Yes. KATSU is the man. He continuing to explore what graffiti can look like in this century and he’s leaving most street artists in the dust in the process. These screenshots are from a piece by KATSU within the game Minecraft. I’m not a gamer, but, as far as I understand it, the vast majority of Minecraft games are not played in an online multiplayer setting, but they can be. So, like Franco and Eva Mattes performing during a game of Counter-Strike or Diego Bergia getting his graffiti into Tony Hawk’s Project 8 (which spread his Where’s Lepos project from the street into a game), KATSU has brought his graffiti into the digital world and could potentially put it in places in the digital world where others could see it. Most likely though, this throw-up wasn’t made in a multiplayer game and won’t be, so in that sense it’s more like doing something in a sketchbook and posting a photo of the sketch to Instagram than doing a piece of graffiti, but it’s still pretty cool and it’s another step for KATSU towards doing graffiti in the world of 1’s and 0’s.
The project was announced through F.A.T. Lab, where KATSU is currently an Artist in Residence. In that post on F.A.T. Lab’s website, KATSU says “The future of graffiti for me will be in the form of black hat tactics.” For those who may not know, “Black hat” is a term used to describe hacking which would typically be considered invasive or malicious in some way, rather than the good kind of “white hat” computer hacking. I can’t wait to see what KATSU does next. A move from physical graffiti to the digital graffiti of website defacement could be very interesting.
Images courtesy of KATSU / F.A.T. Lab