Barcelona – Graffiti Capital of Europe?
Is Barcelona the graffiti capital of Europe? Within only a short walking distance, the 1.15 minute clip below exposes the shear volume of street art around the city. In many cases residents have turned what is obviously a problem into something much more creative. They appear to have given up on trying to clear the graffiti. Instead, there is a sense that it is not just part of local society, it is in fact now embraced by it. Below is a video short highlighting the sheer scale of the street art. Calling it graffiti feels almost unkind because many of the colour schemes and designs seem carefully crafted as opposed to simply scrawled. Interestingly, the famous street artist Banksy has his museum in Barcelona. I wonder how much the colourful street art/graffiti clad surroundings influenced his decision?
Barcelona – Graffiti Capital of Europe?
One thing that particularly struck me while photographing all of the graffiti were the times that people seemed to have matching graffiti with clothes or other items. Below are some examples where people’s outfits or items matched the graffiti surrounding them. Maybe the graffiti was affecting their fashion choices in a subliminal way?
How AI Interpreted the Designs
I was curious to see how AI would react to the graffiti colours, writing and shapes. Below is a video short I made of some of the stronger designs. The graffiti images included in the video short below were produced by taking an original graffiti image and feeding it into Dalle-2 which generated the resulting variations. I then took these images, tweaked and tidied them using editing software. Below is a short video snapshot of some of the designs.
Further Experimentation
Below is an image of AI Reimagined Art that has been digitally edited then vectorised.
Bold Colours
Much of the Barcelona graffiti utilised strong complimentary colours. I felt that these colours blended themselves very well to simple graphical shapes. Below is a simple leaf shape using the colours from the vectorised, digitised and reimagined AI Art.
