About the book:
Street art is a product of the twentieth century, yet depending on how one reads it, it may offer useful material for thinking about both the present and the future. The 1970s, which saw the introduction of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), marked a transitional moment from a culture of print to one of images and icons. Around the same time, the fundamental forms of graffiti were established, with simple lettering evolving into pictorial configurations. What is more, graffiti anticipates certain behavioural patterns associated with digital environments. These can be understood as game-like in character. Graffiti simulates an act of conquest—not through direct domination, but by first rendering the subject as a character within a simulated world. In this sense, urban tagging begins to resemble a form of e-sports, a practice situated within a gamified urban field. This logic extends beyond graffiti. Street culture as a whole transforms the city into a field of play, where movement and access are always at stake. It develops into a mode of cultural experience in which civilisation can be folded and unfolded, accessed and exited at will. From this perspective, it becomes a kind of museum—not a stable institution, but one that erupts toward the viewer.
Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media, anticipated this condition. He wrote:
“We have… been suddenly plunged into a new world. A world in which we are all forced to participate imaginatively in social life. It seems to be our inevitable destiny to live as artists.”
This prediction appears to have come to pass.Technological systems such as artificial intelligence now compel us to become fully realised human beings. The role of the artist is no longer exceptional. It has been extended to everyone else. As a result, the creative field increasingly moves beyond the grasp of discourse.
In this expanded terrain, street art re-emerges—not as the symbol of youthful rebellion, but as a figure of exteriority. At a time when information is compressed, recomposed, and expressed through the individual, what is needed is not a clearer distinction between human and machine, but a broader sense of artistic disposition: a way of self-definition responsive to the present. This perspective may inscribe a new layer of meaning onto one’s prior understanding of street art—not as a tool of irony or deviation, but as the gesture of an image pointing to nothing but itself. A mark of being that resists naming.