Last Friday, I got to take part in the first public use of PaintOut, a digital spraypaint program developed by fellow Parsons MFA DT candidate, Leif Percifield. Developed over a two-year period while in New Mexico, Percifield built a transparent digital spray can that contains an infrared sensor, color-picker dial with nifty LED indicator, and and undo/save/clear button. The spraycan sends the infrared signals to a mobile projection rig he built out of a wheeled grocery cart, powered by an 80-lb boat battery that doubles as a grounding weight, allowing an elevating tripod to raise the projector to well over 6ft. As this is an on-going and fairly open project, please stay tuned as PaintOut is improved and iterated, hopefully along with our tagging skills to match.

Video Description:
Students from Parsons graduate MFA Design & Technology program took to the streets on Friday night of October 15, 2010 and tagged a number of public surfaces using digital spraypaint. Using technology developed over a 2 year period by Leif Percifield, taggers used a digital spray can with controls to change color, undo, save and erase in conjunction with a mobile projector rig. Video captured and edited by Alex Koplin.
This project is ongoing, and plans for future iterations include paint as unmasked moving video and more responsive and realistic paint characteristics once the program is ported from Action Script to Open Frameworks. Ideas? Questions? Thoughts? Share and stay tuned for more!

Some more background and personal narrative:

For our first trials, we decided to keep it local and relatively small, as a large, flat, preferably unlit public surface isn’t easy to find in Manhattan these days. The first test using the battery to power the rig took place in the lobby of one of Parsons’ main buildings, the Shiela C. Johnson Design Center. A few kinks would need to be worked out, but on the whole, it got working pretty quickly. Then I thought of how it might be a devilishly fun idea to tag the facade of NYU’s ITP building, home to the university’s counterpart to our own program, with a little Parsons MFA DT…all in good fun. Crowds of passersby stopped and watched curiously, many were amazed at the glow of yellows, blues and greens, and amused as we experimented and played around. The final location we planned to tag was on the side of Washington Square Park’s massive monument. It might have been a stretch, as the monument was sure to be well-lit, but fortunately for us, one side was not. And so we set up in an even more open public space and went to work, this time resolving not to erase anything, but instead paint over. At one point, this guy who had been screaming at people, “don’t you EVER…go to sleep tonight,” caught what we were doing, and was instantly drawn in. He actually, sort of like a little kid, snatched the paint can from one of the Parsons crew and at 3:52 mins in, began to add to the collage. He claimed to be a member of some of New York’s earliest graffiti artists in the 70’s, which is evident in his can control. At one point, I added a bit of orange gradient to his “Son” tag, and then proceeded in throwing my H/34 tag over top. He protested, as of course tagging over someone else’s tag is equivalent to a dis, or getting served…thank God for the undo button.

Posted in Design and Parsons Posted by on Oct 19 2010 11:00 am