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In the digital epoch, the elevation and roof plan are computationally-accurate orthographic projections of a building’s exterior surface and assembly.


At its purest form, the surface of the wall is graphically represented by an absence of line.


A flat and stain-less hygiene.


In a sense, the elevation mythologizes an infinitely sterile image of the facade that exists only within the Platonic space of the DRAWING.


In reality, such a purity can only be aspired to and never achieved.


Graffiti is a parasite that lives on the wall.


In the urban environment, a clean wall sends a signal of conformity and private ownership over the public domain.


Across various municipalities, barbed wire, CCTV, and particle sensors are mobilized in designated areas of the city as violent manifestations of hostility harbored towards graffiti artists by state authorities.


Evidently, in the eyes of the state, graffiti is regarded as an error in the overall order of the city.


But while graffiti interferes with the clean wall, it transmits the signals of those not expressed in authorized media such as commercial signage, logos, and adverts.


In other words, graffiti is NOISY because it temporarily hijacks the city’s exterior surface to signal more than the interests of institutional power.


A popular French pun, “LE MURMURE DU MUR,” is commonly used to describe street art and graffiti, and roughly translates to “the MURMUR of the wall.”


The CITYEATER is a loud MURMUR - a NOISE or a PARASITE that infects the walls of THE CITY.


If the elevation renders the wall using the blankness of the page, the page itself becomes a 1:1 analogue of the wall’s surface.


The MONSTER lives on the elevation like a tag on a wall.


It contaminates the surface and ruins its integrity.


The MONSTER’s skin is not clean; in fact, it is very dirty.


As Mary Douglas famously states, “dirt is matter out of place.”



Simply put, dirt is not what is dirty intrinsically, but rather what is made othered within an existing set of classifications.


The MONSTER is alien, it is placed outside or external to normality.


Its body is a multiplicity comprised of both anxieties and desires that resist a homogenous status quo.


But these forces are not truly external - the NOISE of the street is inherent to its vitality.


NOISE is the street’s diversity.


To SILENCE the MURMURS is to kill its diversity, which is to say, to kill the street in its entirety.

The MONSTER is always around the corner.