Animal Street Art in VR-1
Indefinite Life Extension for Great Public Murals
VR and Street Art make a great couple. Artists who do their work in public know that it is impermanent. For a while, their art exists in a specific place. Then it gets painted over or the building gets demolished.
Sometimes the Google Car goes by snapping hi-res full pano pics during a work of street art’s life span.
When it does, the art is saved, in its place, in a way that can be reproduced as a virtual world. Maybe there’s a car in the way, or the sun isn’t just right. The resurrection is an unintended consequence. Sometimes it’s perfect.
I find street art, download it and make it into virtual worlds. I enjoy getting an idea of how to present pieces of street art in VR that couldn’t be done in the physical world. Like, setting up comparisons where our avatars can flow from city to city without waiting in airport security lines. What about bringing together a few works by the same artist, to get a feel for their work in different places. Then do that for a few more artists and let each little group of street art connect smoothly to the next artist’s set.
All on the same topic.
I picked ‘Animals’ as the theme for my first try at working out this idea.
I think it gives the concept its best chance because who doesn’t like cute or otherwise interesting animals and maybe that will extend to liking the way they are set up in VR. If it turns out that I’m on to something, the topics that could be treated this way are endless — politics, culture, marginalized people, celebrities …
How It’s Done
Skip this section if you don’t want to know that the ‘world’ starts as a ‘scene’ in Unity, a game engine especially popular with indie developers for iOS and Android devices. You could also call it, ‘modeling software,’ which has been around on computers for decades.
I use it to import the hi-res 360 degree pics from the Street View database and assemble them like pieces in a 3D puzzle. Arrange them just the way I want. Add labels about who, when and where. Render and upload as a world to VRChat, the largest social VR platform at this time.
Learning Unity is like learning a new language. I’m semi-old and figuring out the commands and then finding them in the menus was difficult and irritating. I haven’t ‘learned Unity; I have learned how to accomplish my very limited objectives in Unity. It took me about 2–3 weeks. The software offers thousands of functions. I have mastered maybe six of them. It’s enough for now and I will slowly build on this base.
Also, I had a friend-teacher who helped me not feel like an idiot, which is the number one reason for giving up. Without Scott during that key 2–3 week period, I know I would have reluctantly concluded that this challenge was too much for me.
With a $4,000 desktop computer and several monitors, Unity runs like a dream. As a mere hobbyist, I can’t really justify buying a $4,000 desktop computer and I’ve learned that, for the scale of my current projects, my laptop can do the job. OK, so it takes a few minutes to render and upload. Good time to sit back and have a toke.
What I Want the World To Be
The Animal Street Art world I mean.
It’s ‘done’ now. It has reached MVW status, (Minimum Viable World). It is published and open to the public. I hope that it will stand on its own when people drop in and check it out but that’s not why I made it.
I want it to be an event space. I want just the right number of people, about 8–32, to experience it together, flowing from city to city as I’ve imagined. Taking in the animal street art.
After 15–20 minutes, we’ll talk about it. I’ll ask people, ‘please tell us what you see in this picture.’ Easy stuff, like, ‘someone show us one that made you smile, and tell us why you smiled if you can.’ We’ll all end up seeing things we wouldn’t have seen through our eyes only.
That’s what I want. To get people who ordinarily wouldn’t meet or discuss anything, talking about street art and the ideas it stimulates or provokes.
Once I have a few basic ways of setting up new street art worlds down patin Unity, I hope it’ll be more a matter of pouring the right pics and labels into the right template for the material. New events every week.
Selecting the Animal Street Art
I come to the task of curation as a complete non-authority. I am not an artist and my artistic sensibility is not especially sophisticated. What I know about street art I know from living or traveling in big cities around the world — and from spending countless hours locating great works on Street View. In that highly specific area — finding street art on Street View — I am an authority.
It’s tricky because articles about street art or pictures of street art, like you see on Instagram, NEVER identify the location. I mean the Street and Number on the Street. Date Painted is nice too. I know because I’ve read many many articles and to that extent, I have gained knowledge, although probably not enough to be considered a Street Art SME (9)Subject Matter Expert). I’m just a VR Street Art SME.
I know enough to pick four world famous artists who all create versions of animals. Drawing, painting, garbaging.
Bordalo II
The Portuguese Artivist Artur Bordalo named himself Bordalo II in honor of his grandfather, a painter ,who he watched before spraying grafitti himself from age eleven.
His work is a form of sculpture constructed completely from garbage to dramatize excessive consumption and degradation of the natural world. He estimates that he has used over 100 tons of waste materials to create over 200 very large works in cities all over the world.
The subject of his work is almost always animals — animals whose habitat and existence is threatened by the junk and other destructive consequences of a materialist society. ‘Racoon,’ created in 2015, is located at 43 R de Bartolomeu Dias in Lisbon.
Faith47
The South African artist started drawing grafitti in 1997 and has created large public murals in over 50 cities around the world. Her work often depicts animals running freely in urban areas as slightly vague, almost ghostly images.
“Zebras” was painted in 2017 beside a vacant lot at an intersection in Johannesburg. The lot is no longer vacant and “Zebras” no longer exists there. Fortunately, the Google Car went by several times when it did exist. Standing at 30 Rissik Street in VR now, we see ghostly images of ghostly images.
ATM
There’s usually a good back story for a great work of street art. Sometimes there’s even a good back story for a street artist’s own nom de spray can. ATM stands for Anarchist Trouble Makers, the collective which the artist formerly known as Mark Anthony was part of in London during the early 1990s. The initials stuck as he rose to prominence as the Threatened Species Artist.
“Cuttlefish” is strikingly non-anthropomorphic. The animal has three hearts and the ability to change the multiple hues ATM captures in a large still image.
ROA
I’m not sure it would be okay to do a street art animals event without ROA. He’s my favorite. His identity is unknown, beyond growing up near Ghent, Belgium where he started drawing animals on abandonned factories. Now he has drawn them, sometimes very large, in dozens of major cities.
“Snails” was done in 2013 on the wall of an alley behind 38 Lancarote Frietas, in Lagarve, Portugal. When you’re virtually there, it looks like they regarding each other with the idea of becoming intimate. His animals are always playful monochrome sketches.
What’s Next
I am opening up Animal Street Art 1 on a small scale in VRChat now. It still needs fine tuning. The labeling has to be just right. Maybe four artists with three pieces each is too much. Maybe less is better when it comes to people talking about street art. I’ll ask.
There are other great animal street artists, like Alexis Diaz, DALeast, and Louis Masai who could make up Animal Street Art 2. Along with ROA.
There are other topics or causes that are expressed powerfully all over the world in street art. Just ask Banksy. If you could. There could be LBTQI Street Art worlds. Political Street Art worlds. Celebrity Street Art worlds.
What about the city itself as a unifying theme? Street Art of Sao Paulo. Street Art of Istanbul. Or a more focused, Faith47’s Cape Town.
What’s After That
The Street Art Database I have personally assembled currently consists of 338 pieces of high quality public art captured acceptably or better, sometimes much better, all downloaded from the Street View database. Most of them are from the Google Car. Some were uploaded by individuals, often from locations the Google car copuld never drive.
I have recorded 360 degreee images in Asia and North America and contributed many of the them to the Street View database.
I wish my Street Art collection was two orders of magnitude larger. I will never build a database that large on my own.
Some time, I will ask for addresses or street view links from anyone, street art they know something about and could provide some local context for. I will ask people to be part the events with street art they contributed, if they would like to be, in headsets or on mobile devices.
People gathering, saying what they think or feel — that will always be the point of it. Street art is a draw. People will come. It is engaging. People will talk about it. This is what I believe VR is for.
Tom Nickel writes about new media technologies and other topics he has little if any standing to write about. His work has not appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, The New Republic, or the New England Journal of Medicine.
Tom holds a Black Belt in Learning and is a founding Board Member of the African VR Campus & Centre and a long-time supporter of the Khmer Magic Music Bus.
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