Inside Out Project: Street Artist JR’s $100K TED Prize

What the global importance of women has to do with favela murals and graffiti in Kibera.

Last fall, in a bold and unexpected move, TED granted the $100,000 TEDPrize to shadowy Parisian street artist JR. Known for his large-scale graffiti murals tackling social justice and human rights issues like freedom and identity, the semi-anonymous 27-year-old artist made his most revealing public appearance to date on the TED stage this week, showing some of his truly incredible work and sharing his vision for how the prize will empower his art.

The launch of JR’s Inside Out Project, an ambitious global collaborative art initiative, is a truly inspired experiment in civic engagement through art — a different iteration of something we looked at earlier this week.

If JR’s project tickled your soul like it did ours, here’s how to get involved.

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Street Sketchbook: The Creative Process of Top Graffiti Artists

It’s no secret we have a soft spot for street art books. So we’re all over Street Sketchbook: Journeys — a rare peek inside the sketchbooks of 26 of the world’s hottest new artists.

From Brazil’s iconic favelas to Tokyo’s backalleys, it reveals both globe-trotting adventures and rich internal landscapes in 227 large-format pages and lush double-spreads of pure creative genius.

Street Sketchbook: Journeys is the sequel to Tristan Manco’s 2007 gem, Street Sketchbook: Inside the Journals of International Street and Graffiti Artists.

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Facadeprinter: Graffiti Meets Paintball

Automating anti-establishment, or what street art has to do with disaster relief.

Much of street art revolves around the cult of the individual creator, creeping through the night to meticulously paint, stencil or tag a wall by hand. But can technology subvert this ethos? Facadeprinter is an inkjet printer in architectonical scale — a simple, software-controlled robot that shoots artwork from a distance of up to 12 meters, dot by dot, onto the target surface area. Think Banksy meets paintball meets ChalkBot — in other words, graffiti for geeks.

Designed by German duo Martin Fussenegger and Michael Sebastian, Facadeprinter can render artwork as large as 8 by 10 meters and, depending on the paint used, can produce permanent or temporary images. Besides the obvious uses in large-scale street art and advertising installations, the technology could have some interesting and rather useful applications in disaster relief, where the rapid printing process can enable quick and effective visual communication signaling shelter, food and water, danger zones, or medical aid.

Design is research. Driven by the desire to discover and understand. Above all a new design comes from a foreshadowing, which is looked into. Step by step this turns into an insight. If someone finally senses the result as being ‘beautiful’ or ‘new’, these are the many steps required of understanding, which produce a coherent whole. New aesthetics through new technology. Thus the Facadeprinter and the resulting rough printed appearance inseparably belong together.”

Here’s how it works: An integrated laser displays a bounding box of the artwork onto the wall, affixing its position. A paintball system converted into a printhead then shoots the color balls onto the wall, conveying the gelatine-encapsulated color balls to the marker where they are accelerated to a speed of 200km per hour. Upon contact with the wall, the balls burst, leaving dots 5 to 10 cm in diameter. The emptied out gelatine shells fall down to the ground where they can decompose naturally after rain without residue.

What makes Facadeprinter particularly interesting is that it’s an odd intersection of art and algorithm, raising questions of whether we can automate street art and preserve its message, and whether urban visual communication can serve as a design-driven humanitarian solution.

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Drainspotting: Japan’s Unique Visual Subculture

What dragons have to do with civic identity and geolocation scavenger hunts.

We have a soft spot for street art, especially unusual work that plays with pieces of the urban environment in unexpected ways. (Like those Brazilian storm drain graffiti.) Well, this month, we’re in luck: June 22 marks the official release of the much-anticipated Drainspotting book — a stunning photographic anthology of Japan’s remarkable custom manhole covers, found across nearly 95% of the country’s 1780 municipalities.

The book features a curated selection of over 100 photographs, capturing the best and most visually compelling of Japan’s 6000 distinct manhole cover designs, part of a 20-year beautification program — orchestrated by what’s essentially Japan’s version of the WPA — aiming to make manholes reflect the uniqueness of each city — its mythology, its aesthetic sensibility, its legacy and essence.

The bold colors and dramatic motifs — from doves to dragons — really come to life in the book’s crisp photography and superb art direction. But what makes it all so extraordinary is that what begins as a window into art ends as a door into a rich cultural storytelling and heritage.

It gets better — there’s also a Drainspotting iPad app, a beautiful homage to the classic Japanese intersection of art and technology. The app uses geolocation, inviting users to drainspot Japan, scavenger-hunt-style, and discover more examples of this unique visual subculture that didn’t make the book.

Drainspotting comes out next Tuesday and is now available for pre-order.

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