Batch 1
Batch 2
Scanned City: Graffiti as Living Archive
Philosophy
Tools
Portable flatbed scanner,
Photoshop,
After Effects
FIgma
Role
Graphic Designer
Context
The Lower East Side of Manhattan is one of the most visually saturated neighborhoods in New York City, where layers of posters, graffiti, political messaging, and tags overlap, erode, and reappear.
While many street artworks are ephemeral and go unseen by wider audiences, they speak to the soul of a city in flux—raw, unfiltered, and communal.
This project captures and archives these visual moments using a portable scanner, preserving the street’s ever-changing textures and recontextualizing them as digital posters.
Process
I physically walked the streets of NYC with a handheld scanner, scanning surfaces at eye level and below—torn posters, layers of wheat-paste, graffiti, stickers, grime.
These scanned surfaces were then digitally stitched, color-corrected, and curated into compositions that embrace distortion, decay, and layering, treating public surfaces like glitch canvases.
Final outputs include both static posters and motion reels that exaggerate visual decay and time collapse.
Street art is often viewed as illegal, temporary, or marginal, but it holds critical visual dialogues around identity, rebellion, culture, humor, and resistance.
By scanning these works, I’m documenting collective authorship and giving a second digital life to pieces destined to be scraped, torn, or painted over.
It also challenges traditional poster design by embracing noise, fragmentation, and illegibility as central aesthetic tools.
Why This Matters
Design is often clean, polished, and commercial—this work lives on the other side of that spectrum.
These posters and reels make visible what urban gentrification often erases.
This is preservation through distortion: celebrating overlooked authorship and glitch as a mark of truth.
Batch 3
Batch 3
Click on display to see the video
