Tracing the Lineage

1. New York Seen
2. Mode 2 & The Chrome Angelz
3. Alliance
4. Accumulated Design
5. Memetic Graffiti

_{Phase2 talking about his computer rock style and being a one-armed artist}

1. New York Seen

'Super' by Seen, 1981

By 1980 New York writers, such as Phase 2, T-Kid and Seen, had developed arrows, sliced off segments and connecting links, and used them as standard parts of their repertoires.

'The Wall', by Seen and Mitch 1980

'The Wall' is one of the most jaw-dropping whole cars featured in Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant's Subway Art. Taking some tips from Phase 2's computer style, this is wildstyle consisting almost entirely of straight lines. At that time it was a highly complex design - a bar connecting the letters at the top, interlocking and overlapping joints across the bottom, 3D solidity, and the whole piece pointing up towards an invisble perspective point above the train. And the collapsing wall background - making it seem as if the letters are bursting through a wall, a wall on a train...

'Mad.Demon 123' by Seen 1984

In contrast to the more angular, straight-edged wildstyle of Phase 2, Seen also developed a more curvy, flowing style. Note the sweeping segments flowing out from the 'M' and 'N'.

_{Seen adding 'doodads' in Style Wars (1983)}

_{The finished piece, later destroyed by Cap, in Style Wars 1983}

2. Mode 2 & The Chrome Angelz

'Chrome' by the Chrome Angelz, Covent Graden 1985 (?)

UK wildstyle. Note the similarities and differences between the Chrome Angelz 'C' and cantwo's 'C' above.

'Another Payback', by Mode 2, at Unity in West London 1992

'The World is Yours' Mode 2, Australia 1995

Too Much Stress On Da Brain, Mode 2, France (date unknown).

Mode 2 is most famous for his character work, but his contributions to style development are underestimated. His letters combine sharp edges and cut ups with grand, sweeping fluidity. He also took outlining, shadows and 3D to new levels, putting outlines within outlines (e.g. in 'Another Payback' and 'Too Much Stress on Da Brain') - and as putting on the outline is perhaps the most crucial and difficult part of a piece, to turn outlining into an art is a true mark of virtuosity.

cantwo also demonstrates amazing proficiency when it comes to letters, but cannot match Mode 2's characters in terms of range and flexibility - cantwo's characters tend to be rather similar - threatening/aggressive looking gangster types...

cantwo, Bremen Germany 2002

... whereas Mode 2 can turn his can to anything - trains, speakers, children, teenagers, cartoons, men and women...

Da Payback, Mode 2, Paris 1992

...He obviously prefers to paint women though - his character pieces often celebrate fertility, whether in the form of big voluptuous mistresses who can sometimes give Robert Crumb's implausible muses a run for their money, or in the form of sexy pregnancy.

'Untitled Nude' by Mode 2 (1997)

3. Alliance

'Seen' by Seen, Character by CanTwo, Frankfurt, Germany 1999

cantwo (or Can2) in an interview at lay-lo in 2000:

WW: Who influenced you the most coming up?
CAN2: The one I got most influenced by is SEEN, but also a lot of other old school N.Y. artists...

WW: How long have you been active?
CAN2: I'm 29 years and I'm active since I was 13 years (1983)...

WW: How did you get introduced to your crew(s)?
CAN2: I was in a lot of crews during my career, but soon I got tired of all and founded my own crew (STICK UP KIDS). We are all friends in that crew, regardless of how famous each member is, that's very important to me. 1999 SEEN got me into UA, which is a real big deal for me...

'Seen' by Seen, New York 1998

cantwo, Spain 2005

The simliarities between Seen and cantwo's styles are a strength - it is not slavish copying. Cantwo has inscribed himself into the classic wildstyle lineage, taken it to new levels of clarity and precision, given it a huge colour boost, and been accepted by the Godfather.

Seen is the Godfather of graffiti because he was unbelievably prolific, inventive and flexible, and because he kept going for decades. Cantwo can also catch you completely off guard with the range of his lettering:

cantwo & Smash137, Siwtzerland 2005

... and as he has been going for 23 years, getting better and better, cantwo is fully entitled to call his writing 'Royal Graff'

4. Accumulated Design

“The key to understanding Darwin’s contribution is granting the premise of the Argument from Design. What conclusion ought one to draw if one found a watch lying on the heath in the wilderness? As Paley (and Hume’s Cleanthes before him) insisted, a watch exhibits a tremendous amount of work done. Watches and other designed objects don’t just happen; they have to be a product of what the modern industry calls “R and D” – research and development and R and D is costly, in both time and energy, in both time and energy. Before Darwin the only model we had of a process by which this sort of R-and D work could be done was an Intelligent Artificer. What Darwin saw was that in principle the same work could be done by a different sort of process that distributed that work over huge amounts of time, by thriftily conserving the design work that been accomplished at each stage, so that it didn’t have to be done over again. In other words, Darwin had hit upon what we might call the Principle of Accumulation of Design. Things in the world (such as watches and organisms and who knows what else) may be seen as products embodying a certain amount of Design, and one way or another, that Design had to have been created by a process of R and D. Utter undesignedness – pure chaos in the old-fashioned sense – was the null or starting point.”

Daniel C. Dennett ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’ p68

The products of biology are the result of design, but not intelligent design. Evolution is a blind researcher, working incredibly slowly to make incremental adaptations, squandering vast resources in its development – unbelievably dumb design, in fact. However, natural selection produces increasingly complex designs by building on existing templates.

The difference between biological evolution - driven by genetic replication - and memetic evolution - driven by meme replication, obviously, ahem – is that memes can be produced consciously, with the benefit of foresight. It might be helpful to make a crude division between different types of memes.

1. Autogenetic Design

Many memes or types of memes evolve independently of any conscious decision making loops.

Language is a useful example. Artificial languages have not taken off, despite the fact they were designed to be more logical, consistent and economical than natural languages. Language evolves naturally, if ‘naturally’ is taken to mean ‘without foresight’. The big shifts in language are determined by external factors that can be traced and explained, or by utterly mysterious factors, but definitely not by conscious choice. Nobody planned the invasion of French into Old English, which led to mutated Middle English. The great vowel shift of the 15th century did not come about by people suddenly deciding to start pronouncing ‘make’ as /meik/ rather than /ma:k/. Accent drift and linguistic mutation take place regardless of the efforts of the prescriptive language police to keep language imprisoned in their standards. To a large extent, language seems to organize itself as it replicates its line through generations and across continents.

2. Deliberate Design & Meme Plagues

Some memes can be designed with foresight, tested and assessed, abandoned, kept in use or redesigned. Technological memes are the most obvious example of this; houses, pens, stringed instruments, recipes for jam, the TV, the telephone, cars and spray cans are all memes that are subject to conscious redesign (even if they have their claws deep lodged deep in the human psyche and their overall replication is not entirely under human control). There is a basic template determined by function, and no matter how much the meme mutates it will still retain the basic properties of the template, e.g. a house has walls and a roof, a pen is held by a hand (or foot or mouth) and inscribes marks on a surface.

Technological memes can have a major (and of course unpredictable) impact on ‘naturally evolving memes’ – the memes of txtng are replicated both within the txtng genre and outside, as they infiltrate other genres of writing.

Cultural and behavioural memes can also be subject to conscious design, but are not always. Religious and political memes can replicate and mutate by aesthetic persuasion and critical thinking, but also by viral infection.

The Renaissance and the Reformation were profound examples of meme reassessment and redesigning supervised by minds very much aware of what they were doing. In contrast, closed systems, such as Marxism and Fundamentalism, contain a core memetic code which is protected by circular cunning (“You would say that – you’re bourgeois.”) and the prohibition of truly critical thought. With such memes, the transmission takes the form of a plague and mutation/redesigning is effected by repackaging the core code (Marxism > Leninism > Stalinism > Maoism) and involves minimal critical thought.

5. Memetic Graffiti

There have been postmodern, semiotic ‘readings’ of graffiti, in which graffiti appears as a liberated, asignifying signifier – (i.e. letters and words have escaped from the interior of the book and library to the outside, they move on trains, but they don’t mean anything – graffiti is not imprisoned in the tyranny of meaning etc.). This is all very well and good, but...

Memetics would be more inclined to treat graffiti as a form of calligraphy:

Calligraphy (from Greek καλλος kallos "beauty" + γραφος graphos "writing") is the art of beautiful writing. A style of calligraphy is described as a hand.

Well-crafted calligraphy deferrers from typography; characters are fluid and spontaneous, improvised at the moment of writing. In the best examples the moving gestures of the hand are captured in a palpable pen and ink recording on the page. A full appreciation depends on feeling the rhythms and cadences of a piece of calligraphic writing.
Calligraphy is not a collection of slavishly-copied standardized hands. Letters may appear to march, to run, or even blow and flutter as if in a breeze. Masters of the art typically have several styles all uniquely their own, that is, one hand is a virtuoso of many styles.

The graffiti lineage could be traced back through illuminated and papyrus manuscripts - in which case it would be a reactivation of forgotten skills. Graffiti is very much a manuscript, in its Latin sense – manu ‘by hand’ and scriptus from the verb to write – and can be seen as the reactivation of skills which were obliterated by the onset of printing and typography.

A closeup of the illuminated letter P in the Malmesbury Bible.

Section from a Book of the Dead, Thebes, Dynasty 21, ca. 1070-945 B.C.

Graffiti writers can be compared to the elite scribes of the past who laboured over manuscripts that few could read or appreciate. Tomek pointed out in the comment below, “The art of hip-hop is very much mutually controlled by its creators.” The meanings and messages of a graffiti piece are also very much encrypted and disguised by their writers. Just because cantwo writes multiple mutations of ‘cantwo’ all the time, in it does not mean that his pieces are asignifying.

Graffiti is full of messages, mostly for very specific recipients equipped with state-of-the art decryption devices. The trains of New York were once like mobile notice boards covered in messages most of the population could not understand. Sometimes the message can be simple - “Look at what I have done to the letter ‘S’!”, “Look at this new thing I’ve invented!”, “We can do this now - Look!” – sometimes the message can affirm an aspect of Hip Hop culture, or sometimes a political or subversive message might be written in big, bold letters for all the public to comprehend.

The latest stage in the evolution of graffiti as memetics is the replication of graffiti style lettering and characters in graphic design and computer graphics. Though this can often mean that the fluidity and aesthetic appeal of graffiti is put at the service of marketing, exemplifying capitalism's tendency to appropriate movements from the street, repackage them and sell them back to us, it also means that computers and graffiti are now in a positive symbiotic relationship, where the streets feedback on computers and computers feedback on the streets. Typography has become far more dynamic and animated since the advent of graffiti.

Perhaps the most exciting potential of computer graphics is 3D: now a piece of graffiti can take on a 3D form in the confines of a computer screen. For a hint of what's to come, have a look at the Style Wars website, the trains section...

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