By – Utkarsh Suman
Abstract
Graffiti was once about sweat, risk, leaving some sort of imprint on a world which is not always there. It’s now being slowly consumed by machine learning. However, the rawness and rebelliousness of street art are being repurposed into a clean, profitable data asset, through a tool tech giants have been using called algorithmic enclosure. At the same time, smart cities are using automated surveillance and drones to wipe the real thing from a real wall. This article examines how the true sense of graffiti is sublimed from the streets into highly regulated digital walls where state and corporate nexus can easily trap, channelise and divert public sentiments.
Introduction
In graffiti, there’s no style of lettering or colouring. It darts about in the noise of a spray can at midnight, in the rush of a shadowy alley or through uneven pathways. In the past, it has been a powerful statement that people have made by leaving an unauthorized mark, which is to say, “I am here, I matter.” Everyone is looking to leave a mark, isn’t that right?
It was in World War II when soldiers scribbled “Kilroy Was Here” anywhere they went. Those were not witty gags; they were pained and anguished statements that a real, breathing human being had survived. Sociologist Erving Goffman, in his book “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”, saw society in the 1950s as a giant stage play. The book delves into the idea of everyone having a “front stage” mask, that is, how individuals act at work, in formal institutions, in heavily monitored public streets. All individuals have their real “backstage” selves or real selves, who reside somewhere underneath. Graffiti is when someone tugs their backstage persona into the spotlight. Graffiti creators are no different than we commoners. The only difference is that they have successfully channelised a way to present their inner selves in the best possible manner. However, their ways, their acts, are under threat of extinction.
In the current landscape, the fight isn’t just with paint, it’s with digital light as cities become more policed. Street artists are now swapping out spray cans for lasers and projectors, called Digital Projection Bombing. The genius of the trick is that it avoids the normal rules and practices of paintballing; now, no paint comes in contact with the brick!
However, the spirit of rebellion remains the same. The artist continues to load another populist message against the evil corporate and institutional power. They are transforming perceptions of the building in ways that do not permanently alter the physicality of the building, but the transition to digital has also opened the door to a massive and automated attack from the State.
The Rise of the Machine
Modern smart cities have installed large surveillance networks to take the task of locating and eliminating graffiti. Today, the city’s walls are monitored by artificial intelligence, all day long. Systems like advanced AI vision are directly connected to CCTV cameras and street sweepers. These models continuously scan the urban surfaces and get active in milliseconds. The twist is that AI is the final judge of whether an unauthorized mark is “illegal graffiti” or “protected art.”
Cities work with aerospace firms like Aquiline Drones for mechanized removal, with aerial, paint-spraying drones. These drones hover above walls and paint tags mechanically, precisely using lasers and sensors. Adrenaline, sweat, all fade away as a machine scans the streets. The human component is completely and totally supplanted with the cold and calculating efficiency of an autonomous robot.
The Theft of Authenticity
City droids destroy the physical art, and the tech companies steal its heart. Generative AI models are trained with billions of pictures downloaded and collected from the internet, taking in decades of street culture without ever seeking permission or compensation from the original artists. Now, a corporate graphic designer can just type in a prompt, “gritty urban graffiti background”, and get an AI-generated safe, sterile version of street art ready for a commercial. This takes the fun out of graffiti. Real street art is respected throughout because the people know what it takes, they know the risk factor, the legal risk, and the physical risk, which eventually helps them to connect with the ideas of the artist. Creating an image with AI is effortless and risk-free. It has the appeal of anarchy, the appeal to dissent, resistance and rebellion, but it’s completely empty, which is to say, it’s about the preservation of the intellectual property of a tech firm, and the removal of creators who have created that culture and made it their own. It is like a euphemistic and clean version of street graffiti, which just has a name value and nothing else.
As real world surveillance makes traditional painting too risky, street artists are turning to augmented reality apps like Gestobrush to project virtual 3D tags onto buildings, landmarks, and even corporate headquarters. On the surface it may feel like total freedom, like countless digital canvases and graffiti on properties without facing any law, but it is actually a brilliant trap known as augmented enclosure. Those digital pixels do not float freely in public space, but they live entirely on private servers owned by the same corporate and tech giants. Now they can instantly delete any virtual mark that threatens their safety and policies. The same graffiti which symbolized dissent and street rebellion is now turned into a sterile, heavy moderated corporate asset.
Adversarial Hand Styles
Realizing that the virtual space is completely rigged, human creativity, in no time, found a way to strike back. Street artists are now turning the very technology AI uses to feed itself into an adversarial weapon. The modern smart city’s greatest assets are its automated computer vision models which scan public spaces to detect graffiti and calculate a “confidence score”– a mathematical guess of how certain the AI is of what it’s looking at. If that score crosses a developer’s established threshold, the system flags the wall for immediate erasure. To counter this, artists are manipulating these networks by using sharp, distorted geometric patterns, broken typographic loops, high contrast borders, and infrared reflective pigments in their paint. To a human passerby, the result may look like a complex, gritty piece of graffiti but to an automated camera, these visual disruptions crash the system’s processing logic. The moment the lens hits and scans the infrared painted art, the internal math fails and the system malfunctions, the algorithm can no longer make out the graffiti and instead misinterprets the art as a harmless shadow or an odd brick pattern.
The physical warfare on the concrete walls runs parallel to the war waged online. Across the internet, creators are deploying tools like Nightshade data poisoning to inject invisible ‘poison pixels’ into the images which AI scrapers hunt for. When these poisoned images are ingested into a dataset, the corrupted pixels in it scrambles the software’s internal logic from the inside, thus mathematically convincing the machine that a raw piece of street art is actually a clean corporate logo or a text document. Hence, the contemporary street artist no longer just dodges the police in dark alleys, they are actively dodging and blinding the artificial intelligence too. An art form which remains entirely invisible to the algorithm is loudly visible and broadcasted to an average man standing on the street.
Conclusion
When technology wasn’t around, the best leveller was a spray paint can. It gave the people, the unknown artists, a way to channelize and articulate against societal disparities. Every mark left by these street artists is a manifestation of “Kilroy was here”. The artistic expressions of these anonymous artists distinguish them. Their individual identity is derived by spray paint can, thus acting as a metaphorical leveller. It gave these artists, the people who lived off the grid, an opportunity to redefine their individuality, to become visible on the front stage before the public. That was an act of rebellion at a time when calculations were performed by hand, and now a simple act of defiance contrasts with the infinite calculations that are silently performed today from the depths of corporate servers.
Though they tried their best in distorting graffiti and categorizing legal and illegal, modern artists too have evolved and co-opted with new techniques to counter it. The fight to preserve the true sense of graffiti, being an art of dissent and discontent, will continue as long as the corporate and institutional nexus does not deliver a true sense of justice and democracy.
About the author
Utkarsh Suman is an undergraduate student of law at O.P. Jindal Global University. He has a keen interest in AI and Digital laws and how it is paving the way to a new societal revolution.
Image Source : https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-use-detectron2-for-rotated-bounding-box-detection-on-a-custom-dataset-63916514b368