For Inside Out Festival on 24th September I demoed Evan Roth’s Graffiti Analysis software. The hoardings outside Friction Arts’ building have just been dying to be tagged, so I felt this software would give the opportunity to do so, but in a very safe method.

You can see some still shots here on Flickr and even download the tags for your own viewing pleasure. For this there were a few tasks to overcome. The Graffiti Analysis capture and playback software has reached version 3, but only for Mac’s (at the moment). Version 2, which is available for Windows and Linux is still very capable. However, for Linux, the files created in the capture application don’t work with the playback application. They create their own .graf files and the playback application can only handle .gml files. d’oh! Luckily I was able to enlist the skills of the ever talented Andrew Thomas, who created a Processing script that converts between the two files (tested on version 1.1). You can download this and try it for yourself. It hasn’t failed me so far!

Click to download the sketch

As I was using this rather tricky technique of capturing the light I had to strap a few lights to a glove to ensure enough light was emitted and captured. I highly recommend that you try this for yourself, with or without a real pen 😉