#18.

ART • 2018 • ISSN: 2238-0272

17th to 19th of oct 2019

ANAIS
1
18º Encontro internacional de Arte, Ciência Tecnologia
18th International Meeting of Art, Science and Technology
18º Encontro internacional de Arte, Ciência Tecnologia
18th International Meeting of Art, Science and Technology

Edição I Edition

ISSN: 2238-0272
 #18.ART • 2018 • ISSN: 2238-0272

artigos / papers
EDIÇÃO LISBOA

ANAIS

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Maria Jose Martinez1 de Pison and

Trinidad Gracia2
Urban cyclists Mini-projections. Video graffiti and anti-
mapping
Urban cyclists Mini-projections. Video graffiti and anti-mapping

Resumen
El artículo pretende aportar algunas reflexiones sobre las prácticas artísticas de
proyecciones audiovisuales en el entorno urbano que están vinculadas con las
performances, el video graffiti portátil y las prácticas anti-mapping. Con estas del
reflexiones queremos contextualizar el marco referencial y conceptual proyecto
que estamos llevando a cabo en las calles de la ciudad de Valencia.
Alejados de una proyección estática y de un ambiente uniforme, se pretende
tener otro tipo de relación con la ciudad y sus habitantes (espectadores) y crear
relaciones dinámicas dentro de la metrópoli contemporánea.
Palabras clave: Proyecciones audiovisuales, Bicicletas, Video graffiti, Anti-mapping

Abstract
The paper aims to provide some reflections on artistic practices of audio-visual
projections in the urban environment. These practices are linked to performances,
portable video graffiti and anti-mapping projections. With these considerations
in mind, we wish to contextualise the referential and conceptual framework of the
project that we are currently carrying out in the streets of the city of Valencia, Spain.
Rather than producing a static projection and a uniform ambiance, the aim is to
create different type of relationship with the city and its people (viewers) and to form
a dynamic relationship within the contemporary metropolis.
Keywords: Audiovisual projections, Bicycles, Video graffiti, Anti-mapping.

1 Visual artist, researcher in interactive digital media. She is Professor at the Universitat Politècnica de
València, teaches at the Master in Visual Arts and Multimedia UPV, and the Master in Contemporary
Technological and Performing Art at the Universidad del País Vasco. She is a founding member of the
Research Group Laboratorio de Luz UPV (1990), and a founding member of the cultural association
HackLab Pluton.cc (2009) based in Valencia.
2 Visual artist, professor at the Universitat Politècnica de València, she teaches image technologies at
the Faculty of Fine Arts in Valencia. She is a founding member of the UPV Light Laboratory Research
Group (1990).

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Introduction
In recent years, the practice of video mapping has expanded across many cities, with
large-scale image-light projections being cast over the irregular surfaces of façades
and monuments. Initially, this practice made a contribution to public art through its
strong element of social criticism, as in the case of the work of Krzysztof Wodiczko.
But over time, mainly on account of the spectacular nature of its expression, it has
evolved into a type of grandiose institutional event, using powerful projectors that
obscure everything else with their blinding light. A bombardment of dazzlingly bri-
ght images that hypnotize the public through their scale and impact, putting art at
the service of power. Guy Debord (1967) proclaimed that capitalist policies were
behind the transformation of urban life through the spectacle, where the commodi-
ty and capital become the mediated image.

Given our awareness of these large-scale manifestations, we are presenting a pro-

ject which aims to revive a more intimate and critical ethos. Smaller and fainter
flickering image-light projections insert themselves into the routine of life on the
street at night with mobile projections that move at a pedalling pace, accom-
panying the inhabitants, generating an ambiance of festivity or intrigue, appea-
ring from behind any corner without any prior invitation or announcement. The
aim of this project is to evoke a type of longing or desire, which Roland Barthes
described as “This longing to inhabit [...] it is fantasmatic, deriving from a kind of
second sight which seems to bear me forward to a utopian time or carry me back
to somewhere in myself.” (Barthes, 1999, p.41)

Other key elements of this proposal are bicycles and scooters, vehicles that are trans-
forming our way of getting around the city, because they provide a friendlier way of
travelling, less polluting and generally move at a more human pace. To this we can
add the symbolic nature of the bicycle, a vehicle that has historically offered a means
of emancipation for women since the time of the suffragettes, as pointed out by
Susan B. Anthony: “bicycling… has done more to emancipate women than anything
else in the world” (Bly, 1986). It also symbolizes a stand against polluting traffic emis-
sions, fumes, particles and noise. “Since 2013, more bicycles have been sold in Spain
than cars. What some then blamed on the economic crisis, seems to have become
a trend that has been maintained over time.” (Cabezas, 2017) Among these active
means of transport, which demand a physical effort by the traveller, such as walking
or cycling, the scooter has emerged as a popular non-polluting urban vehicle, its use
becoming increasingly widespread in many cities. Cycling and scootering is the way
in which we are intending to make these small gestures, which, like mobile fireflies,
project light-images in the form of ephemeral graffiti.

Neruda provides us, with a poetic perspective, an analogy between these vehicles
and insects:

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[…] A few bicycles

passed
me by,
the only
insects
in
that dry
moment of summer,
silent,
swift,
translucent;
they
barely stirred
the air. (Neruda, 1997, p. 297)

These elements mingle together in the form of a migrating performance that roams
the streets to reclaim the urban public space. A directionless movement, with no fixed
destination, tracing luminous signals to create a playful and sensorial experience.

“It is one of the ironies of our age that now, when the streets have become the hot-
test commodity in advertising culture, street culture itself has come under siege.
From New York to Vancouver to London, police crackdowns on graffiti, postering,
panhandling, sidewalk art, squeejee kids, community gardening, food vendors are
rapidly criminalizing everything that is truly street-level in the life of a city” (Klein,
2000, p 311).

Figure 1. Némo (2003) Bike graffiti Paris

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Artistic References
“Illegibilities of the layered depths of a single place, of ruses in action and historical
accidents. The writing of these evocations is sketched out, ironically and fleetingly in
graffiti, as if the bicycle painted on a wall, an insignia of a common transit, detached
itself and made itself available for indeterminate tours”. (de Certeau, 2002, p. 200)

Némo often paints figures of bicycles riding through the city, surrounded by objects;
a black cat, a kite or a balloon, and a suitcase with their name signifying no-one in Latin.
The beam shining from the bicycle appears like a projection, and the style of his gra-
ffiti bears much in common with a certain everyday innocence breaking the routine
on the streets with simple actions.

The Laser Tag action (2006) by the Graffiti Research Lab is another reference for our
project. They employ video tracking techniques using an open source app deve-
loped by openFrameworks. The work requires viewers to take action, so that they
briefly become graffiti artists who, drawing with the aid of a laser, leave illuminated
ephemeral messages on the street, which the software transforms depending on the
parameters selected.

Figure 2. Drawing based on Laser Tag (2006) by Graffiti Research Lab

A pioneering example of interactive art is The Legible City (1988-1991) by Jeffrey Shaw.
In his work, the presence of a stationary bicycle invites the viewer to ride through a
virtual city, constructed from large three-dimensional blocks of text. Pedalling and
turning the handlebars, the viewer controls where they go and the speed at which
they travel through the legible town. A small monitor placed in front of the bike dis-
plays a map of the city, showing the current position of the cyclist.

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Figure 3. Drawing based on The Legible City (1988-1991) by Jeffrey Shaw.

The video artists M-O-T-H send out invitations for their projections of small mobile
images to their neighbours. As part of their StreetLight action, they travelled through
the streets of North Kensington presenting a curious illuminated trail of treasures,
which consisted of a mix of stories, performances and guerrilla video type projects.
With the trail of visual clues, images and animations, M-O-T-H offered an alternative
portrait of the neighbourhood, based on real stories and anecdotes told by the local
residents using street graffiti techniques

Figure 4. Image based on StreetLight (2008) by M-O-T-H

Another example of graffiti digital dynamization is Mule (2019) by Escif and n3m-
3da, performed for the 2019 Lyon Biennial. Using a physical device that generates
a local network linked to an App, the residents are able to interact autonomously
and anonymously with each other by introducing augmented reality images or

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texts into the areas of the neighbourhoods where the device is installed. This work
encourages sharing and aims to reactivate walls in several locations in Lyon as
places of free expression.

Fireflies - On the corner

Fireflies - On the corner is the project we are presenting. It is a hybrid urban perfor-
mance, which projects graphic animations generated by the Mosaic software (Maz-
za, Martínez de Pisón, 2019) that reacts with the sound and casts the images as small
illuminated signs onto the streets.

Mounted on bicycles and scooters that are modified to accommodate the projectors
and a portable audio system with Bluetooth connection, the performers ride around
the streets of Valencia’s Carmen neighbourhood.

Figure 5. Mosaic Patch with animation programming

Reading The Survival of the Fireflies (Didi-Huberman, 2012) inspired us to develop

this project, imagining the bikes and scooters to be like those insects mentioned
by Neruda; resilient fireflies whose light projects images on the walls of the building
façades in the neighbourhood. “the fireflies have disappeared in the dazzling bri-
ghtness of the “fierce reflectors” of politics shows, football stadiums and television
studios.” (Didi-Huberman, 2012, p. 22)

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Figure 6. Fireflies - On the corner (2019)

The images are not projected onto the walls or surfaces in the same place, rather
they mutate over a fluctuating path, moving in no preordained manner, so that the
public/viewers capture a fleeting view of the projections. It is a practice of transien-
ce, with the images escaping, allowing little more to be known about the projections
beyond an ephemeral experience.

These urban performances were not produced in silence, although neither was the-
re a thundering noise. The projections were accompanied by the sound of On the
corner by Miles Davis. When the album was released in 1972, critics dubbed it “the
most hated album in jazz” (Tinge, 2007), and was subject to relentless criticism that
caused it to go underground until 1990, when it became an iconic work for many
young musicians, and today it is considered a precursor to funk, post-funk, electro-
nica and hip hop.

A video recording of one of the performances at https://vimeo.com/341859409

Conclusions
Starting with the earliest research into questions around the relationship betwe-
en bicycles, video graffiti and urban performances, we began to experiment on
the streets of the city. In conclusion, combined with the expectation of future
work, we wish to highlight that these small practices have opened up for us not
only opportunities for expression, but also a reencounter with basic experien-
ces that at one time propelled us and which the frenetic course of our routines
crystallized into pupas, but which that have metamorphized into new illumina-

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ted fireflies. New ideas, paraphrasing the above-mentioned reference made by

Roland Barthes, “seem to bear us forward to a utopic time or carry us back to
somewhere in ourselves”.

“Admirable dialectical vision, on the one hand: ability to recognise in the smallest
firefly a resistance, a light for all thought. Non-dialectical desperation on the other:
the inability to find new fireflies once we have lost sight of the former ones –the «fi-
reflies of youth»” (Didi-Huberman, 2012, p 51)[translator’s translation]

As further work we are currently developing another urban performance entitled Un-
derground Sky, in which the performances record images of the sky and the ground,
which are then sent to a server where a program creates compositions with the ima-
ges. These are then streamed to other performances that subsequently project them.

Acknowledgements
This project has been made possible thanks to the Agencia Estatal de Investigaci-
ón of Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades support for the project De-
sarrollo de sistemas interactivos para la generación y proyección de imagen-luz y
sonido: revisión de su incidencia en arte público. Ref. HAR2017-87535-P-AR , and
the Generalitat Valenciana’s support for the project Ciclope. Visualización creativa de
sonido basada en propiedades perceptuales del sonido aplicada a la realización de
eventos audiovisuales en directo. Ref. GV/2017/028.

We would like to thank the research group Laboratorio de Luz of the Universitat
Politécnica de Valéncia for their support to this project.

References , and Carlos Maiques for the drawings included in this paper

Barthes, Roland. (1999). Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. Farrar, Straus

& Giroux Inc.

Bly, Nellie. (1890). Champion Of Her Sex: Miss Susan B. Anthony. In The New York
World, 2 February de 1896. New York: Pictorial Weeklies.

Cabezas, Dani. (2017). Así mejora la bici tu ciudad. En eldiario.es #16. Movilidad
Sostenible. La ciudad civilizada. (iBook).

de Certeau, Michel. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press.

Debord, Guy. (1967) La sociedad del espectáculo. Recovered on 10 July 2019, from
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Didi-Huberman, Georges. (2012). Supervivencia de las luciérnagas. Madrid: Abada.

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Klein, Naomi. (2000) Reclaim the Streets. In No logo. Great Britain: Flamingo.

Mazza, Emanuele; Martínez de Pisón, María José. (2019). Mosaic, an openFrameworks

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org/2019/papers/paper50.pdf

Neruda, Pablo. (1997). Ode to Bicycles. In Pablo Neruda. Antología fundamental.

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