This Machine Generates Crowdsourced Murals

There is a fine line between graffiti and street art, with the latter enhancing a community by adding vibrancy. But those giant murals on the sides of trendy cafes weren’t free — the owner of the building likely paid an artist a substantial amount of money for the art. So how can a community cover their neighborhood in street art without a massive financial investment? Niklas Roy found a solution in the form of the “Maschinenmosaik,” which let everyone in the community design a small part of the sprawling murals that now cover the neighborhood.

The art itself is called “Maschinenmosaik” and the contraption that enabled its creation is called “Mosaikmaschine” (German for “Mosaic Machine”). The murals include hundreds of small designs contributed by people from the community. Each of those reflects the designers’ own tastes and aesthetic, but the pixelated style maintains a sense of cohesion across the entire project.

That pixelation is both a stylistic decision and a consequence of the technology involved. To collect designs, Roy built the Mosaikmaschine. It looks like an arcade cabinet on wheels, complete with a joystick and buttons. But those controls, which connect to a laptop through an Arduino development board, operate a simple drawing program. Each canvas is a 32×32 grid, which artists can draw in by moving a cursor with the joystick, then pushing a button to place or erase a pixel. After completion, the machine prints a receipt that shows the design and provides information about the project. The images are black and white, because they’re intended to act as stencils.

Because the Mosaikmaschine has wheels, Roy was able to cart it around the neighborhood to collect a bunch of artworks. He then used a Silhouette Cameo Pro craft cutter to turn those into thick paper stencils. Small gaps between pixels help to enhance the pixelated effect and to keep the stencil together.

Roy and a team of street artists then used the stencils and spray paint to apply the designs to walls around the community. They did, of course, have permission to do so and they even gave the surfaces a fresh coat of paint before hand to provide a uniform canvas for the murals.

The result is crowdsourced street art that looks great and that showcases the creativity of everyone involved.

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