Capturing the Choreography of Graffiti Tagging

Evan Roth, one of the minds behind the Eyewriter--a system for allowing the paralyzed to draw--has released his newest project: Graffiti Analysis 2.0, a database capturing the complex calligraphy that goes into creating a tag.

The idea is to move beyond archiving graffiti simply by photographing it--instead, documenting it in code, to reveal the choreography involved in the writing. Roth starts by doing motion capture of a graffiti writer at work. Then, he posts that data--along with a standard for decoding it--on the Web. From there, anyone can create a visualization of the data, showing how a tag reveals itself in real time--basically, revealing the tricks of the trade, involved in creating one sinuous, looping tag.

So far, a half dozen influential writers have been motion captured--SEEN, TWIST, AMAZE, KETONE, JON ONE, and KATSU--and you can watch the animations in a nifty flash viewer and even a free iPhone app.

[Via Make]