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Throwies and Lasers: The Graffiti Research Lab at Eyebeam

In 2005, 2 fellows at Eyebeam in Chelsea set out to build tools for graffiti writers, and the Graffiti Research Lab lit up New York with magnets, LEDs and lasers.

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In 2005, 2 fellows at Eyebeam OpenLab, an open source creative technology lab in New York, started the Graffiti Research Lab. Evan Roth had come from architecture and an MFA at Parsons, where his thesis was Graffiti Analysis. James Powderly had worked in aerospace robotics on NASA financed Mars missions. Eyebeam itself had been founded in 1998 by John Seward Johnson III with David S. Johnson and Roderic R. Richardson, first conceived as a digital effects and coding atelier and a center for youth education, and by the mid 2000s it was a home for new media research. "I'm not a graffiti writer," Powderly told The New York Times in 2006. "I like to say I'm a graffiti engineer."

The goal was not to make graffiti but to rethink how people make it and look at it, by developing tools that writers could use, then posting the instructions online. The best known was the LED Throwie: a lithium battery, a 10mm diffused LED and a rare earth magnet taped together. The lab called it "an inexpensive way to add color to any ferromagnetic surface in your neighborhood," and the instructions were simple: "Throw it up high and in quantity to impress your friends and city officials." The lab pointed anyone who wanted to make their own to a step by step guide on Instructables.

Then came L.A.S.E.R. Tag, a tagging system that let writers draw with a laser pointer on the side of a building, with open source code written in C++ using openFrameworks. In 2007 the lab's laser graffiti put dripping letters of light on a building in Hell's Kitchen, and in the Netherlands the system rode on a Hymer camper through Rotterdam with a crew of Dutch writers. Light and projection let them write at the scale of the city and leave nothing behind when the power went off.

The lab's afterlife is a big part of its legacy. Roth went on to co-found the Free Art and Technology Lab, F.A.T. Lab, in 2007, a collective dedicated to the meeting of open source hacking and popular culture, and the Graffiti Research Lab appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in Design and the Elastic Mind in 2008. Eyebeam, which still supports artists working with technology, keeps Roth and Powderly in its roster of former fellows, a reminder that some of the most influential street art of the 2000s was engineered in a Chelsea lab and given away.

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