The Pokemon Go craze is reimagining street art and graffiti in an urban gamescape.
20 Jul 2016
Lachlan MacDowall
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Writing and Publishing
Street art in Fitzroy, Melbourne – another Pokestop?Charlievdb/flickr
For those of us who practice or follow graffiti and street art, the Pokémon Go craze doesn’t seem that new – and not just because street art and graffiti feature so prominently in the game play.
Rather, graffiti and street art provide a prior model for the Pokémon Go brand of mobile, collective urban gaming. We have seen the frenzied, phone-wielding crowds of urban hunters before. When the world’s best-known street artist Banksy staged an informal residency in New York in 2013, for instance, he installed 31 artworks across the city, leaving clues to their whereabouts.
Dr Lachlan MacDowall is an artist and cultural researcher in the Centre for Cultural Partnerships in the Faculty of the VCA and MCM, University of Melbourne. His areas of research include the history and aesthetics of graffiti, the creative city and community-based art-making.
He has published widely on graffiti, street art and urban creativity, including as a contributor to the two book-length studies of Australian graffiti: Cubrilo, Harvey and Stamer’s King’s Way: The Beginnings of Australian Graffiti: Melbourne 1983-1993 (2009) and Christine Dew’s Uncommissioned Art (2007), which includes 60 of his photographs.
He is also the Principal Researcher on a three-year ARC-funded project examining the effective evaluation of community-based arts projects, in partnership with the Australia Council for the Arts and RMIT University.
