BY LUKAS HAUSER
I.D. Magazine, May 2000
Platform.net, a growing Internet collective, is wending its way into performance art with a Nike-sponsored, mixed-media art and product-design showcase. “All the graffiti artists I know have become graphic designers,” says former tagger and guerrilla designer Romon “Ro-Starr” Yang. “Design is methodical, technical. It’s pretty similar to graffiti.”
Soon, graffiti culture will show itself off in style at ART4M, an international mixed-media exhibit organized by Brooklyn-based Internet culture portal and design cartel Platform.net. “It’s going to be as influential as the 1913 Armory show,” proclaims Platform’s editorial director Stephen Greco of the event to be held at Brooklyn’s Gale Gates gallery.
Sponsored by Nike, the three-day showcase, which runs on September 8, 9 and 10, and is curated by Shana Nys Dambrot of Venice Beach’s Half a Dozen Rose Gallery, reveals Platform’s urban-underground take on product design, commercial art, fashion and performance art. Contributors will include Yang, video mixologists Panoptic and Shepard “Andre the Giant Has a Posse Sticker” Fairey, SSUR’s pop deconstructionist Russ “Surreal” Kalabin, Imageo’s clothing guru Junji Ikeshima, Triple 5 Soul’s Carla Ehlke, graf futurist Phil Frost, Ecko Unlimited’ hip-hop fashion magnate Mark Ecko and probably several more scenesters.
Platform.net recently received a sizable endorsement from Sony, and the delicate interplay between design and capitalism will heavily inform the event. “The challenge,” notes Eric Haze, who morphs tag-style graphic logos into such products as chairs, clothing, skateboards and jewelry, “is to use the politics of the underground within a more sophisticated, real-world model of the media complex.” In fact, most guerrilla designers aren’t hostile to the brand-saturated landscape. They’re actually quite happy it exists, so that they can appropriate its language and warp it into something new. “It’s a paradigm of benevolent subversion,” says Greco. “Destroy the old and gestate the new.”
As the first non-sports event Nike will sponsor, ART4M is seen by the company as both a promotional venue for the company’s first line of hipster running shoes (Presto, see page 40) and a pipeline to the young trendsetters who are expected to attend the event. “This isn’t the typical art show,” says Muhammida El Muhajir, Nike’s music marketing manager. “Our art is functional.”
An avowedly non-hierarchical Web network, Platform.net receives more than a million visits each week to its panoply of sites and sees itself as the progeny of graffiti culture. “Platform is really just a place for us to meet,” explains Ro-Starr/Yang, who also consulted on the megasite’s design, “like graffiti artists who got together on subway platforms to exchange black books and ideas.” In recent years, the Internet has facilitated such subcultural discourse, allowing for the rise of events like ART4M. Yang himself spends little time surfing, however. “The bad part of the Net is that people have to stay home to do it, when they really need to get out of the house.”
Lukas Hauser co-edits Practice.