Words on the Street: A Salon on Street Text Catalogs
Words on the Street brings together two complementary catalogs of street text — one computational and one obsessively hand-gathered — to reveal how public mark-making shapes our experience of site, place, and time.
This salon invites anyone fascinated by graffiti, archives, or text to join the artists for an open-ended inquiry into inscription, authorship, vandalism, and meaning-making.
Yufeng Zhao’s all text in nyc (2024) **is a search engine built from Google Street View data that enables users to search for any word or phrase to reveal every place it appears in the city, from shop signs and advertisements to graffiti and protest banners.
Yufeng Zhao is a media artist and technologist. His work addresses data, imagery / language processing, and experience design, exploring unexpected connections embedded in our techno-cultural landscape and the interactions between humans and machines. Through a blend of web-based experiences, video works, and tangible installations, Yufeng's practice investigates the intersections of data, computer graphics, and human interactions.
Alex Lukas’ Written Names Fanzine (2016-2025) is an ongoing documentation of unsanctioned acts of name writing across America. From coast to coast, Lukas documents names written in nails on train tracks, names written in abandoned streetcars from the ‘70s, names carved into aspen trees by sheepherders—text that would otherwise be lost, illegible, or invisible.
Alex Lukas is the Associate Professor of Print and Publication at UC Santa Barbara. His interdisciplinary practice explores the intersections of place, human activity, and history; seeking to aggrandize the everyday, question historical narratives, and archive the individual. His fieldwork, research, and production reframes the monumental and the incidental through intricate print publications, sculpture, drawing, painting, video, and audio collage.
These two works rhyme. all text in nyc is a catalog of street text, presented online. Written Names Fanzine is a catalog of street text, presented in printed zines. Both works stage acts of looking—one through the spyglass of Google Street View, the other through the eyes of a wandering, embodied observer.
This salon brings these works into conversation. Instead of a traditional artist talk, we’ll gather for a collective act of interpretation and analysis. With the artists present, we’ll let the meanings of these two works surface through conversation, curiosity, and audience insight.