Evan Roth
Born in 1978 in Okemos, MI. Lives and works in Hong Kong.
Evan Roth is an artist with interests in technology, tools of empowerment, open source programming and popular culture. Playing with the notion of property, he spends his free time bypassing laws dealing with copyright and vandalism. For the past few years he has led a number of different research projects on graffiti, including co-founding the Graffiti Research Lab and creating Graffiti Taxonomy and Graffiti Analysis, projects which he began as part of his thesis while pursuing a masters at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. Graffiti Taxonomy is a graffiti-based study in which characters are isolated from a collection of graffiti tags that were photographed in the same geographic region. The characters presented on the façade of the Fondation Cartier were photographed by the artist fromApril 24 to April 28, 2009 in Paris. Graffiti Taxonomy: Paris (2009) aims to represent the diversity in letter forms written by the Parisian graffiti community. Graffiti Analysis makes visible a graffiti writer’s unseen movements when creating a tag. The gestures of graffiti artists at work are digitally recorded using a custom motion capture application. The motions used to create a tag are archived, visualized and projected on the surfaces of buildings, offering viewers a digital representation of how a tag is created.
Evan Roth