Fact sheet
Project leader: Geert J. Verhoeven
Funding body: Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW)
Funding scheme: Heritage Science Austria programme
Start & end: 09-2021 to 08-2023
Contribution: project management, symposium organisation, development and testing of software, testing of hardware, developing data acquisition, management and processing workflows, spatio-temporal reasoning, photo acquisition, report and paper writing, thesaurus development, project and symposium websites, graphical work
Funding body: Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW)
Funding scheme: Heritage Science Austria programme
Start & end: 09-2021 to 08-2023
Contribution: project management, symposium organisation, development and testing of software, testing of hardware, developing data acquisition, management and processing workflows, spatio-temporal reasoning, photo acquisition, report and paper writing, thesaurus development, project and symposium websites, graphical work
Project summary
Graffiti is a short-lived form of heritage balancing between tangible and intangible, offensive and pleasant. Graffiti makes people laugh, wonder, angry, think. These conflicting traits are all present along Vienna’s Donaukanal (Eng. Danube Canal), a recreational hotspot – located in the city’s heart – famous for its endless display of graffiti.
The two-year INDIGO project (09/2021 to 08/2023 aims to build the basis to systematically document, monitor, and analyse 12.9 km of Donaukanal graffiti in the next decade. Combining the local graffiti community’s engagement with regular visits along the Canal ensures that most graffiti gets colour-accurately photographed soon after their creation. A bi-annual total photographic coverage should pick up most of the remaining graffiti. All images are processed into detailed, distortion-free orthophotographs and textures for the canal banks’ 3D surface model (provided by the City of Vienna). In this way, INDIGO will build a spatially, spectrally, and temporally accurate record of all possible sprayings, engravings and other works of personal expression attached in (il)legal ways to the public urban surfaces of the Donaukanal.
The OpenAtlas spatial database manages all these data, along with auxiliary data (like videos) and relevant metadata such as style, artist pseudonym, and creation data. INDIGO ensures (meta)data correctness and completeness through the graffitists’ essential involvement and collaboration with local and international scholars. The CIDOC CRM ontology and a novel thesaurus facilitate a semantic database structure with hierarchical, graffiti-related terms.
This database represents a spatio-temporal inventory of all graffiti along Vienna’s central waterway, thus explaining the project’s title INDIGO: IN-ventory and DI-sseminate G-raffiti along the D-O-naukanal. The dissemination part is taken care of by a freely accessible online platform that enables scholars, graffitists, and non-specialists alike to visualise, explore, and query graffiti inside the INDIGO database. This web-based interface allows virtual walks along the Donaukanal or the display of graffiti through time, while simultaneously supporting spatio-temporal-semantic questions like “where were all political messages from 2021 located” or “which graffiti was visible for more than three months and featured animals”. In this way, INDIGO enables cultural, ethical, legal, or political assessments of graffiti. Simultaneously, its database size also invites the development of methods to mine and analyse extensive image collections.
Since storage in the ARCHE repository ensures the necessary digital longevity and free download of all data, INDIGO can realistically preserve and disseminate society’s thoughts and artistic expressions marked upon its walls.
The two-year INDIGO project (09/2021 to 08/2023 aims to build the basis to systematically document, monitor, and analyse 12.9 km of Donaukanal graffiti in the next decade. Combining the local graffiti community’s engagement with regular visits along the Canal ensures that most graffiti gets colour-accurately photographed soon after their creation. A bi-annual total photographic coverage should pick up most of the remaining graffiti. All images are processed into detailed, distortion-free orthophotographs and textures for the canal banks’ 3D surface model (provided by the City of Vienna). In this way, INDIGO will build a spatially, spectrally, and temporally accurate record of all possible sprayings, engravings and other works of personal expression attached in (il)legal ways to the public urban surfaces of the Donaukanal.
The OpenAtlas spatial database manages all these data, along with auxiliary data (like videos) and relevant metadata such as style, artist pseudonym, and creation data. INDIGO ensures (meta)data correctness and completeness through the graffitists’ essential involvement and collaboration with local and international scholars. The CIDOC CRM ontology and a novel thesaurus facilitate a semantic database structure with hierarchical, graffiti-related terms.
This database represents a spatio-temporal inventory of all graffiti along Vienna’s central waterway, thus explaining the project’s title INDIGO: IN-ventory and DI-sseminate G-raffiti along the D-O-naukanal. The dissemination part is taken care of by a freely accessible online platform that enables scholars, graffitists, and non-specialists alike to visualise, explore, and query graffiti inside the INDIGO database. This web-based interface allows virtual walks along the Donaukanal or the display of graffiti through time, while simultaneously supporting spatio-temporal-semantic questions like “where were all political messages from 2021 located” or “which graffiti was visible for more than three months and featured animals”. In this way, INDIGO enables cultural, ethical, legal, or political assessments of graffiti. Simultaneously, its database size also invites the development of methods to mine and analyse extensive image collections.
Since storage in the ARCHE repository ensures the necessary digital longevity and free download of all data, INDIGO can realistically preserve and disseminate society’s thoughts and artistic expressions marked upon its walls.
Publications
The challenges of preservation: digitizing graffiti in the urban landscape
Massimiliano Carloni, Geert J. Verhoeven, Jona Schlegel, Stefan Wogrin
Emmanuela Carbé, Gabriele Lo Piccolo, Alessia Valenti, Francesco Stella, La memoria digitale: forme del testo e organizzazione della conoscenza. Atti del XII Convegno Annuale AIUCD (AIUCD 2023), Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale, Siena, 2023, pp. 338-342
'Different folks, different strokes': goINDIGO 2022's «Creators vs Academics» discussion round
Samuel Merrill, Geert J. Verhoeven, Benjamin Wild, JANER ONE, MANUEL SKIRL, SERT, SNUF, Massimiliano Carloni, Martin de la Iglesia, Francisca Fernandez Merino, Ljiljana Radošević, Chiara Ricci, Jona Schlegel, Stefan Wogrin
Geert J. Verhoeven, Jona Schlegel, Benjamin Wild, Stefan Wogrin, Massimiliano Carloni, document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes. Proceedings of the goINDIGO 2022 international graffiti symposium, Urban Creativity, Lisbon, 2023, pp. 25–44
Towards colour-accurate documentation of anonymous expressions
Adolfo Molada-Tebar, Geert J. Verhoeven
Geert J. Verhoeven, Jona Schlegel, Benjamin Wild, Stefan Wogrin, Massimiliano Carloni, document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes. Proceedings of the goINDIGO 2022 international graffiti symposium, Urban Creativity, Lisbon, 2023, pp. 86-130
Making a mark—Towards a graffiti thesaurus
Jona Schlegel, Massimiliano Carloni, Stefan Wogrin, Ann M. Graff, Geert J. Verhoeven
Geert J. Verhoeven, Jona Schlegel, Benjamin Wild, Stefan Wogrin, Massimiliano Carloni, document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes. Proceedings of the goINDIGO 2022 international graffiti symposium, Urban Creativity, Lisbon, 2023, pp. 203-219
Finding listeners for walls that speak
Geert J. Verhoeven, Massimiliano Carloni, Jona Schlegel, Benjamin Wild, Stefan Wogrin
Geert J. Verhoeven, Jona Schlegel, Benjamin Wild, Stefan Wogrin, Massimiliano Carloni, document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes. Proceedings of the goINDIGO 2022 international graffiti symposium, Urban Creativity, Lisbon, 2023, pp. 6-15
Geert J. Verhoeven, Jona Schlegel, Benjamin Wild, Stefan Wogrin, Massimiliano Carloni
ISBN: 979-8394601279, Urban Creativity, Lisbon, 2023
Facing a chameleon—How project INDIGO discovers and records new graffiti
Geert J. Verhoeven, Stefan Wogrin, Jona Schlegel, Martin Wieser, Benjamin Wild
Geert J. Verhoeven, Jona Schlegel, Benjamin Wild, Stefan Wogrin, Massimiliano Carloni, document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes. Proceedings of the goINDIGO 2022 international graffiti symposium, Urban Creativity, Lisbon, 2023, pp. 63-85
Tracking the urban chameleon – Towards a hybrid change detection of graffiti
Benjamin Wild, Geert J. Verhoeven, Norbert Pfeifer
ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, X-M-1-2023, ISPRS, CIPA Heritage Documentation, 2023, pp. 285--292
Benjamin Wild, Geert J. Verhoeven, Norbert Pfeifer, Enrico Bonadio, DEADBEAT HERO, FUNKY, JANER ONE, MANUEL SKIRL, Massimiliano Carloni, Chiara Ricci, Christine Koblitz, Sven Niemann, Ljiljana Radošević, Jona Schlegel, Alexander Watzinger, Stefan Wogrin
Geert J. Verhoeven, Jona Schlegel, Benjamin Wild, Stefan Wogrin, Massimiliano Carloni, document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes. Proceedings of the goINDIGO 2022 international graffiti symposium, Urban Creativity, Lisbon, 2023, pp. 45-62
Graffiti-Dokumentation: Projekt INDIGO
Benjamin Wild, Geert Julien Joanna Verhoeven, Martin Wieser, Camillo Ressl, Johannes Otepka-Schremmer, Norbert Pfeifer
Thomas Weinold, 22. Internationale Geodätische Woche Obergurgl 2023, Wichmann, Berlin, 2023, pp. 322-325
Urban creativity meets engineering. Automated graffiti mapping along Vienna's Donaukanal
Benjamin Wild, Geert J. Verhoeven, Stefan Wogrin, Martin Wieser, Camillo Ressl, Johannes Otepka-Schremmer, Norbert Pfeifer
Geert J. Verhoeven, Jona Schlegel, Benjamin Wild, Stefan Wogrin, Massimiliano Carloni, document | archive | disseminate graffiti-scapes. Proceedings of the goINDIGO 2022 international graffiti symposium, Urban Creativity, Lisbon, 2023, pp. 131-145
Geert J. Verhoeven, Jona Schlegel, Benjamin Wild, Stefan Wogrin, Oskar Baumann, Enrico Bonadio, Massimiliano Carloni, Luca Davico, DEADBEAT HERO, Siri-Helen Egeland, Francisca Fernández Merino, Giulia Flenghi, Paola Guerreschi, Elena Ippoliti, Johannes Jungfleisch, Bernhard Koschicek-Krombholz, Paul Lorah, Alessandra Meschini, Gunther Michels, Luisa Montobbio, Konstantin Oedl, Norbert Pfeifer, Ljiljana Radošević, Michele Russo, Nora Shalaby, Heather Shirey, Holly Sypniewski, David Todd Lawrence, Noemi Tommasella, Valentina Tretti-Beckles, Martina Trognitz, Richard {van Tiggelen}, Adrián Vergara-Heidke, Brett Webb, Martin Wieser
Geert J. Verhoeven, project INDIGO, Vienna, 2023 Jun 12
Good vibrations? How image stabilisation influences photogrammetry
Erica Nocerino, Fabio Menna, Geert J. Verhoeven
ISPRS - International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, XLVI-2/W1-2022, 2022, pp. 395-400
Project INDIGO – document, disseminate & analyse a graffiti-scape
Geert J. Verhoeven, Benjamin Wild, Jona Schlegel, Martin Wieser, Norbert Pfeifer, Stefan Wogrin, Lothar Eysn, Massimiliano Carloni, Bernhard Koschiček-Krombholz, Adolfo Molada-Tebar, Johannes Otepka-Schremmer, Camillo Ressl, Martina Trognitz, Alexander Watzinger
ISPRS - International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, XLVI-2/W1-2022, 2022, pp. 513-520
AUTOGRAF—AUTomated Orthorectification of GRAFfiti Photos
Benjamin Wild, Geert J. Verhoeven, Martin Wieser, Camillo Ressl, Jona Schlegel, Stefan Wogrin, Johannes Otepka-Schremmer, Norbert Pfeifer
Heritage, vol. 5(4), 2022, pp. 2987-3009
Geert J. Verhoeven, Massimiliano Carloni, Jona Schlegel, Martina Trognitz, Benjamin Wild, Stefan Wogrin, Alex Hale, Chiara Ricci, C. Paola, A. Scarcella, S. M. Sunara, M. Bertasa, D. Scalarone, Martin Wieser, Laura Luque Rodrigo, Maria Del Carmen Moral Ruiz, Rita L. Amor Garcia, Gabriele Goffriler, Adolfo Molada-Tebar, Sven Niemann, Stefan Eichert, Nina Richards, Martin de la Iglesia, Camillo Ressl, Johannes Otepka-Schremmer, Norbert Pfeifer, Ljiljana Radošević, Flaminia Cavallari, Elena Ippoliti, Alessandra Meschini, Michele Russo, Klaudia Kreslehner
Geert J. Verhoeven, project INDIGO, Vienna, 2022 May 10
