An Introduction To Graffiti Markup Language

Some of you may already know the Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab, a New York-based group famous for its technological approach to graffiti, expressed in innovative projects such as the Laser Tag. Yesterday, a development team consisting of Theodore Watson, Jamie Wilkinson, Chris Sugrue and Evan Roth, introduced the latest F.A.T. project Graffiti Markup Language, which could be considered an interesting step in digitalization of street art.

Described as “a new digital standard for tomorrow’s vandals”, Graffiti Markup Language is a new XML file type specifically designed for archiving graffiti tags. GML is an open data format intended to be easily used as an input to other digital systems. “Gestural graffiti motion data of a tag created in GML-supported software is saved as a text file with a “.GML” extension.” These can be uploaded and freely downloaded on 000000book.com. This week F.A.T. will publish new GML related projects on a daily basis: “There will be multiple new free software releases, open data repositories, iphone apps, robots, guest bloggers and more.” An example of GML code can be found here.


The notion that graffiti tags could be rationalized through computer analysis and transformation into specific code is an interesting thought in itself, and for that reason this F.A.T. exploration absolutely deserves attention. Watch the video below to find out how Graffiti Markup Language works.

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