Colourful and quickly changing: contemporary graffiti can be considered the chameleon skin of any urban landscape. Many modern graffiti might evoke the feeling of violating basic principles of acceptable social behaviour while providing colour to a city and displaying artistic skill. This tension between vandalism and art explains why contemporary graffiti can be so polarising and why they intrigue. This talk will first introduce various forms of graffiti and make a case for their status as cultural heritage. After defining shortcomings in much of the scholarly research on (modern and ancient) graffiti, the stage is set to introduce project INDIGO. INDIGO (IN-ventory and DI-sseminate G-raffiti along the d-O-naukanal) was a two-year academic project launched in September 2021 through funding from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. INDIGO pushed the status quo in inventorying and understanding extensive graffiti-scapes, for which the distinctive graffiti along circa 13 km of Vienna's Danube Canal served as an example. INDIGO wanted to ensure this graffiti-scape's digital survival and interdisciplinary investigation by creating a long-term, accurate, exhaustive, open-access and interactive online archive. The majority of this talk will, therefore, detail the methodological and logistical developments created to deal with this project's technical- and more humanistic-oriented aspects.

This presentation was given on 19/03/2024 at the University of Bradford's School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences guest lectures series.