We’ve been obsessed with the idea of art existing in the digital space - not just social media, but something sexier, using cool new disruptive technology. After researching the digital space in Asia (especially in the context of the upcoming Culture Cartel convention), we devised a way to present an elevated language of street art in Singapore - by marrying Graffiti with Virtual Reality.
The concept of the VR Tilt Brush Graffiti Battle was born, and Singapore’s first ever street convention, Culture Cartel, was an appropriate stage for that.
Two things happened. Lets get to the basics.
SIN CITY
We live in a country where rules are everywhere and we’re constantly told what not to do, very often in the form of street signs. We procured some Singapore-special street signs and sent them to 13 artists to wreak havoc all over them. The results tingled our irreverent selves to the bone. These went up for sale at our booth. A larger (and improved) street sign showcase will be presented at Aliwal Urban Arts Festival on 19 Jan 2019.
Set-up of the Booth
Die or Skate by Kilas (SG)
Cock-blocker by Keith Ang / Spazak (SG)
SiaLan (Cocky) by Winnie Tan (SG)
VR GRAFFITI BATTLE
On theme with the overarching idea of living in “Sin City”, we selected eight kickass graffiti artists to participate in Asia’s first-ever VR Graffiti Battle. These peeps expressed much interest in momentarily ditching their spray cans for joystick controllers.
The graffiti artists, NESTWO, DIDIER ‘JABA’ MATHIEU, BOON BAKED, CLOG TWO, KATUN, INKTEN, CLOAKWORK and HAS J experienced training with the Tilt Brush over two weeks and unsurprisingly, they took to it like fish to water.
Kult has, and always will be an incubation space for artists. With digital graffiti, we hoped that a little training and practice would fuel something different in their journey as artists and boy, were we right. ;)
The battle had the crowd sitting on the edge of their seats, along with a few media mentions from The Straits Times to Esquire, Straatosphere and Vice.
Clog Two vs. Boon Baked (Semi-finals, 2 Dec)
The participating graffiti artists were stoked and were well rewarded with not just experience, but actual Google items like the Google Home. The champion, CLOGTWO received his very own set of the Google Tilt Brush, sponsored by Google of course.
For all the highlights - check out the video below.