Tagtool

Two weeks ago, we noticed a few Youtube videos from Tagtool sessions in Brazil with some nice scenes, like this city street. But we were especially intrigued by the fact that the Tagtool was changing color, glowing in the hue of the brush.

Sure enough, a few days later we got an email, complete with images, from Fred Paulino of Belo Horizonte, shedding some light on the mysterious chameleon Tagtool.

We proudly present a new brazilian Tagtool by Graffiti Research Lab Brasil and Gambiologia Project. It was developed from your original project but we made several customizations …
Hope you like it and keep in touch!

While GRL and its international spin-offs like GRL.BR are well known, I’d never heard of the term Gambiologia. Looking at the explanation on their homepage, and with the help of online translation, I learned that

Gambiologia is a work of construction of electronics with accent anthropophagy. Through recycling equipment, brings a new meaning for the technological context, to assume a position of creative recontextualization of materials normally regarded as scrap.

The charming robot phrasing aside, here was another word I didn’t know – anthropophagy. Here goes the dictionary:

an⋅thro⋅poph⋅a⋅gy /ˌænθrəˈpɒfədʒi/
–noun
the eating of human flesh; cannibalism.

Techno-Cannibalism. Nice one. A broken VHS eats some wires, knobs and LEDs, slaps some stickers on, and becomes a Tagtool. The Tagtool gets eaten by a lawnmower, who downloads Google Earth and we’re set for some obscene golf course graffiti to entertain our lurking invaders from space. For sure, Gambiology has been added to my vocabulary.

But back to Fred’s email and the Tagtool he built, together with Lucas Mafra. He explained that they used RGB LEDs, color-changing lamps that follow the hue of the brush, and blink red when the pushbutton is pressed. On top of that they turned the Mini into a power- and USB hub device – anybody who has set up a session with a Mini and struggled with connecting all the wires will approve.

True to the game, they also posted pictures of the construction process, schematics and the Arduino code that controls the LEDs.

We’ll surely try this out with one of our Tagtools, and I hope others will, too. To wrap things up in the right spirit, here’s some more robo-poetic, auto-translated Gambiological philosophy –

Gambiologia is a proto-science that begins to be important at the time of processing. Unlike the other sciences, the gambiologia happens as a TAZ, an impermanence that the need arises and disappears in the conclusion. The gambiarra is open to experimentation in the veins of the hacker spirit. The DIY is essential; Mastering the world without the need to report.

The Gambiarra Style – Photo: Daniel Mansur | Model: Wally