The Paris based street art collective, whose name translates as digital acrylic, have been performing together for the best part of a decade pioneering the use of digital technology in audio-visual and animation infused performances. The ever-changing murals they produce mix graffiti, stencils and posters with live projections of images, animations and videos, into dynamic multi-media palimpsests. The art is in the performance itself, rather than the murals or other detritus left behind afterwards. It's crucial to the group that their 'urban orientated, interactive live graphic jazz' performances are only viewable for a limited period of time. The 'magic' isn't in whatever mural results at the end of their multilayered and multi-authored composition; that's merely a trace of what is really going on. It's the intersecting layers of media, of images, icons and references, all merging together and interacting into a splurged artistic communication that reflects the ever-changing nature of the social and urban environment within which it exists.

 

AKRYLONUMERIK teaser from mappingfestival on Vimeo.

 

Street art is essentially collective and public. This means that at its heart it's to be effaced and buried by the marks of others. The very act of making the mark public invites repetition, invites effacement, invites it's own loss and passing. Yet as street art has become more popular, gained commercial success and moved off the street into gallery settings, this invitation to efface the original mark is itself lost. The essential transience of street art is replaced or displaced by the logic of collection; by turning into a product the work falls to familiar capitalist logics where perhaps the genre first emerged as a reaction against urban and cultural space dominated by advertising, controlled and programmed by the latent consumerisms of our capitalist age. Through putting the emphasis squarely on performance, Akrylonumerik revive this transience. Theirs is an art of urban time lapse, exploring how the street or wall is marked by all the people who have passed through it, touched it, even if only with the gaze of their eyes. How this urban setting is transformed by this and passes forever into the new.

 

 

One of the most interesting aspects of Akrylonumerik's practice is their use of touch-screen technology in composing and manipulating projected imagery. Their touch-screen desk, which looks like an oversized iPad, designed in-house and running off open source software they've been central to developing, is only the tip of the iceberg of the group's dedication to pioneering new technology and its intersection with the arts. The desk enables them to manipulate any image or video being projected live, with all the tools available in an Adobe package, moving it across the canvas, changing its colours, inverting the animation loop, all in response to and interacting with the spray-painting and stencilling happening underneath. The group are currently testing motion-capture technologies as a way of enabling them to paint digitally straight onto the canvas through the light of the projection, and thus add the additional dimension of painting with the body. An earlier manifestation of this can be seen in their photo-receptive touch-wall , which in part recalls the futurological triumph of technological foresight that was the graphical interface used by the police in Minority Report. At the end of the video of Akrylonumerik's performance at the Foundation Cartier, you can see the starry-eyed wonderment in little kids' eyes as they get up and start playing with the touch-wall after the group have finished, manipulating the paint-brush icons to paint light onto the wall besides them. At barely three months ago my father had me sat before our Apple II home computer, puppeteering my manipulation of the keyboard to conjure shapes upon the screen. If I am from the first generation to lived my entire life with a computer in front of me, given the radical technological changes we've seen in the past three decades, then I marvel at the futures these young minds will adapt into long after I succumb to Carousel.

 

Black book à la Fondation Cartier from jaimitocdm on Vimeo.

 

An interesting development has been Akrylonumerik's recent collaboration with Nissan in promoting their Crossover range. Called Journey to Urbanproof, the collaboration involved the group producing seven murals in the space of five days, each mural relating to a different aspect of Nissan's evolving Crossover range targeted at urban drivers. As each mural was being made the group meticulously documented their evolution, collecting together thousands of images from which to recreate the journey in a dynamic online portal on the Nissan site. The interesting aspect of the portal is the potential for the troupe to archive their future performances online in a similar fashion, potentially finding a way of sustaining the energy and interactivity into a continuous ongoing performance.