Photo by Tone.

Jersey’s notorious AIDS crew brought their skills indoors for a legal showing of their talents, and they killed it. Simple as that.

The show, which was at Jersey City’s 58 Gallery, was impressive as a whole, rather than on the strength of the individual pieces. It was like one big collaborative installation with solo pieces thrown in for good measure.

Simple graffiti covered the walls, which was then washed over in various spots with different colors of transparent paint. More detailed attention grabbing smaller paintings adorned the walls at different spots on top of the subtle graffiti. Then messy white squares were thrown up, and the paintings were placed within them. This stark border helped emphasize the individual works, allowing the viewer to look at them without being overwhelmed by the paintings around it.

There was so much to look at on the walls that it took me a good twenty minutes to absorb it all.

As for the solo works, Distort’s oil painting of kids playing with guns really burned everybody else. Komar’s electric pole was fire was well. The pole and electric box were painted in the corner, and a wire was stretched from the top of it to the other corner of the gallery. Shoes were then strung over it. Dutch’s stained glass window of Biggie also stood out.

The opening was earlier this month, but it will still be open for viewing for about another week. Unfortunately, somebody took their time sending me photos, or I would have posted this sooner. Check out Photos By Tone for some more shots of the opening. Also peep Distort’s Jokerized City Council member here. 

Photo by Tone.

For all my grafitti writin’ familam out there who care about their brain cells and their appearance, today we got designer gas masks! Say word. Whether you’re tryin’ to keep paint outta your nose, or you think the Raelians are gonna rock a Saren gas bomb on the L train, but you just HAVE to go to that Glasslands show - well here. you. go. Just for you. I bet we see HeartsRevolution rockin’ this ish soon! By Diddo Velema.

<via Core 77>

Check this live VJ installation by Aaron Sjogren called Fixate, via Create Digital Motion. Fresh. It was apparently a test project that he is perfecting for live performances.

I’m definitely diggin’ the abstract shapes, and can even get down with some of the cityscapes. But when it comes to the water shot and marine life, it loses me. As a general rule, shapes and live footage don’t mix well - unless the footage is rendered difficult to tell what it actually consists of.

I wouldn’t want to make the mistake of getting all pedantic and saying the two never go together, though. Dogmatic rules like that lead to artwork more concerned with process than outcome, which is usually pretty hurt.

(By the way, CDM points out how high quality video sites like Vimeo are going to making an impact on the spread of video art. Mos def.)

"God damn dubstep."

That about sums up how I’ve felt about this British style for a while now. It caused me spasms; teasing me with   its possibilities, but forcing a landfill of trash through my headphones. Maybe it was just ‘cuz I’m in here in New York, not London.

The latest DubWar poster. By Miss Ashes 57. Cop a limited edition print here.

Well, now the DubWar heads are pounding the concrete streets of NYC, and I finally got a real taste of the style with the party they threw last night.

I didn’t really know what I was getting into, but from some of the mixes I heard on their website, I suspected it might be what’s up.

See, I’ve heard dubstep mixes where I had to suffer through twenty minutes of monotony before I heard a decent dub. Whole sets where I didn’t hear one minute of melody or complexity. I couldn’t even tell whether or not I was listening to different songs because they were all so similar as to be identical. It’s almost as if a lot of the heads in the scene are more concerned with identifying with a genre then they are with making good music - like so many of the purists in the prolific variety of electronic sub-genres.

But it’s a style that appeals to me with its forward looking attitude, as my man Blackdown is fond of saying, who was present last night. Dubstep caught my interest since I first heard some random snippets of its bomb-raid-like bass and rusty metal electronicness. I’ve been eagerly  waiting to find examples of the style that pushed beyond the excessive loopyness and simplicity to attain the title of "music," and DubWar brought that shit.

I’m not sure who I heard - whether it was the Bomb Squad, (the production team behind Public Enemy who performed live last night), Loefah, Dusk & Blackdown, or any number of the resident DJ crew. But I do know that I most definitely came away feelin’ like the music I heard was worth the scraps of cash left in my hole strewn pockets.

DubWar definitely filled the emptiness my fiendin’ for good dubstep caused, but it took more than that to get my sleep deprived ass outta bed and into last night’s  freezing wind. It was also the chance to hear this ish on a good system. I wanted the bass to rumble everything around me like the subway. And dudes did their best to provide.

Unfortunately, the police showed up and made them turn it down.

Killed the whole night.

In fact, the whole club - called Love, of all things - was hurtin’. The place was underground, and after you entered, you descended a flight of stairs that looked like a five year old’s idea of hell, what with its black light toy graffiti, grimy corners and all. They had this lounge that was pretty fly, with two open stories of loft spaces that held beds inside little caves. But the whole area was damp from this waterfall that took up a big part of the room. I couldn’t help but think about how bad the mold looked once you turned the lights on. Besides the water, you couldn’t really hear the music in there either. The only speakers were on the dance floor, and there were none in any of the other rooms.

Six dollars for a Red Bull with no alcohol? Riiiiight.

If this night is going to blow up, they’ll have to find a new spot. But keep your eyes on the DubWar cypher, ‘cuz they just might bring the fifteenth British Invasion.

It’s a stark juxtaposition: MySpace, the fashion world, and the inanity those worlds tend to focus on on the one side; the dilapidated state of the Vietnamese landscape on the other. Daps to Filippo Minelli, our protagonist for the day.

<Ecosystem via A Blog Soup> 

Eyebeam, a technology and arts center, has explored the future of graffiti through its Graffiti Research Lab.They have lots of cool projects, but the one that seems as if it could actually have serious implications for the future of graffiti - and public art in general - is the Pixel Roller (first video). You upload an image into the roller, and then simply roll that image onto the wall. Also included below is a selection of some of their more interesting projects.Correction: Apparently, the Pixel Roller isn’t an Eyebeam project, I just came accross it on their blog. It’s in fact a rAndom International project, out of London.