When graffiti comes alive

I first discovered that graffiti was a living thing through the 99 Rooms project. Graffiti moved, breathed and reacted to human intervention in the rooms of abandoned factories with their dusty floors, crumbling walls and rusty machinery.



Then Blu, an Italian artist took this concept a step further and created a kind of living graffiti animation with his short video film called Muto. The graffiti on the walls awake and tell myriad stories among the indifferent passers by who fail to notice anything exceptional. For them, it’s just a static image on the wall which fails to steer the stagnant waters of their everyday routine. If only they could decipher the secret algorhythms of wall painted animation. If only they could see the whole picture. Muto is constant change, constant mutation and could be signaling the beginning of a new age in street art.

See the 99 Rooms

http://www.99rooms.com/

Visit Blu’s site and see Muto

http://www.blublu.org/

http://www.blublu.org/sito/video/muto.htm

Derek Walcott's "Love After Love"

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott wrote his first poem in 1944 when he was 14. In 1992, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was born in Saint Lucia.