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Admired and despised, created and destroyed, legal and illegal: Contemporary graffiti are polarising, and not everybody agrees to label them as cultural heritage. However, if one is among the steadily increasing number of heritage professionals and academics that value these short-lived creations, their digital documentation can be considered a part of our legacy to future generations. To document the geometric and spectral properties of a graffito, digital photographs seem to be appropriate. This also holds true when documenting an entire graffiti-scape consisting of 1000s of individual creations. However, proper photo-based digital documentation of such an entire scene comes with logistical and technical challenges, certainly if the documentation is considered the basis for further analysis of the heritage assets. One main technical challenge relates to the photographs themselves. Conventional photographs suffer from multiple image distortions and usually lack a uniform scale, which hinders the derivation of dimensions and proportions. In addition, a single graffito photograph often does not reflect the meaning and setting intended by the graffitist, as the creation is frequently shown as an isolated entity without its surrounding environment. In other words, single photographs lack the spatio-temporal context, which is often of major importance in cultural heritage studies. Here, we present AUTOGRAF, an automated and freely-available orthorectification tool which converts conventional graffiti photos into high-resolution, distortion-free, and georeferenced graffiti orthophotomaps, a metric yet visual product. AUTOGRAF was developed in the framework of INDIGO, a graffiti-centred research project. Not only do these georeferenced photos support proper analysis, but they also set the basis for placing the graffiti in their native, albeit virtual, 3D environment. An experiment showed that 95 out of 100 tested graffiti photo sets were successfully orthorectified, highlighting the proposed methodology’s potential to improve and automate one part of contemporary graffiti’s digital preservation.

Project INDIGO aims to document, disseminate and analyse the contemporary graffiti-scape surrounding the Viennese Danube Canal (Austria). Despite its focus on present-day graffiti, INDIGO is considered an archaeological project. The authors take the stance that archaeology is an academic discipline trying to understand (our complex relationships with) the material remains of the stratified past, whether that past was centuries (i.e. the remote or ancient past) or days (i.e. the contemporary or recent past) ago. From this point of view, it should not be surprising that INDIGO applies (and improves) various tools and workflows commonly used for acquiring and managing data in more conventional archaeological projects. However, outsiders might find it strange to hear that a discipline examining space- and time-bound anthropogenic activities has only developed tools to properly analyse and visualise the two-dimensional spatial component of archaeological data. Effective practical approaches to handling the third spatial dimension, let alone the temporal aspect, are generally lacking. INDIGO wants to leverage its focus on "less old" things to advance the management, visualisation and analysis of the uncertain spatio-temporal boundaries characterising "older things". Post-depositional processes like erosion, ploughing, animal digging, and soil formation increasingly bias and fuzzyfy the spatial and temporal information obtainable from common archaeological remains like Bronze Age ditches or Celtic ceramics. Because modern artefacts like graffiti are typically less influenced by post-depositional processes, and since their continuous "layering" (which archaeologists call stratification) can be documented in situ, contemporary graffiti-scapes lend themselves well to develop archaeologically-relevant ways of dealing with spatio-temporal complexities. Despite considerable effort, monitoring the dynamic nature of graffiti along the Danube water channel still poses problems concerning data quality and completeness. INDIGO's initial spatial and temporal (meta)data only accounts for when (and if) a graffito was photographed. Whether the graffito production occurred hours or days before typically remains unknown, while some graffiti even go undocumented. INDIGO relies on a polygon for each graffito to address these challenges. This polygon is first indicated on – and stored within – each graffito's overview photo via the bespoke software GRAPHIS. AUTOGRAF – another tool coded within INDIGO – transforms this image-bound two-dimensional polygon into a three-dimensional geometric entity correctly located in a real-world coordinate reference system. A GeoJSON file stores each graffito-polygon. This human- and machine-readable file complements the polygon coordinates with various attribute fields for temporal data. Some fields can be populated upon creating the polygon, while other temporal data might be automatically inferred from subsequent polygons. At the end of the process, each polygon should provide a digital, nuanced representation of one graffito's spatial and temporal dimensions. Through their combination, we hope that INDIGO's online visualisation platform can extract the various explicit or implicit spatial and temporal relationships among the thousands of documented graffiti., The INDIGO graffiti project is funded by the Heritage Science Austria programme of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW)

This presentation will introduce the online platform UrbanChameleon, which we have been developing to facilitate the analysis and dissemination of contemporary graffiti in Vienna, Austria. The platform is designed to visualise and analyse data collected in the scope of project INDIGO, which is funded by the Heritage Science Austria programme of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and focuses on circa 13 km of graffiti-covered surfaces along the Danube Canal. Project INDIGO utilises OpenAtlas, an open-source, web-based database system that leverages the CIDOC CRM (Conceptual Reference Model) to manage and visualise historical, archaeological, and cultural heritage data. The CIDOC CRM is an international standard ontology for exchanging and integrating heterogeneous cultural heritage data and information, enabling the representation of complex relationships and events in a structured manner. The online platform seamlessly connects to OpenAtlas through an API (Application Programming Interface), a set of protocols and tools that enables different software applications to communicate and share data. This integration allows the platform to efficiently fetch and incorporate graffiti data, ensuring a comprehensive and user-friendly exploration experience. A key feature of the online platform is a 4D viewer that allows users to visualise graffiti in its original location and context, as well as track its temporal changes. This is achieved via Cesium-based tools, open-source software libraries designed to create and visualise 3D geospatial data in web applications. Known for their powerful and flexible capabilities, these tools enable the rendering of high-quality, realistic 3D environments. By incorporating Cesium-based tools into UrbanChameleon, the platform provides immersive and detailed visualisations of graffiti, making it easier for users to understand their spatial context. UrbanChameleon benefits from enhanced stability, performance, and scalability, providing a seamless and efficient user experience when exploring graffiti in Vienna. The platform features a user-friendly interface with an interactive map component, offering valuable insights into the distribution and context of contemporary graffiti. By focusing on the core functionalities and user experience, the platform allows researchers to study and understand the cultural heritage and significance of graffiti in an intuitive manner. In conclusion, the UrbanChameleon platform provides researchers with a comprehensive tool to explore, search, and filter graffiti in Vienna, specifically at the Hall of Fames along the Danube Canal. It enables them to uncover layers of meaning and contextual significance. To truly engage with those graffiti records and unlock their analytical potential, smooth data streaming and proper treatment of the temporal dimension are key, which UrbanChameleon enables via various technical means. In the end, we hope that the platform can be used to digitally explore the colourful walls of the Danube Canal over time and space, but also facilitate the creation of valuable insights into the evolution of graffiti and its role in our contemporary society., The INDIGO graffiti project is funded by the Heritage Science Austria programme of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW)

This is the book of abstracts created for the goINDIGO 2023international graffiti symposium organised in the framework of the academic project INDIGO.

Graffiti have always been a contested form of human expression. Although they have increasingly been accepted as museum objects or study topics, in many cases they are neglected or even actively rejected as human expressions worth documenting and (digitally) preserving. However, some scholarly initiatives have tried to overcome this lack of coverage of the graffiti scene. INGRID, for example, collects images from Germany over a span of forty years, while SprayCity archives photos of graffiti from all over Austria and beyond. The limitations with pre-existing solutions, however, is that they do not have standardized criteria to create and process the digital surrogates of graffiti, especially because they derive the photos from different sources. Project INDIGO aims to overcome these difficulties by offering a systematic, standardized and extensive coverage of a specific area of the city of Vienna, the Danube Canal, which has been a hotspot for graffiti production since the 1980s. For this purpose, INDIGO has developed a highly reliable and reproducible workflow that ensures color accuracy and automated orthorectification of the pictures, and has combined it with a curated digital preservation strategy that involves different services, such as the digital repository ARCHE and the spatial database application OpenAtlas. While drawing on the specific experience and knowledge acquired in the course of project INDIGO, this paper aims to offer an overview of the challenges that must be faced when digitizing, documenting and preserving contemporary graffiti. It will focus on three key aspects: (1) heritagization, i.e. the process by which an object made by humans such as a graffito becomes a valuable sample of cultural heritage; (2) FAIRness, the compliance with the so-called FAIR principles (findability, accessibility, interoperability, reusability) in the development of a digital preservation strategy for graffiti; (3) sustainability, i.e. how we can ensure that the data and services provided can integrate into the existing research environment, in order to safeguard the continuous relevance of the products of the research project. While graffiti are an edge case in the field of current studies, this paper aims to show that discussing the challenges linked to the digital preservation of graffiti can also help us think more carefully about possible improvements in digital preservation strategies for other, more traditionally accepted, kinds of cultural heritage assets.

What does it mean to create graffiti? What exactly is (or are) graffiti? Graffiti and street art differ, right? Almost everyone has an opinion on what constitutes (modern) graffiti. Consequently, the term has taken on the most varied meanings in the conversations of academics, in media coverage, or in daily life. So how can one be sure about the meaning of the term (or any graffiti-related term, for that matter)? This is why glossaries, dictionaries, and other types of lists with definitions exist on websites, at the beginning or end of coffee-table books, and in scientific articles. However, there is currently no generally available, updateable, broadly accepted and easy-to-expand list of graffiti-related terms. Therefore, in order to meet the need for systematisation and consistency required for a more comprehensive study of graffiti, project INDIGO embarked on the journey to create a graffiti thesaurus. Being a finite set of terms (i.e. a controlled vocabulary) with hierarchical relations, this thesaurus will make INDIGO’s graffiti classification explicit and hopes to serve as a reference for the broader (academic) graffiti community., document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes, 2022: document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes

goINDIGO 2022 has managed to bring various disciplines together. That is why the editors hope that the contributions in these proceedings can collectively be considered a proper methodological status quo on the inventorying and dissemination of graffiti records. Because most academic efforts focus on the analyses of graffiti, these proceedings also hope to kickstart further discussion and interdisciplinary scholarly action on the (need for) proper documentation and dissemination of graffiti. Critical, maybe even uncomfortable, reflections like those vented in this volume form an essential part of this discourse.

Graffiti are studied by, amongst many others, archaeologists, sociologists, (art) historians, linguists, ethnographers, architects, anthropologists, librarian scientists, geographers, criminologists, conservators, lawyers and architects. Although most of these professions rely on a digital representation of graffiti at a particular stage of their research, there has been strikingly little attention to how graffiti can effectively be monitored and digitally documented. And this is precisely one of the gaps that the heritage science project INDIGO is trying to fill. Through collaboration between geomatics, photography, data management and graffiti specialists, INDIGO aims to develop technical and logistical solutions that facilitate the systematic documentation, monitoring, and analysis of extensive graffiti-scapes. This paper focuses on the graffiti-discovering and data acquisition strategies INDIGO has been applying during its first project year. At the same time, the text explores new avenues for improving the existing approaches., document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes, 2022: document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes

During the first discussion round of goINDIGO 2022, which took place on Thursday, 12 May and was called Creators vs Academics, four local graffiti creators were invited to consider a series of (potentially provocative) statements in discussion with symposium participants (joining in-person and online). The statements, compiled by Geert Verhoeven in consultation with Samuel Merrill, were: Academia CHANGES graffiti Graffiti MUST be recorded ALL graffiti are archive-worthy Decontextualisation MATTERS Graffiti NEED categorisation Digital media are ESSENTIAL The four attending graffiti creators agreed to participate following their contact and invitation via Instagram. When introducing themselves, each conveyed their own, often close, relationship to the Donaukanal as well as their different levels of experience and exposure within Vienna’s wider graffiti scene. JANER ONE (active since 2012), for instance, took hope from doing graffiti in “tough times” and identified the Donaukanal as a really big playground—”it does not have many rules, and the few rules it has, you must pick up by yourself”—and a site of graffiti history. MANUEL SKIRL (active since 2006) meanwhile recounted how the openness and inclusiveness of the Donaukanal offered the chance to begin creating and, in time, to develop a personal style in “more artistic” directions. SERT (active since 2009) highlighted moving to Vienna partly to be close to the Donaukanal after growing up in a “pretty small village” in the countryside. SNUF’s (active since 2012) first piece was at the prestigious Donaukanal, the “best art gallery of the city with almost daily changing exhibitions”. Each of the four brought their personal, ‘inside’ perspectives to the discussion of the selected statements that is recorded in the following text. This text is not, however, a verbatim nor sequential account of that discussion. Firstly, although retaining the ‘feel’ of the discussion has been prioritised, the text has been edited for readability, and some superfluous content removed. Secondly, as is often the way with the most exploratory of dialogues, the main topic of conversation shifted quickly and regularly. Thus, although the six statements were originally detailed by Merrill (in his capacity as moderator) following a preamble at the start of the discussion round, in this text these statements (and their more detailed elaborations) have been chronologically redeployed to structure the text in a manner that might better serve the reader. The reordering of the transcription in this way means that in some places the text does not always flow consecutively in the way it did during the discussion. These places are indicated by […] and they do not only represent hops forward, but also hops backward in time. Finally, it is essential to know that all authors—of which none was a minor—have read this text and confirmed in writing that they were fine with their statements. This agreement notwithstanding, one must understand that these statements were raised in a lively discussion and must also be understood and treated this way., document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes, 2022: document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes

During the second discussion round of goINDIGO 2022, which took place on Friday, 13 May and was called Ethics & legality in graffiti (research), three out of many invited graffiti creators joined a discussion on (potentially provocative) statements with symposium participants (joining in-person and online). The statements, compiled by Geert Verhoeven in consultation with Benjamin Wild and Norbert Pfeifer, were: objectivity OVER morals objectivity OVER consequences graffiti INCLUDES exploitation copyright DOES NOT matter Donaukanal graffiti IGNORES the origins The three attending graffiti creators agreed to participate following their contact and invitation via Instagram. When introducing themselves, each conveyed their relationship to the Donaukanal and their different levels of experience and exposure within Vienna’s wider graffiti scene. DEADBEAT HERO (active in Vienna since 2014) is a Texan artist mainly focusing on street art while “dabbling in graffiti”. He owns an art studio and regularly interviews Viennese graffiti creators in his Artcade podcast. FUNKY (active intermittently since 2005) is a Bosnian, but Vienna-raised creator practising graffiti “with ups and downs and a lot of breaks like in life”. He was close to the Donaukanal a decade ago, but his central activity zone is now more to the north of Vienna. MANUEL SKIRL (active since 2006) is a Vienna-based creator currently known for his organic structures formed by black and blue lines. The openness and inclusiveness of the Donaukanal scene offered him the chance to begin creating and, in time, to develop his personal style in “more artistic” directions. Each of the three brought their own perspectives to the discussion of the selected statements, recorded in the following text. However, this text is not a verbatim or sequential account of that discussion. First, although retaining the ‘feel’ of the discussion has been prioritised, the text has been slightly edited for readability, and superfluous content got removed. Second, as is often the way with the most exploratory of dialogues, the main topic of conversation shifted quickly and regularly. Although the five statements were individually framed by Norbert Pfeifer (after which Enrico Bonadio took on the moderator role), the first four statements and their more detailed elaborations have been reduced to two sections to structure the text in a manner that might better serve the reader. This reordering of the transcription means that, in some places, the text does not always flow consecutively in the way it did during the discussion. These places are indicated by […], and they do not only mark hops forward but also hops backward in time. Finally, it is essential to know that all authors—of which none was a minor—have read this text and confirmed in writing that they were okay with their statements. This agreement notwithstanding, one must understand that these statements were raised in a lively discussion and must also be understood and treated this way., document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes, 2022: document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes

Colourful and quickly changing: graffiti can be considered the chameleon skin of any urban landscape (Curtis, 2005). Two millennia ago, people were already writing their thoughts on the urban surfaces of Greek Aphrodisias in present-day Turkey (Chaniotis, 2011) or Roman Pompeii in Italy (Garrucci, 1856), and this practice has lived on throughout many cultures until this very day (Lovata & Olton, 2015; McDonald, 2013). Because of this long history and the multitude of surfaces on which graffiti have appeared, defining ‘graffiti’ is complicated. A safe but overly general definition could be that graffiti are a multifaceted, ‘self-authorised’ (Blanché, 2015) form of personal mark-making that exploits the public space using a visual intervention. ‘Graffiti’ can thus be an umbrella term for many ancient and contemporary mark-making practices, including engravings, paintings, sprayings, stickers, and other personal expressions attached to public (urban) surfaces in legal or illegal ways. [Note that we use the adjective ’ancient’ instead of the commonly found ‘historic’ since the latter excludes prehistoric paintings and inscriptions from the graffiti definition. For more info on how to define ‘graffiti’, see Schlegel et al. in this volume]., document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes, 2022: document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes

This presentation was given by Jona Schlegel and Massimiliano Carloni during Session D of the goINDIGO 2022 international graffiti symposium. Awareness of the 20th-century graffiti phenomenon spread globally with movies like Wild Style (1983) and photo books like Subway art (1984). To educate the public on the graffiti movement, graffiti specific terms were described and discussed throughout such books or added at the end in the form of a glossary – an alphabetical list of words. However, these glossaries aimed only to explain the graffiti community terms to the broader public rather than to build up a fixed set of terms (and synonyms) or guidelines for the description of graffiti. This talk will illustrate how the INDIGO project attempts to fill this gap by building a thesaurus, i.e. a structured, controlled (and thus finite) dictionary of hierarchically related terms. The creation of such a thesaurus must tackle particular challenges characteristic of graffiti, including: regional terms that can differ widely (international: stencil; French: pochoir); constantly changing terminology (hit → tag; masterpiece → piece); lack of connection between modern-day graffiti and historical forms of personalised expression like cave art and petroglyphs (studied in archaeology). These challenges require technical solutions that make it possible to precisely structure the thesaurus items while also describing the relationships between the terms in different ways and reconciling inconsistent terminology. Therefore, this presentation will detail how INDIGO profits from modern Semantic Web technologies. Thanks to these, single pieces of information can be represented according to formally defined models, linked to each other, and made available on the web for reference and reuse by a wider audience. More specifically, the talk will illustrate the advantages of the model being used by the INDIGO thesaurus, the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS), a recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium employed in a wide range of fields, including cultural heritage. This model allows to document the thesaurus terms accurately (e.g. providing historical information about them), describe their hierarchical (and non-hierarchical) relationships, and link them to existing initiatives, such as Wikidata and the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus. The development of the INDIGO thesaurus will allow the project team to have a clear, explicit, and reproducible way to describe graffiti and their constituent parts. At the same time, since the thesaurus will also be the product of the experience and feedback provided by external experts, it is envisaged that it will serve as a reference for the broader (academic) graffiti community., The INDIGO graffiti project is funded by the Heritage Science Austria programme of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW)

This presentation was given by Geert Verhoeven during Session A of the goINDIGO 2022 international graffiti symposium. Project INDIGO wants to ensure the digital survival of a large part of Vienna's graffiti-scape by creating a long-term, accurate, exhaustive, open access and interactive online archive. The digital photographs of graffiti constitute one of the archive's main backbones. Not only do they represent the spectral and spatial data about every graffito, but they are also used to extract the three-dimensional surface geometry needed to turn these photographs into colour-accurate, distortion-free orthophotographs. That is why INDIGO photographs are taken according to specific rules and with dedicated hardware. This talk will explain the rationale of INDIGO's photographic approach and detail the entire photo acquisition process: from the logistics for the bi-annual total coverage surveys (targeting the whole research area) to the camera settings and newly developed hardware for the bi-weekly photo tours (aiming to record new graffiti). The presentation will expand on INDIGO's current reliance on human memory and social media combined with specific apps to keep track of must-record changes in the graffiti-scape. However, the talk also reviews plans for a more automated change detection approach. Overall, this contribution wants to clarify that photographs, whether of graffiti or any other form of cultural heritage, typically serve a specific purpose. To reach that purpose, photographs should usually be more than mere snapshots. Via this talk's focus on INDIGO-specific photography strategies and hardware, the INDIGO team hopes to get critical feedback, valuable suggestions and collaboration proposals. These would benefit everybody involved and ideally lead to the joint development of more dedicated photo acquisition workflows for any cultural heritage recording or monitoring project.

This is the book of abstracts created for the goINDIGO 2022 international graffiti symposium organised in the framework of the academic project INDIGO.

This presentation was given by Benjamin Wild at the 3D-ARCH 2022 conference in Mantova, Italy. The presentation won the best paper award., The INDIGO graffiti project is funded by the Heritage Science Austria programme of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (��AW)

Graffiti is a short-lived form of heritage balancing between tangible and intangible, offensive and pleasant. Graffiti makes people laugh, wonder, angry, think. These conflicting traits are all present along Vienna's Donaukanal (Eng. Danube Canal), a recreational hotspot – located in the city's heart – famous for its endless display of graffiti. The graffiti-focused heritage science project INDIGO aims to build the basis to systematically document, monitor, and analyse circa 13 km of Donaukanal graffiti in the next decade. The first part of this paper details INDIGO's goals and overarching methodological framework, simultaneously placing it into the broader landscape of graffiti research. The second part of the text concentrates on INDIGO's graffiti documentation activities. Given the project's aim to create a spatially, spectrally, and temporally accurate record of all possible mark-makings attached in (il)legal ways to the public urban surfaces of the Donaukanal, it seems appropriate to provide insights on the photographic plus image-based modelling activities that form the foundation of INDIGO's graffiti recording strategy. The text ends with some envisioned strategies to streamline image acquisition and process the anticipated hundreds of thousands of images.