Did you hear the one about the Member of Parliament who had their name changed on a newsletter published on their own party’s website? This isn’t actually a set up to a clever joke, it recently happened here in Aotearoa. It was, at the time, unclear if the less-than-flattering alteration was the result of a cyber hack or an internal edit by a dissatisfied employee. Politics aside, it raises an interesting question: what does vandalism look like in the digital realm? 

Graffiti, whether in more historical instances or the guise of ‘style writing’, has always centred on ego and dissent, manifested by subverting our shared environment. It is easy to see the influence of advertising and branding in graffiti’s bold, more developed forms, but even the simple tag is indicative of the desire to rewrite the city and declare one’s presence, ultimately a response to the make-up of the urban landscape. This is not a defence of graffiti’s inflammatory presence; it is instead to provide context for the relationship between graffiti and the spaces it inhabits.

So, as we increasingly occupy the digital realm, how might this space reflect the contestation we see playing out on walls in the real world? It is easy to assume hacking culture is the natural comparison, itself an evolving subculture that has reacted to different eras and technological and social change. Yet, despite overlapping aspects, ultimately hacking has a different sense of being and unique expressions from graffiti writing culture. 

Rather than reflecting on hacking as an equivalency, the interest here is whether graffiti culture could eventually translate into an online presence. Graffiti currently has a strange relationship with the analogue/digital balancing act, favouring the real-world risk with the profile offered by the online world. Artists use social media platforms to gain ‘Instafame’ (as Australian graffiti scholar Lachlan MacDowall terms the relationship) for their work, instantly reaching larger audiences than previously possible. But there are also those who remain distrustful of this exposure, favouring anonymity and real credibility earned through active public output. This tension is heightened with the rise of digital drawings that bypass the danger of painting in the streets. It has become difficult to immediately identify real paintings (including murals) from ‘Photo-shopped’ creations.

The creation of fake interventions is problematic when they are presented as real. But what if this approach was instead applied to the digital realm, maintaining both the subversive and stylistic integrity of graffiti culture? As websites and feeds have become the primary vehicles for us to consume content, they are also positioned as prime targets for overwriting and the claim to presence amongst the isolating effects of contemporary society. How might the tenets of graffiti culture be maintained and evolved to fit within the digital realm? I am not an expert in cyber-security. I cannot proscribe exactly what such a transition would require technically.  

Undeniably the skill-sets of a graffiti artist would likely need to expand from the practical knowledge of aerosol cans and caps to the additional understanding of vectors and code, a hybrid of art and hacking. Would the attraction of subversion and the potential audience be enough to embrace a new approach if it also meant an evolution of process and aesthetic? Altering the content of a website for comedic effect, either through the addition of a sentence or a link to a viral video, or even affecting its ability to operate provides a different outcome than graffiti’s proclamation of presence, would a tag written over a website banner evoke the same effect without the physical reality? Whatever the answer, as it continues to dominate our experience, the digital realm remains a ripe space for intervention and consideration.

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1. DSide, Graffiti has commandeered the real world - but what is its relationship with the digital realm