580]  And the video was a video made by this guy named Peter Badofsky and his friend, who I don't care what his name is.
[35:26.900 --> 35:30.440]  The YouTube clip was interesting because it was also done kind of in our style.
[35:30.580 --> 35:32.260]  It was pretty good, it was fun to watch.
[35:32.520 --> 35:34.060]  It shouts us out at the end also.
[35:34.060 --> 35:40.460]  It says, you know, inspired by the, maybe I'm quoting here, brilliant creativity of the Graffiti Research Lab.
[35:48.280 --> 35:55.380]  Some time elapsed between this event and an email I got one morning where Todd had written to me, have you heard about what's happening in Boston?
[35:55.640 --> 36:00.200]  These Moon and Night advertisements had been discovered by some transit authority worker.
[36:00.460 --> 36:06.740]  The transit authority worker had called the police and the Homeland Security Department came in and they basically treated these like they were bombs.
[36:07.100 --> 36:10.280]  And they defused them, they were numbering them all over the city, something like 20.
[36:10.500 --> 36:15.300]  And then he wrote back a few minutes later, I'm f*cked, they think I did it.
[36:15.300 --> 36:17.120]  I think he said, we're f*cked.
[36:17.340 --> 36:18.880]  I just got a call from the FBI.
[36:19.600 --> 36:32.220]  After telling Todd to basically just tell whoever called him, the FBI, the cops, the CIA, Department of Homeland Security, the ISI, just tell whoever it was that they need to talk to Sam Travis Ewan.
[36:32.400 --> 36:37.300]  We had already looked up his company and we had the address of it and I think we forwarded him all that information.
[36:37.300 --> 36:38.820]  Just said, rat him out.
[36:40.340 --> 36:40.980]  F*ck him.
[36:41.140 --> 36:42.400]  We got a lot of hits that day.
[36:42.520 --> 36:45.960]  And that's probably the only good thing that came out of that entire thing.
[36:47.180 --> 36:52.560]  I feel like the Department of Homeland Security is utterly incompetent.
[36:53.140 --> 36:58.060]  Things like this demonstrate how completely f*cking vulnerable we are.
[36:58.060 --> 37:05.000]  small glowing bombs that are on like a one month timer that depict pop culture symbols.
[37:05.180 --> 37:10.580]  If that's the type of device that they think people are going to put up in the city, we're f*cked.
[37:12.700 --> 37:28.280]  I don't know if this is the end of the throwie story or if it will continue from here, but as an example of what happens when you release your work the way that we do, which is just directly into the public domain, free for all to take, it's fun to be able to watch this thing you sort of released turn into a major catastrophe.
[37:34.660 --> 37:48.280]  In some ways this was the first shot across the bow from advertisers that, you know what, not only do we own this city, literally we own physical spaces where we can put up anything we want to sell our product, but now we own all the spaces.
[37:48.520 --> 37:55.640]  We will go up everywhere, we will go over every public piece of property on train stations, on overpasses.
[37:55.760 --> 38:03.260]  We're going to adopt all the rules of graffiti artists to terrorize you, literally terrorize you to stop traffic for hours and hours in your city.
[38:03.480 --> 38:04.560]  It's a war now.
[38:04.820 --> 38:09.240]  And so that was maybe the first time we were like, you know what, let's take a side in this war.
[38:09.420 --> 38:12.060]  And it's perfect that they're bringing it kind of to our turf.
[38:16.100 --> 38:26.560]  Instead of working with advertisers the way so many graffiti crews do, if we all worked against those advertisers, we could probably diminish our chances of getting in trouble.
[38:26.760 --> 38:29.060]  Because people don't give a f*ck if you write on an ad.
[38:29.400 --> 38:36.200]  But also we could really do something to cut down on that one crew who's really all city now, which is the f*cking advertisers.
[38:36.720 --> 38:37.740]  Guerrilla and legal.
[38:37.740 --> 38:43.820]  And it's a shame, right, that in the city that birthed graffiti, that that's who's up the most.
[38:44.800 --> 38:51.640]  We went through the Homeland Night scare with the CEO of the anti-advertising agency, Steve Lambert.
[38:51.800 --> 38:54.380]  He's a new fellow to I-Beam sitting right next door.
[38:54.640 --> 38:58.620]  The Light Criticism project was really all Steve's initiative, as far as I remember.
[38:58.980 --> 39:01.340]  We were just there to help put the duct tape up.
[39:02.280 --> 39:04.980]  Light Criticism was a total rip-on, G. Lee.
[39:05.200 --> 39:09.540]  And we talked about that beforehand, because we thought that there was some real potential power.
[39:09.900 --> 39:26.560]  And taking this advertising infrastructure that they've installed around the subway stations in New York City, and using that in typical hack fashion to twist what it's saying, he sort of took the first step by making this really sort of abstract art single line of pixels.
[39:27.300 --> 39:30.940]  And the only thing more interesting than abstract art is like anything with content.
[39:30.940 --> 39:33.980]  Steve believes that ambiguous art is bad art.
[39:37.220 --> 39:39.060]  Graffiti is illegal.
[39:39.380 --> 39:41.120]  We don't want to see it legalized.
[39:41.260 --> 39:51.820]  We might, like a lot of people, advocate the decriminalization of it, so that people aren't going to jail for a year sentence for a crime that would take one stroke of a brush to undo.
[39:51.820 --> 39:54.220]  But we're not for it being legal.
[39:55.180 --> 39:59.580]  So, maybe that was the first time we've had this notion that graffiti is illegal.
[39:59.900 --> 40:01.100]  Let's keep it that way.
[40:01.300 --> 40:03.440]  Let's make advertising illegal also.
[40:11.220 --> 40:13.920]  And it feels good when you beat the advertisers.
[40:13.920 --> 40:17.120]  And this was a case where it just kind of fell into our lab.
[40:17.360 --> 40:19.620]  We were working one night late in the lab.
[40:20.100 --> 40:21.480]  James comes running down.
[40:21.940 --> 40:22.600]  Grabs me.
[40:22.720 --> 40:28.760]  All excited because Perrier is projecting Perrier champagne ads right above our building.
[40:29.080 --> 40:32.800]  We have the equipment to fight back, sitting right underneath our desks.
[40:33.020 --> 40:34.180]  We grab the projectors.
[40:34.340 --> 40:35.620]  We get a long extension cable.
[40:35.680 --> 40:36.580]  We head up to our roof.
[40:36.680 --> 40:39.720]  And we just start projecting over top of their projections.
[40:40.280 --> 40:41.560]  Steve was up there using the laser.
[40:41.560 --> 40:42.640]  I think he drew balls.
[40:43.800 --> 40:49.720]  But in true Steve Lambert style, I think we needed to get more directly to the point of why we were pissed they were there.
[40:49.860 --> 40:56.960]  So instead of using the laser tag, we just opened up a text editor and just started basically talking trash for about 15 minutes.
[40:57.180 --> 40:59.740]  I think we were threatening to call 311 on them.
[40:59.920 --> 41:00.720]  Get off our wall.
[41:01.180 --> 41:03.020]  Trying to use as many swear words as possible.
[41:16.720 --> 41:18.180]  And then eventually they shut down.
[41:18.200 --> 41:20.940]  So it was a situation where we won.
[41:21.100 --> 41:21.880]  I mean, hands down.
[41:21.880 --> 41:23.620]  There was no debate in that one.
[41:34.370 --> 41:38.370]  Occasionally we get to work with writers who are out right now.
[41:38.590 --> 41:40.410]  Street bombers who we respect.
[41:40.550 --> 41:42.570]  Who we work with to make more conventional tools.
[41:43.010 --> 41:45.490]  You'll never hear really anybody talk about them as much.
[41:45.690 --> 41:50.710]  But sometimes these are the ones where we feel like we're actually doing the work we set out to do the most effectively.
[41:50.970 --> 41:53.790]  Because they're tools that are made for graffiti writers.
[41:53.970 --> 41:55.630]  They get used by graffiti writers.
[41:55.630 --> 41:58.150]  Sometimes our name's less associated with it.
[41:58.270 --> 42:00.290]  It's their work that's on display.
[42:00.570 --> 42:02.930]  So, one of those writers is Katsu.
[42:03.590 --> 42:08.310]  He's kind of been someone who's willing to test drive some of the tools we've made out in the street.
[42:08.870 --> 42:12.610]  And in turn for him, we've ended up making a few tools that he's gotten to use.
[42:12.610 --> 42:14.070]  So, no one else really has.
[42:15.870 --> 42:18.170]  We created a tool for him called the High Rider.
[42:18.410 --> 42:24.810]  Which is basically a new version of this Barry McGee style spray paint extension system.
[42:41.490 --> 42:46.630]  The other sort of collaboration we've done with Katsu is the extinguisher stuff.
[42:46.810 --> 42:49.170]  Extinguisher POV cam, fire extinguisher writing.
[42:49.790 --> 42:52.150]  So, this is not something we came up with at all.
[42:52.290 --> 42:54.430]  And it's something that Katsu's taught us how to do.
[42:54.790 --> 42:57.390]  But our influence on this is in spreading the how-to.
[42:57.690 --> 43:08.250]  A lot of these techniques that graffiti writers come up with that are incredible ways for individual people to get over on the city end up residing in cryptic graffiti forums, if that.
[43:08.450 --> 43:12.890]  And a lot of times graffiti writers are even pretty secretive about their craft so that they can have the tricks.
[43:12.890 --> 43:21.850]  But Katsu, fitting in with GRL release methods, has been kind enough to write out how to make your own fire extinguisher implement for graffiti.
[43:22.330 --> 43:25.730]  Our addition was only the documentation tool, which is the POV cam.
[43:25.970 --> 43:34.370]  Which is basically a small disposable video camera duct taped with a wide angle lens and strapped to a welder's mask.
[43:41.460 --> 43:53.300]  If you see that video, and you see how someone can write their name in about seven or eight seconds the size of a giant billboard, you start to understand how much power can reside in something as simple as a fire extinguisher.
[44:02.150 --> 44:07.850]  Okay, honest to God, why don't you and the giant laser get a frickin' room for God's sakes?
[44:21.710 --> 44:26.730]  EyeBeam was actually getting some renovations, so we were kind of out of the lab and were working kind of remotely.
[44:26.730 --> 44:31.730]  So Evan kind of tested to see if the idea would work, using processing, and then we were like, okay, they could.
[44:32.030 --> 44:33.350]  So Theo really went to coding.
[44:33.590 --> 44:41.990]  We got all the equipment together, and we head to Rotterdam with this idea, and $30,000 worth of responsibility, and we had never tested it a single time.
[44:53.920 --> 44:58.040]  So the first night we got there and set it up, it was just us out there in this parking lot.
[44:58.460 --> 45:04.760]  Rotterdam is a shitty place to be all year long, but it's particularly f*cking rainy and horrible in February.
[45:04.760 --> 45:06.740]  So it was foggy, rainy, crappy.
[45:06.960 --> 45:12.480]  We're standing out in the rain, testing the system out, and we finally get, like, a prototype up that's working.
[45:13.160 --> 45:15.980]  You know, the first time we rode a free bird obstacle.
[45:16.340 --> 45:17.320]  We rode a free bird.
[45:17.600 --> 45:19.260]  And that got posted on Boing Boing.
[45:19.320 --> 45:21.660]  It was getting some Internet attention even before it happened.
[45:21.800 --> 45:23.340]  People were kind of salivating for it.
[45:23.540 --> 45:24.580]  It's this laser beam.
[45:24.700 --> 45:25.400]  It looks pretty cool.
[45:27.220 --> 45:33.060]  We had contacted, before we left, some graffiti riders in the Netherlands, and told them, we're coming there with this system.
[45:33.200 --> 45:34.660]  It's going to be a tool for riders.
[45:34.900 --> 45:36.000]  Do you guys want to come and use it?
[45:36.040 --> 45:38.720]  And we happened to meet an organization called Catfight.
[45:38.900 --> 45:39.860]  And we met this woman.
[45:40.060 --> 45:41.300]  She rides foxy lady.
[45:42.000 --> 45:44.040]  She contacted a lot of people for us.
[45:44.280 --> 45:46.320]  And it got them all excited about coming out.
[45:46.460 --> 45:49.320]  Including some people from Berlin, a guy who rides a dash.
[45:51.280 --> 45:52.300]  They all came out.
[45:52.400 --> 45:53.300]  They came out every day.
[45:53.440 --> 45:57.040]  They were there on the first day when we were setting up, just to test to see if it would work at all.
[45:57.240 --> 46:01.380]  And they, in a large part, were what made the project as successful as it was.
[46:01.380 --> 46:04.160]  On opening night, we had a bunch of riders out there.
[46:04.280 --> 46:05.040]  We turned it on.
[46:05.320 --> 46:08.840]  With the laser tag system hooked up in the Hemermobile.
[46:09.060 --> 46:12.380]  Which was a RV setup that Hype had gotten for us from his uncle.
[46:13.120 --> 46:16.180]  It was hard to tell if this was going to be a good project or not, right?
[46:16.340 --> 46:19.280]  I mean, there's like 14 graffiti riders.
[46:19.660 --> 46:20.880]  Really, really stoned.
[46:21.080 --> 46:23.420]  And they're all super excited about using it.
[46:23.620 --> 46:26.800]  And we were really happy seeing it actually work and come together.
[46:27.040 --> 46:29.900]  And not look stupid, but look really f*cking good.
[46:29.900 --> 46:35.200]  And they started feeding us suggestions like, Oh, why don't you add a bevel tip?
[46:35.440 --> 46:38.320]  Can you guys make it where you can adjust the thickness of the stroke?
[46:38.700 --> 46:41.300]  And Theo was coding in real time, adding these in.
[46:41.500 --> 46:42.340]  Including the drips.
[46:42.840 --> 46:46.320]  Theo went home that night programming some more new brush additions.
[46:46.660 --> 46:47.880]  We came out the next night.
[46:47.960 --> 46:49.220]  All those graffiti riders came.
[46:49.340 --> 46:51.360]  And that pretty much continued for the next three nights.
[46:51.700 --> 46:52.820]  Every night we'd come out.
[46:52.980 --> 46:54.040]  Improvements to the system.
[46:54.240 --> 46:55.080]  More footage.
[46:55.260 --> 46:56.100]  Cops would come.
[46:56.240 --> 46:57.100]  People would use it.
[46:57.300 --> 46:58.500]  A good time was had.
[46:58.500 --> 47:01.320]  On that trip, we kind of rolled out with a pretty big crew.
[47:01.620 --> 47:02.980]  It was me and Evan.
[47:03.380 --> 47:04.580]  Bennett for Senate was there.
[47:04.700 --> 47:05.040]  And Theo.
[47:05.280 --> 47:10.300]  That's the first time we kind of really established a little bit of a block party vibe out of the Hemermobile.
[47:10.540 --> 47:13.220]  So we were rocking, like, Bennett's special mixes.
[47:13.680 --> 47:14.280]  Drinking beers.
[47:14.540 --> 47:21.060]  And that profile has stuck with us now that we've managed to keep these kind of paramilitary party things going on.
[47:21.060 --> 47:21.940]  We're on Edgar Eastwood.
[47:22.460 --> 47:23.400]  Education and C-h-h.
[47:24.080 --> 47:24.760]  Oh.
[47:26.500 --> 47:27.760]  Go to school.
[47:28.120 --> 47:28.400]  Go to school.
[47:35.600 --> 47:37.260]  Go to school.
[47:42.160 --> 47:49.340]  The other thing that we found out was that although the Netherlands is a really tolerant place, It's one thing they're not tolerant of is lasers.
[47:49.980 --> 47:54.560]  The Dutch government has a specifically strict policy regarding lasers.
[47:54.800 --> 47:57.320]  And no one's ever mentioned it to us, no one ever said anything.
[47:57.700 --> 48:00.020]  But apparently no one's mentioned it to the police there either.
[48:00.220 --> 48:05.080]  Because you'll see in the video that they pick it up and write Martin Rocks on the wall and never realized what they were doing.
[48:05.140 --> 48:09.400]  Yeah, they have some laws there, but there's kind of a loose hand enforcing them.
[48:09.540 --> 48:12.740]  Which is what makes the Dutch people so f*cking awesome.
[48:18.620 --> 48:24.000]  Pass me the laser beam and let me wipe out the wicked end clean.
[48:31.160 --> 48:36.980]  They might come with them chapel in the seguir, but I and I know that no papa.
[48:37.380 --> 48:43.000]  They might come with them 45 but I and I say we got to survive.
[49:03.940 --> 49:09.960]  Theo put up a really good website that had the entire instructions that how to use the software, how to set up the equipment.
[49:10.140 --> 49:12.200]  He did a really, really good job on it.
[49:12.200 --> 49:15.000]  So when we released it, it had a really big impact.
[49:15.820 --> 49:17.880]  It is, to date, our biggest project.
[49:18.240 --> 49:34.060]  And it has received attention from counterculture-type organizations like Art Threat or the 9-11 Truth Movement all the way up to kind of mainstream bullshit like The David Letterman Show and has afforded us a lot of opportunities subsequently.
[49:37.460 --> 49:39.520]  But the advertisers got a hold of it as well.
[49:39.720 --> 49:44.840]  In the early days of Laser Tag, we got a lot of phone calls from people like General Electric and Walt Disney.
[49:45.180 --> 49:48.820]  And all these companies wanted us to write something for them.
[49:49.380 --> 49:51.800]  True to what we do, we said no to all these guys.
[49:52.180 --> 49:58.400]  But at this point, these people have actually taken some of the initiative to put together the open source code on themselves.
[49:58.700 --> 50:01.700]  Someone who did like the stunt award ceremony.
[50:02.040 --> 50:09.420]  And there's another crew who have said they've deeply explored the sort of shallow software territory we started for them.
[50:09.660 --> 50:22.640]  And they're now doing something called Urban Graffiti Interactive Simulation, which involves laser tag on the side of cars while like models are flanked on either side of it with their hands out like they're on the f*cking Wheel of Fortune.
[50:23.440 --> 50:24.340]  We make something.
[50:24.720 --> 50:26.120]  They steal something.
[50:26.440 --> 50:27.620]  This is the natural process.
[50:27.880 --> 50:31.700]  But in the meantime, there's a lot of people who are doing the laser tag setup in their garage.
[50:31.700 --> 50:34.360]  And you can find those now on Flickr and on YouTube.
[50:34.360 --> 50:36.560]  People who have put together their own laser tag setups.
[50:36.560 --> 50:40.580]  It's just normal guys, riders, hackers who are making these systems.
[50:41.720 --> 50:49.380]  In addition, we've used it here in the city for protest groups, just parties, in addition to getting some really legendary riders to use it.
[50:49.460 --> 50:55.400]  People like Leon Reed, people like KR have wrote with it, 323, Katsu Hell, AV1.
[50:55.640 --> 51:00.320]  All the dudes that we work with and look up to and respect have all gone out with us with the bicycle.
[51:00.960 --> 51:04.760]  And taking advantage of this is a graffiti tool and public expression tool.
[51:05.820 --> 51:13.360]  It is the kind of thing where you can really easily just hand someone the small laser and they can all of a sudden have their content up really big.
[51:13.720 --> 51:17.220]  But that requires us to sort of be out in the field and running the system.
[51:17.960 --> 51:23.260]  And it isn't necessarily the most flexible system for people that want to get other content up besides handwriting.
[51:23.480 --> 51:39.000]  And so really in the end, laser tag is just one application that we've developed that runs from this mobile broadcast unit, which is a three-wheel bike equipped with multiple power sources, audio, 5,000 lumen projector, camera input, and a laptop.
[51:39.320 --> 51:41.760]  We had seen the effectiveness of dragging audio.
[51:42.120 --> 51:49.320]  When we worked with BORF, he wanted to make an audio system that was mounted on a three-wheel tricycle, which we called the BORF Riot Bike.
[51:49.340 --> 51:51.520]  And we had used that and seen how effective it was.
[51:51.520 --> 51:55.260]  So when we went to Amsterdam, we saw these huge bikes.
[51:55.440 --> 51:59.220]  We thought, you know what, you can get audio in there, you can get projection systems in the front of it.
[51:59.420 --> 52:09.340]  We always kind of imagined it would be like the Hummer with the gun turn on top, where someone would sit in the front, kind of wielding the projector, pointing it around, the dude on the back riding and DJing the music.
[52:09.580 --> 52:12.700]  And we managed to get funding from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
[52:12.700 --> 52:17.360]  We combined all the laser tag equipment, and we kind of got this bike put together for us.
[52:25.780 --> 52:30.600]  If it's free for us, we can make it free for everyone else to use, which is what we're doing now.
[52:31.040 --> 52:34.520]  Anyone who contacts us who wants to use it, other than advertisers, can.
[52:34.860 --> 52:36.860]  They come in, they get trained on the system.
[52:37.120 --> 52:38.460]  It's like a mobile cinema.
[52:38.920 --> 52:40.760]  You can go and play movies with audio.
[52:41.020 --> 52:44.420]  You can make your own content geared for certain types of building.
[52:44.420 --> 52:47.960]  And we kind of joke that there's like a GRL library card.
[52:48.240 --> 52:53.480]  You can come, check out this system, project your content for a night, and then it comes back to us when you're done.
[53:12.360 --> 53:15.540]  Season two begins with two things, right?
[53:15.880 --> 53:19.180]  The Summer of Blood and the Mobile Broadcast Unit.
[53:19.800 --> 53:33.420]  Just like the laser tag project or the LED throwie project, both of them we need to create tools and application examples for those tools that make people want to buy in and get involved.
[53:51.380 --> 54:01.600]  Another thing that's going to happen in season two is that we're leveraging some of the interest we've been getting in the laser tag system to develop mobile broadcast units in other cities.
[54:01.940 --> 54:15.860]  So now when we get invitations to go somewhere instead of just shipping out our equipment, we try to talk them into taking those costs we would have had associated with shipping our whole system over there into just buying a system that will stay in whatever city we're going to.
[54:16.300 --> 54:18.920]  So we're setting up one of these in Mexico City.
[54:19.060 --> 54:22.620]  Already one in Barcelona sponsored by Hangar.
[54:23.040 --> 54:37.200]  So now when we leave these cities instead of just leaving people with the general impression of what loud Americans we are, they now have this thing that can stay behind and hopefully be used for the power of good against the power of evil.
[55:00.460 --> 55:23.480]  You know, it looks like the legislation is going to go through, but if everything stays on track, we are going to be awarded the title of the Department of Homeland Graffiti here in the United States and can directly liaison with countries all over the world to help improve the graffiti there and to give more people opportunities to tear their cities apart.
[56:51.640 --> 56:55.400]  So that's the complete first season in all its glory.
[56:55.860 --> 57:04.000]  All the stuff we filmed at HOPE, all the pictures we've taken are going to go into the complete first season 2, which will come out, I don't know when, when it's finished.
[57:05.340 --> 57:09.940]  We've got, supposedly we've got Skype up with Evan and James who are in Korea.
[57:10.840 --> 57:16.160]  So we can do like a little Q&A, they can say hi, but I don't know where everybody went with the laptop.
[57:16.820 --> 57:18.060]  So we'll try and figure that out.
[57:18.160 --> 57:25.380]  In the meantime, I'll kind of introduce myself, go over a little PowerPoint presentation sort of thing and we'll go from there, see what happens.
[57:34.680 --> 57:41.280]  And also if anybody wants, we've got copies of the DVD for $20 or you can just jump on Pirate Bay and download it or do both.
[57:41.520 --> 57:42.420]  It's up to you.
[58:18.330 --> 58:20.530]  All right, so this is me.
[58:21.170 --> 58:22.410]  I'm Michael Lager.
[58:22.790 --> 58:23.910]  I am GRL Utah.
[58:24.810 --> 58:25.670]  Bad things.
[58:26.670 --> 58:30.150]  All right, so this is me.
[58:30.250 --> 58:30.250]  I'm Michael Lager.
[58:30.250 --> 58:30.250]  I am GRL Utah.
[58:30.250 --> 58:30.250]  Bad things.
[58:32.570 --> 58:36.710]  Anyway, so I've met Evan and James a while ago.
[58:37.070 --> 58:37.970]  A few years ago.
[58:38.050 --> 58:38.690]  I've known them for a while.
[58:38.810 --> 58:41.410]  They came out to Sundance Film Festival to debut their movie.
[58:42.110 --> 58:44.550]  Met up with them there and we had a good time.
[58:44.690 --> 58:45.330]  They were bugging me.
[58:45.690 --> 58:46.490]  Bugging me the whole time.
[58:46.610 --> 58:47.970]  They're like, dude, you need to start GRL Utah.
[58:48.450 --> 58:52.070]  I'm like, I don't know, I don't know, finally gave in and here we are presenting at HOPE.
[58:52.790 --> 58:53.690]  Go us, right?
[58:54.270 --> 58:59.090]  So if anybody's ever been to Sundance Film Festival, you know it's February in Utah.
[58:59.090 --> 59:03.330]  And if you've never been to Utah in February, this is all you need to know right here.
[59:06.390 --> 59:08.830]  Yeah, so it was like negative 4 degrees.
[59:09.870 --> 59:12.910]  Doing laser tag negative 4, not a fun thing to do.
[59:13.150 --> 59:16.110]  You get really cold and batteries die really fast.
[59:20.370 --> 59:23.850]  So some of the other stuff we did while we were there, we went out on the freeway.
[59:24.510 --> 59:29.630]  There's this big bank of snow parked out on the freeway at like 3 a.m., negative 12 degrees.
[59:30.410 --> 59:31.710]  Yeah, we're a little nuts.
[59:32.810 --> 59:36.190]  We projected across four lanes of traffic and like a two-lane median.
[59:36.610 --> 59:41.850]  We had three cops show up in the period of like an hour and all of them were just like, oh, you're just doing this?
[59:41.890 --> 59:43.030]  Okay, have a good time.
[59:43.170 --> 59:43.430]  See ya.
[59:43.430 --> 59:46.530]  And Evan and Jim were like, shit, we need your cops everywhere.
[59:48.490 --> 59:50.190]  But you know, can't have everything.
[59:51.730 --> 59:55.270]  So one laser tag per child is a project GRL is working on.
[01:00:01.720 --> 01:00:06.040]  The whole point of it is to get a cheap box that can run laser tag basically.
[01:00:06.360 --> 01:00:13.060]  And where it came from, I was working on a project to do five laser tags simultaneously in Salt Lake City.
[01:00:13.320 --> 01:00:17.420]  And I was like, crap, I've got to buy five laptops, five projectors, five full setups.
[01:00:17.520 --> 01:00:18.500]  It's going to make it expensive.
[01:00:18.900 --> 01:00:21.680]  And I saw the Intel Atom stuff that was coming out.
[01:00:22.640 --> 01:00:26.060]  You got $80 for a motherboard with an embedded processor.
[01:00:26.820 --> 01:00:28.120]  You throw in a little bit of memory.
[01:00:28.280 --> 01:00:30.120]  You got a hard drive, a little power supply.
[01:00:30.340 --> 01:00:33.440]  Under $300, you've got a box that can run laser tag.
[01:00:34.300 --> 01:00:38.440]  Anybody that came down and saw the laser tag earlier today, we had it up and running.
[01:00:38.540 --> 01:00:41.160]  It ran it for like six hours, no problems.
[01:00:42.320 --> 01:00:43.280]  We've got it up here.
[01:00:43.800 --> 01:00:47.280]  We can show it to you guys if you want to look at it a little bit closer, get some hands-on with it.
[01:00:47.340 --> 01:00:48.840]  It's all just sort of prototype right now.
[01:00:48.840 --> 01:00:51.960]  But we are working on some custom cases and things for it.
[01:00:52.060 --> 01:00:53.020]  Go a little better from there.
[01:00:54.840 --> 01:00:55.800]  Here's another shot.
[01:00:55.980 --> 01:00:56.940]  Just kind of the ports on it.
[01:00:57.200 --> 01:00:59.960]  Just a standard Mini-ITX motherboard.
[01:01:01.140 --> 01:01:02.040]  Standard set of ports.
[01:01:02.120 --> 01:01:02.920]  You don't get FireWire.
[01:01:03.080 --> 01:01:03.340]  Sad.
[01:01:03.600 --> 01:01:04.540]  But, you know, it happens.
[01:01:06.080 --> 01:01:10.340]  We will have full specs on the one laser tag per child stuff.
[01:01:11.200 --> 01:01:13.500]  All set up on the webpages in the next few weeks.
[01:01:13.580 --> 01:01:15.940]  If you guys want to check that out, you can get the full list of everything.
[01:01:16.120 --> 01:01:16.340]  Buy it.
[01:01:16.400 --> 01:01:17.080]  Build one on your own.
[01:01:17.080 --> 01:01:19.600]  Let the mighty evil show.
[01:01:19.600 --> 01:01:22.280]  And here is GRL Vienna.
[01:01:23.480 --> 01:01:24.280]  Hey there.
[01:01:25.480 --> 01:01:28.380]  I'm really, really, really tired.
[01:01:28.680 --> 01:01:31.280]  I got locked out of my room yesterday night.
[01:01:31.480 --> 01:01:37.400]  I've had about maybe three hours of sleep and one person sneezed about five times in my face.
[01:01:38.260 --> 01:01:39.000]  Sorry, Ant.
[01:01:41.380 --> 01:01:43.580]  I'll begin with the Hypnotoad for me.
[01:01:46.590 --> 01:01:51.570]  Well, to explain a little bit the projection on there that you see, it's on a building.
[01:01:52.070 --> 01:01:55.010]  It's the old imperial stables in Vienna.
[01:01:55.010 --> 01:01:57.830]  Now used for the museum's court here.
[01:01:58.430 --> 01:02:07.030]  Which is a rather pretty museum area where there's loads and loads of hipsters.
[01:02:07.270 --> 01:02:07.810]  White.
[01:02:07.950 --> 01:02:08.250]  Pretty.
[01:02:08.690 --> 01:02:09.630]  Great dresses.
[01:02:10.510 --> 01:02:11.550]  There's cafes.
[01:02:11.850 --> 01:02:12.450]  There's a museum.
[01:02:12.650 --> 01:02:13.370]  There's Klimt.
[01:02:13.370 --> 01:02:14.030]  There's Schiele.
[01:02:14.490 --> 01:02:15.670]  There's Erwin Wurm.
[01:02:15.850 --> 01:02:16.290]  Who cares?
[01:02:17.030 --> 01:02:20.350]  There's great architecture that kind of looks like Borg Cube.
[01:02:20.630 --> 01:02:21.670]  Borg Cubes?
[01:02:23.290 --> 01:02:23.690]  Yeah.
[01:02:24.210 --> 01:02:29.210]  And as you can see, if you compare the size of the Borg Cube to the rest, it's really frickin' big.
[01:02:30.310 --> 01:02:30.630]  Anyway.
[01:02:33.830 --> 01:02:38.690]  We thought outside there's a projector and it's only displaying advertisement.
[01:02:39.150 --> 01:02:40.350]  What are we gonna do with it?
[01:02:40.430 --> 01:02:42.430]  Well, the first one was the Hypnotoad, of course.
[01:02:42.650 --> 01:02:45.430]  We tried out at Woodworks and we saw, okay, there's a VGA.
[01:02:45.430 --> 01:02:45.490]  We had to use this idea completely.