photo by Sarah Hawksley
Digital Graffitii
Artists Kazuki Ozone, Daichi Saito, Chihiro Noguchi, and Kai Naito from Tokyo, Japan, capture the spirit of Digital Graffiti with “emoji and pixel,” one of many mosaics.
The late-afternoon sun silvered the tips of the waves as I sloshed through the seagreen surf, my pants rolled up to my knees and wet sand tickling between my toes. I was painfully aware of how I must have looked to the locals; I may as well have worn a shirt with “Landlubber” printed across the chest. But I didn’t care. The surf was cool, the steady repetition of its susurration, soothing.
I had been in South Walton, Florida, that little stretch of New Urbanist beach towns along Highway 30A, for almost a day. As I cooled my heels in the waves, watching the sandpipers scurry to and fro in the light of the setting sun, I was thankful for a moment to catch my breath.
It had been a full day already — zipping up and down the coast west of Panama City, from Airstream Row and the Truman House in Seaside, to Western Lake, one of the area’s 15 named rare coastal dune lakes, which stretches between Grayton and WaterColor. The reason for my visit would be clear soon enough. Digital Graffiti would begin after nightfall.
Alys Beach
Not Your Average Beach Town
Alys Beach is home to the Digital Graffiti festival and is the grandest of the interconnected villages along 30A. The architecture of Alys Beach is varied, even as it’s unified by certain recurring visual motifs. Though every residence has a water feature and some version of a balcony, the architects clearly drew their inspiration from far-ranging sources. Sometimes I felt as though I had been transported to a small village of Swiss chalets; other times I was certain I was in the Mediterranean. And where, in Seaside, the know-your-neighbor ethos of New Urbanism has yielded an endless permutation of porches, in Alys Beach, the residences tend to favor courtyards.
The themes and variations, the absence of color, all draw the eye to the geometry of the town. Again and again, I admired the curve of an arch or the straight line of a column — like that of the pillars that mark the entrance to Alys Beach. But the one thing that is impossible to ignore is that every building is starkly, brilliantly white. In the afternoon sun, the residences seem to glow with self-generated light. After dark, though, they would be white as a sheet, blank as a canvas. Perfect, in other words, for photon bombing.
Digital Graffiti
Three-hundred and sixty-four days a year, the buildings of Alys Beach are as white as the famous sugar sands of the area, but on the night of the annual Digital Graffiti festival, which celebrated its 12th iteration on May 18, 2019, they are canvases for photon bombing. Photon bombing, as the folks at Digital Graffiti call their craft, is the art of projecting digital art onto a large, blank canvas. One like, say, a tall, all-white building.
A house to the right of the entrance becomes the first canvas of the night. The video projected onto it makes use of its wide, flat facade as well as the white-tiled roof. On the video, Day-Glo protoplasms wriggle and squirm and grow explosively. They look like an entire colony of synthetic anemones. I watch the video cycle and repeat. The result is an impressive bit of digital wizardry — and the festival’s opening salvo — a bit of flash to make attendees ooh and ahh before entering an arts festival that is far more nuanced than I expected.
Walking into Digital Graffiti is like stepping inside a kaleidoscope filled with smaller, more ecstatically colorful kaleidoscopes, each operating with its own set of organizing principles and unique geometry.
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Alys Beach
The natural color palette of white dunes, blue surf, and green foliage seen at Grayton Beach is echoed in the colors found in Alys Beach – gleaming white buildings, blue sky, and green shrubberies. That is, until the artists involved with Digital Graffiti inject a psychedelic swirl of other hues.
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Alys Beach
The natural color palette of white dunes, blue surf, and green foliage seen at Grayton Beach is echoed in the colors found in Alys Beach – gleaming white buildings, blue sky, and green shrubberies. That is, until the artists involved with Digital Graffiti inject a psychedelic swirl of other hues.
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Alys Beach
The natural color palette of white dunes, blue surf, and green foliage seen at Grayton Beach is echoed in the colors found in Alys Beach – gleaming white buildings, blue sky, and green shrubberies. That is, until the artists involved with Digital Graffiti inject a psychedelic swirl of other hues.
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Alys Beach
The natural color palette of white dunes, blue surf, and green foliage seen at Grayton Beach is echoed in the colors found in Alys Beach – gleaming white buildings, blue sky, and green shrubberies. That is, until the artists involved with Digital Graffiti inject a psychedelic swirl of other hues.
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Alys Beach
The natural color palette of white dunes, blue surf, and green foliage seen at Grayton Beach is echoed in the colors found in Alys Beach – gleaming white buildings, blue sky, and green shrubberies. That is, until the artists involved with Digital Graffiti inject a psychedelic swirl of other hues.
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Alys Beach
The natural color palette of white dunes, blue surf, and green foliage seen at Grayton Beach is echoed in the colors found in Alys Beach – gleaming white buildings, blue sky, and green shrubberies. That is, until the artists involved with Digital Graffiti inject a psychedelic swirl of other hues.
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photo by Jesse Davis
Truman House
New Urbanism favors walkable towns and open public spaces. Where Alys Beach has courtyards, in nearby Seaside, the trend is picket fences and porches, as seen at the Truman House (above) — a location for The Truman Show.
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photo by Jesse Davis
The People's Moon
Helen Marshall's The People's Moon creates a lunar mosaic out of thousands of smaller images. The work has been showcased at Digital Graffiti, Times Square, and even the Kennedy Space Center.
Xiaowen Huang’s 2018 piece _ImEdge uses generative algorithms to explore landscape shapes. The result is like an engraving of a topographical map, filmed in real-time as the engraving is made. Jonah Allen, a resident of the area, takes as his subject the coastal dune lakes. His piece, Coastal Dune Lake Outfalls, shows one of the outfalls that happen after heavy rains. The lakes fill up with more and more water until, eventually, the division between lake and ocean breaks and the waters mingle. The piece was selected for one of three Special Recognition awards, alongside the artists Ehsan Atiq and Fair Brane.
Some installations are as short and elemental as GIFs, or cave paintings of the digital age. Some are impressionistic short films. One piece was accompanied by a thrumming, mechanical soundtrack, like a recording of industrial fans blowing on high blast. The image was all rounded metallic beams interlacing and overlapping, calling to mind the cover of The Who’s Tommy.
In the afternoon sun, the residences seem to glow with self-generated light. After dark, though, they would be white as a sheet, blank as a canvas. Perfect, in other words, for photon bombing.
Resident artist Tamiko Thiel created an augmented reality (AR) piece. In it, schools of brightly colored fish and other marine life “swim” across your phone screen before metamorphosing into two-litre soda bottles and other refuse. There’s no ranting, no call to arms to “go green” — just a subtle change as fish and seahorses disappear and are replaced by an ocean of single-serving plastic bobbing in the current. All night, I watch as festival attendees play out that scenario on their smartphones.
Attendees congregate in a courtyard, drinks in hand. The buzz of conversation mingles with the music some installations include. From a nearby speaker, I hear bubbles gurgle as huge schools of fish flit across the buildings opposite the courtyard.
I stride across a rainbow bridge, a translucent, light-up affair that makes me feel like David Bowie slinking across the stage, circa Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane. Twelve years into Digital Graffiti, festival curator Brett Phares and his team have developed an undeniable knack for leading the crowd from one attraction to the next. I’ve never been a fan of guided tours, so I admire the way the pieces on display seem to gently coax the audience along to each new delight.
There’s more. The installations are seemingly endless, as plentiful and as strange as confections in Willy Wonka’s famous factory.
After the bridge, I’m startled by an arresting image. There’s Pam Grier, unmistakable in a paisley scarf and red nailpolish, and she has me in her crosshairs. Los Angeles-based Fair Brane’s Centers pays homage to Vito Acconci’s 1971 video piece, “Centered.” In Acconci’s 22-minute-long black-and-white video, the artist points an accusatory finger at the camera. His hand trembles; his breathing is audible. In Centers, a scene from William Girdler’s 1975 blaxploitation film Sheba, Baby loops endlessly. Pam Grier takes aim at the viewer with a snub-nosed revolver, breathing heavily as she points the pistol at the camera. Grier seems to appear out of nowhere, visible only after I round a corner, and her larger-than-life handgun takes me aback.
The piece evokes questions about violence, blackness, and the female form — and in doing so underlines the wide gulf between Girdler’s mediated image and the real thing. Grier’s Sheba Shayne is a mob-busting private detective working in Kentucky; she possesses a surfeit of agency and authority, in 1975, that’s hard to imagine an African-American woman wielding safely in the Bluegrass State today, in the age of Black Lives Matter. It’s easy to see why Brane’s piece was recognized with one of the festival’s three Special Recognition awards this year — and why the filmmaker was, in 2017, the winner of the first annual Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant.
There’s more. The installations are seemingly endless, as plentiful and as strange as confections in Willy Wonka’s famous factory. But my favorite, it turns out, is yet to come.
Helen Marshall’s The People’s Moon is part of a series that includes installations in the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, in Times Square in New York, and at London Piccadilly Lights. The short video, one of the installations that screened in the Caliza pool area, was her second exhibition at Digital Graffiti, after her 2017 submission, Nightfall. In The People’s Moon, photos are made into a mosaic of the man in the moon from Georges Méliès’ 1902 masterpiece, A Trip to the Moon. The photos disperse and then come together, as if pulled by lunar gravity. The image is black-and-white, before shifting to a brilliant purple. Though I probably shouldn’t have been, I was surprised to see so many references to classic and cult cinema at the festival.
Caliza Restaurant is the ending point and traditional after-party of Digital Graffiti. It’s where the longer videos play, and where most of the food waits. I had walked up a considerable hunger, but the twinkling lights of the festival beckoned. I plucked a macaroon from a dessert table and decided to walk through the festival in reverse, just in case I might spot anything new.
Brett Phares
Designing Digital Graffiti
“Digital art is a problem child in the art world,” reads Brett Phares’ arts curation website, General Anxiety. “You can’t hold it in your hands, but you know you love it.” That’s, perhaps, what makes his job so challenging. Because the art is meant to be viewed in motion, even the most high-definition, brilliantly colored photo can’t capture the essence of a piece. It’s like trying to infer a feature film’s plot and mood by looking at a still.
Phares originally hails from Colorado, but he’s now based in New York. He was working as an artist and teaching interactive media when he was approached about getting involved with Digital Graffiti. “A mutual friend connected me with the town evangelist Mike Ragsdale around 2008. He was the one with the original concept of projecting onto the residences down there,” Phares says. “He was trying to get the word out about Alys Beach and bring in the local community to let them check out what was going on around them.”
Brett Phares
Brett Phares
Now Phares has been with the festival for more than a decade, and he oversees the art selection from the open submission process to the night of the festival itself. “I make the final cut, and then I present those finalists to Alys Beach for their blessing,” Phares explains. “Then I get the final videos from the various artists and start selecting locations for where they’re going to go up on Alys Beach.”
The most impressive feature of the festival is the way the installations interact with the residences on which they’re showcased. One house’s fountain highlights a water-themed piece. The curves of a tower bend and warp the shifting mandalas of a geometric piece. “The ideas of screen-savers are hard to escape. There’s not much you can do about it when that’s what people are used to on a flat screen. When I look at them, they are on a flat screen. I have to step back and imagine them on larger-scale objects,” Phares says. “It’s not easy to tell people what’s going on, but once you do have it sitting on a different physical object, you’re physicalizing this digital [image].”
The interplay between the installations and the buildings’ structure is something that has grown — and grown more challenging — over time. When the festival began, Phares says, “We had a lot of blank walls that didn’t have windows or doors in them.”
Though I noticed some recurring images and motifs — water and classic cinema made multiple appearances — there was no overarching theme for the exhibitions on display. That was by design. “I don’t run themes,” Phares says of his programming methods for the annual festival. “I want to represent as much of the world as possible. There is a lot of stuff out there, and I want to be looking at what others are seeing rather than what I want to see.”
The artists sometimes surprise Phares. “I do tell them it’ll probably change once they get there,” Phares says of Digital Graffiti’s resident artists. “Tamiko Thiel had some different ideas, and the more time she spent in Alys Beach, the more it made sense to use fish for her work.
“It’s what has brought me out every year,” Phares continues. “Surprises do occur.”
Jonah Allen
Making Waves
He’s from Atlanta, Georgia, but photographer Jonah Allen radiates a vibe that is pure California surfer dude. He’s got long, sun-bleached hair and a seemingly imperturbable sense of calm. Maybe that’s because he is a surfer.
“I love to surf,” he says. “So I ended up chasing waves around the world for about a year, and then I settled down in Santa Rosa Beach.” Before moving to Florida, Allen studied art at the University of Georgia.
photo by Jonah Allen
Jonah Holding Converge
Walton County Resident Jonah Allen photographs the aquatic vistas of 30A, especially the rare coastal dune lakes. His piece, Coastal Dune Lake Outfalls, was among three selected for a Special Recognition award at Digital Graffiti 2019.
“I picked up a camera because I was able to photograph the ocean and then take those snapshots back to Georgia,” Allen says. “I grew up landlocked. I learned to surf on the Gulf Coast when I was 10 years old, and that experience totally changed my life. … Surfing is like you’re harnessing this energy that has travelled far to reach you,” he explains.
“I started to move toward trying to ask questions with my photographs,” says Allen, who is working on a series of photos of human-altered landscapes. This series stands in stark contrast to his work with the waterways of Walton County. “Most of my work revolves around interest in the environment or industry or some sort of waterway.”
Allen’s Coastal Dune Lake Outfalls was selected for one of three Special Recognition awards at Digital Graffiti 2019, alongside the artists Ehsan Atiq and Fair Brane.
“It’s so dynamic, the relationship between water and light. It’s always changing. It’s never the same moment twice,” Allen says. “I’ve attempted to create the same image many times, but it’s just not possible. It changes on a daily and hourly basis.”
