One fascinating part of the work of Daniel Weissbach and a lot of graffiti related work is the idea of distortion and augmentation of reality. Some of the graffiti coming from different parts of the world seems like a portal to another dimension. The collective noise of tagging distorts a part of reality or parts of reality. The performance work ‘distortion field’ sums up the drive of modern graffiti. That is to augment reality as an opening to another world. The way graffiti can seem like either a CGI movie or B-grade schlock is fascinating because it asks the viewer to join in for a particular moment of their time in commute and provides a momentary escape from reality. Heavily tagged areas become symphonic, a bending of reality through many hands through a duration of application. Each part clashes yet works off each other part. To be more succinct, some graffiti is like a slick sci-fi movie that does all of the heavy liftings for you. Other ‘raw’ graffiti is the imagined portal of creative collaboration that happens by a drive to make a social collection point. Each antagonist turns up when they feel the urge and then the landscape slowly morphs. Reality is the grid of architecture formal and functional that is visually distorted through interactions with surfaces.

Most art lends itself to distorting reality but usually for reasons other than simply distortion. If you look at graffiti culture there will be myriad rules and reasons why certain things are done yet at the end of the day an image remains. An image that is a portal to other worlds and ideas.