Seven Red

Thanks to Unnamed Work Colleague for this video, which displays a Nintendo Wii controller turned into a can of spraypaint:

A few thoughts on this technology. While I think stuff like this is really cool from a technological perspective, and I think bagging on virtual toys for not being “real” just ends up resentful and silly, I do think this version of graffiti reinforces the point I’ve been making here: graffiti is most comfortable to people when it is aestheticized and therefore removed from the realm of social conflict. On the face of it, this should be a fairly obvious point: a dominant culture would prefer if graffiti writers engaged in legal, “beautiful artwork” rather than mucking up the public surfaces. Right. Duh. But the stakes of it, as I’ve said here before, have everything to do with the exit value of graffiti as a non-signifying sign. It’s not just vandalism. It’s a signature system (with all that implies for identity and control) that operates in a completely opaque alternative economy. That graffiti communities also have well-developed aesthetic systems and values only complicates the problem, since the aesthetics – especially where they don’t jibe with dominant aesthetics (i.e., the tag rather than the mural) – further emphasizes the non-familiarity of the practices. Conversely, aesthetics then becomes the vehicle to normalize graffiti practices and include them within a framework of dominant cultural understanding. The graffiti mural – and especially the legal mural (at the community center or similar authorized location) – eliminates exit, makes graffiti familiar, domesticates it: Oh, those kids do some beautiful artwork…I just hate when they write that chicken-scratch on the store gates. As soon as you hear that, you’re dealing with somebody who doesn’t get it, at all.

So, how might that relate to our Wii controller here. As I said, it’s trivial to note that a virtual activity is not the same as a real activity. Wii tennis is not tennis. We all know this, and repeating it is not particularly interesting. It’s easy enough, in other words, to bemoan the loss of materiality involved in such virtualizations, and no small number of “philosophers of technology” had made tenure braying the same argument. Yes, when you’re writing graffiti the weather counts, the wind counts, the surface counts, the way you’re balanced on a two foot ledge with a fifty foot drop beneath you counts, your caps clog, your paint freezes, and your finger gets numb, and you can smell, yes smell, the colors. (Some guys in college tested me on this claim. They sprayed one of three colors, I think they were Cherry Red, True Blue, and Ultra Flat Black Krylons, the test being whether I could identify the color based on the smell. Of course I did; I can identify the scent of Ultra Flat Black at 50 yards). So, yes, materiality counts, but that’s not really the issue. For the Wii controller, it’s the specific mode of deviating or abstracting from the “real” or material activity that’s important. The spraypaint controller implies that graffiti is merely the act of using spraypaint on a wall or surface, as if that act can be isolated from all the social forces that actually shape graffiti practices. That is, it reduces the activity to an aesthetic operation. I’d suggest that this virtualization is, in fact, very different from the one that occurs when baseball or tennis are translated into Wii. In the case of the Wii spraypaint, the technology actually removes the key elements that function as value within graffiti cultures, with the primary element being risk. Graffiti practices mean nothing if they are separated from the cultural value of risk that drives the whole graffiti enterprise. In this sense, the technology perfectly mirrors the dominant cultural response toward graffiti, when its not simply raging and throwing kids in jail. That is, it strips the practices of the one thing that makes them socially interesting.

One final note: I said earlier that I think this thing is cool, and I do. I have no doubt that it will spur many creative uses, and I suspect graffiti writers may even use it for new and unforeseen things. As I noted in this post, graffiti is best when its transforming itself, and so is technology. It’s not a question of being a purist. More connections, then, more! But it’s also useful to be very specific about how and what transformations take place, and what they do. So…

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