SPRAY

Graduation Course Conclusion Project — 8th Semester in Digital Design

The “Spray” project aimed to recover and perpetuate the memory of graffiti, initially in the city of São Paulo. With this objective, the project uses concepts from the Situationist International, in order to support the proposal of a derivé (“drift”) in time that opposes the current city, providing a new reading of the urban space in the present.

Situationist International (SI) was an artistic and political movement that emerged in the 1950s and that criticized the effects of spectacularization in cities, viewing them as a field of political and revolutionary action. In order to detach itself from the routines resulting from capitalism, SI proposes the derivé (“drift”): a method of walking around the city without elaborate routes, through which the population would appropriate the public space, detaching itself from the routine and culture of alienation.

In the project, this proposal is portrayed through an application for mobile devices, which proposes the creation of a collaborative collection of photographs of the city’s graffiti taken in the same place on different dates. Through this grouping of images, the application provides a drift through time and space, in addition to a visualization of the ephemerally present in urban centers.

The creation of the symbol was made from a triad of elements representing the project, these being: the spray can be used to make the graffiti, the hourglass representing the change over time, and the “S” referring to the project name “Spray”.

The pink and blue colors in the sand of the hourglass are references to the primary colors, used in painting and printing processes to create other tones, in the same way as the creative process itself in urban art. The logo makes direct reference to common forms of writing in urban art, from the iconic tags of the 80s to the graffiti of today.