Imagine a typical first day of school at Naba University, Milan. You come in, slapping high-fives with your mates and start an intensive workshop for creating interactive digital graffiti (Diffiti), designing small computer games, and project your content all over the school walls. On other classes near by, Crispin Jones runs a workshop that deals with personalization of future mobile phone, and Elio Caccavale’s workshop deals with DNA modifications, hypothetical products and social fictional scenarios that engage students’ imaginations.
…Who said the first day of school is always the hardest?

What is Diffiti

Diffiti is simply the art of digital graffiti, which came to the public awareness mostly by Graffiti Research Lab, an art group dedicated to outfitting graffiti writers, artists and protesters with open source technologies for urban communication.
Since the term for this art was yet to be defined, we simply named it Diffiti.

Although Diffiti can be preformed in many ways, such as LED Throwies, L.A.S.E.R. Tag, Electrograf and High Writer, our workshop concentrated on using Projection Bombing (projecting visuals on a building’s surface), and our aim was to create interactive displays, allowing people passing-by a chance to interact with the architecture in an intuitive and playful way, remaining on large scale throughout.

Following the spirit of Graffiti Research lab, we also provide an open source platform made in Macromedia Flash™, allowing anyone to use and change our original code and graphics, however they see fit.
Following our step-by-step “HOWTO”, we encourage other students and Diffiti artists to “get out there” and bomb the place (with a projector, that is).

How does it work?

In Difitti, a strong projector is projecting display-content on a surface of a large building, or other appropriate landscape elements.
This projector is connected to a laptop, running Flash™ application that generates the visuals, and provides the logic for the interaction system.
A Joypad is connected to the laptop’s USB port by a long cable. A participant is handed the JoyPad, and can then control the diplayed content, and manipulate it.
The visuals of this playful action are seen from miles away, and blend with the city’s landscape.

Enter our “HOWTO” section to get a step-by-step instruction, and do it yourself. You’ll soon discover how fun and easy it is.

Final presentation

Final presentation in Naba October 12 2007

Related pages

Click here and download our flash source code we used in our final presentation, feel free to change and modifiy it to your needs

Click here for some prototypes videos

Click here to see the first presentation about graffiti and diffiti

Participants

Class by: Yaniv Steiner and Riccardo Strobbia with Stefano Mirti.
Editor: Saar Shai
Special thanks to: Rachel Fincken , Elio Caccavale , Crispin Jones , Laura Perin , Stefano Testa , Luca Poncellini , Walter Aprile.

Naba Academy of Arts and Design, Milan Italy.