Graffiti Hacking | Although for some of you hacking is just a seven-letters word starting with h, for me the top news of today is about Evan Roth and his graffiti analysis project. Roth, who is one of the heads behind the Graffiti Research Lab (GRL), earned a lot of fame and credit for his computer-based researches on graffiti in the last months. Now his work gets another publicity push, when Mozilla Drumbeat chooses the “Graffiti Markup Language” for this year’s “Open Web Award” finalists! ...

Artist in Action | Last month, famous Austrian graffiti artist Nychos exhibited at Pure Evil Gallery in London. During his stay in the British capital I caught up with him on top of a roof in Shoreditch and took a nice graffiti action photo-series. Thanks to the bright sun and my friend Probs for making the shooting possible and to Revert and Inkfetish for the good company! Nychos, who is mainly known around the globe for his prolific street art concept “Rabbit Eye Movement”, combines in his urban artworks his cartoonist and illustrator attitude as well as his personal development and a big portion of humorous remarks and fun. ...

Photo Paste-Ups | French photographer and urban artist JR is in Shanghai to paste-up a new series of street photographs of elderly Chinese people. As Arrested Motion wrote, the “photos will be pasted up at locations that he feels speak to the heritage of a city that has definitely has its share of ups and downs”. After his participation in the “Abu Dhabi Art Fair” in 2009 and the fantastic “Women Are Heroes” project, “The Wrinkles of the City” is JR’s latest urban photography project and is supported by Magda Danysz Gallery. ...

Urban Art Show | The upcoming show by Niels “Shoe” Meulman, who recently painted a car in his well-known calligraffiti style, in Los Angeles seems to become rather interesting! It’s called “Calligraffiti Throw Ups” and features “new series of carbon acrylic on linen canvas works inspired by Shoe’s love for baseball, mayhem and cosmic unconsciousness”, which in my ears sounds quite spectacular with a lot of splatter effects, drips and of course high-level calligraphy… ...

Stencil Art | The Moniker Art Fair is going on and I had some busy last days, visiting all the live paintings by Herakut, Case and Titi-Freak and having fun at the VNA magazine issue party. But what’s more interesting is the fact that during the last days a lot of amazing new street artworks popped up around the Village Underground in London’s creative area Shoreditch! One really impressing is the new stencil artwork by internationally famous artist Boxi. He painted a whole wall in his well-known greyscale style including three of his brilliant multi-layer stencil spray-paintings. A must to see for every stencil art enthusiast in London! ...

Graffiti Legend | Everyone who has something to do with graffiti or urban arts in general should have heard about Mr. Jon Naar. Naar is, in addition to Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, one of the first photojournalists who documented graffiti and its environment in New York City! His legendary book “The Faith Of Graffiti” was published about 35 years ago and has been re-released in an expanded edition earlier this year. For that reason there were again a lot of specials about him and his book, his photographies and his opinion about the entire graffiti world… ...

Graffiti Documentary | As already mentioned, I photographically documented the creation of that new “Calculate” mural by famous British graffiti artist Ben Eine in London - But I was not alone! The graffiti wall is part of the Moniker Art Fair which will open its doors today and therefore a lot of other people and documentarists joined the creative process. Also a camera team by Babelgum was there and filmed the entire creation progress! Their video is online now and shows in almost three minutes how Ben Eine and his crew painted the mural in about two days. ...

Reverse Graffiti | I really laughed when I watched that new urban art project “Searching for Something Concrete” by interventional artist Brad Downey today, because I had the same idea together with an friend of mine a few month ago when we visited an exhibition in a gallery were the walls are periodically painted by artists, whitewashed by the gallery owner, painted by artists, whitewashed by the gallery owner, and so on… ...

Art Magazine | On September 14th, 2006 the first issue of an urban art magazine was printed which should later become one of my favourite underground art mags. Since then the quality, circulation and publicity of that quarterly street art and graffiti documenting magazine grew steadily and today “Very Nearly Almost” (VNA) is probably the most well-known magazine for urban art forms and their protagonists in Great Britain. What I really like about VNA is not only the interesting content or the nice pics. Much more it’s that ongoing advancement and of course the nice launch parties which unfortunately are confined to London. But I heard that this will maybe change in the near future… ...

London Graffiti | London-based graffiti artist Ben Eine is probably one of the most famous British graffiti artists and that not just since David Cameron has given one of his paintings to President Obama. Eine’s bold letters especially those on the shutters and of course the so called Alphabet Street are well-known around the globe! Last weekend, I met Ben while he and his crew spray-painted a new wall in Shoreditch as a part of the Moniker Art Fair which will open its doors this Thursday. Again he clearly arranged big bold letters, this time forming the word calculate. ...