Today we present another of our projects at ACE 2006 in a paper called “The Mobile Phone as a Digital SprayCan”. The project is called ‘Mobspray’ is based on the graffiti writing practice of ‘tagging’ were writers leave their individual tags (often a stylised signature) in physical locations. Instead of actual physical graffiti we allow users to leave virtual graffiti (using a Nokia 5140 phone with RFID/NFC shell) on RFID tags which have been placed at actual locations in this case around our university campus. The figure below shows a site marker and the mobile tags of our test crew (the mobile tags are created offline due to limitations of device). Although, only a small proportion of our test crew of writers had a specific interest in graffiti, their experiences highlighted some interesting experiences of utilizing this technology and produced aspects akin to the tagging behaviour of ‘real’ writing crews and indeed behaviour often associated with gaming in terms of competition and community.

The phone is used to read a list of the last five writers from the RFID tag and then add their own tag to the top of the list as shown below.

Whilst many of you may dismiss graffiti a simply a criminal activity most of the actual sociological studies have shown that this is an overly simplistic view. To illustrate I would quote probably the worlds best known and provocatives graffiti writers Banksy:

 ‘Graffiti writers are not real villains.  I’m always reminded of this by real villains who consider the idea of breaking in someplace, not stealing anything and then leaving a painting of your name in four foot high letters as the most retarded thing that they have ever heard of.’

 The reason I undertook this project is that if we are to truly attain an environment of pervasive computing technology then we must utilize technologies available to all sectors of our society and provide systems that will engage groups whose activities are out of the mainstream. Graffiti is a cross cultural phenomenon that is part of every single society ( you can even find Roman graffiti on the Pyramids). Within the variable contexts of their production, graffiti allows personalized and de-personalized space, the construction of landscapes of identity, the ability to make public space into private space, and act as a promoters of ethnic unity as well as diversity. Graffiti can be understood as concrete manifestations of personal and communal ideologies which are visually striking, insistent, and provocative; as such, they are worthy of consideration.

 My goal is to have the system combined with NFC readers linked to projectors at various locations around a city so that the mobile tags could be displayed on a very large scale on buildings in a similar vein to the novel  projections of graffiti artist Fi5e working at the graffiti research lab. If there are any enlightened city authorities out there I would love to hear from them.

Further I would make a plea to have RFID added to some of the smart phones as soon as possible as it would allow users to draw there tage directly on the phone prior to 'getting it up'.

Note: No actual buildings were harmed during the course of this project!