Project INDIGO is the umbrella for a broader research programme dedicated to the systematic documentation, dissemination and analysis of graffiti along Vienna’s Donaukanal (Danube Canal). It brings together the original INDIGO project, now known as INDIGO 1.0 (2021–2023), and the follow-up project, INDIGO 2.0 (April 2026–March 2029).
Graffiti are often dismissed as vandalism or visual noise, yet many examples represent powerful, albeit ephemeral, forms of social, political and cultural expression. Along Vienna’s Donaukanal, a recreational hotspot in the heart of the city, graffiti form a dense and constantly changing urban graffiti-scape. They balance between the tangible and the intangible, the offensive and the pleasant, making people laugh, wonder, think or become angry.
INDIGO 1.0 was launched in 2021 to lay the theoretical and methodological groundwork for systematically documenting, archiving, disseminating, and analysing graffiti along the Donaukanal. The project focused on 12.9 km of graffiti-covered canal surfaces and combined regular photographic surveys with engagement from the local graffiti community to photograph many graffiti soon after their creation.
The images collected in INDIGO 1.0 were processed into detailed, distortion-free orthophotographs and textures for a 3D surface model of the canal banks. Together, these data created a spatially, spectrally, and temporally structured record of sprayings, engravings, and other forms of personal expression attached, in legal and illegal ways, to the public urban surfaces of the Donaukanal.
The project’s OpenAtlas spatial database managed these images, auxiliary data and associated metadata, including information on style, artist pseudonyms and creation dates. The involvement of graffiti creators, local researchers and international scholars supported the correction, enrichment and contextualisation of the data. The CIDOC CRM ontology and a graffiti-specific thesaurus provided a semantic structure for organising hierarchical, graffiti-related terminology.
INDIGO 2.0 builds on this foundation and addresses several challenges identified during INDIGO 1.0: the efficient detection of new graffiti, bottlenecks in metadata annotation, the modelling of complex spatio-temporal relationships, and the limitations of relational databases for managing heterogeneous heritage data. The follow-up project develops a techno-humanistic framework for sustainably monitoring, interpreting and preserving evolving graffiti-scapes. The project's central research question—how to sustainably monitor and understand evolving graffiti-scapes—guides a three-year program of interdisciplinary development and implementation.
Five core areas of inquiry provide a framework for the project. First, a bike-mounted multi-camera system, paired with graffiti change detection in the AUTOGRAF software, will track new graffiti and document them using orthophotos and 3D models. Second, metadata annotation pipelines will be transformed through machine learning and voice-to-text transcription, enabling region-specific, voice-driven tagging via the GRAPHIS software. Third, the temporal dynamics of graffiti will be modelled using a dedicated time-aware ontology embedded in a graph database that manages INDIGO 2.0's diverse (meta)data and supports new ways to analyse and visualise complex relationships. Fourth, the HUEnique software will consistently determine graffiti colours, assign standardised names, and link them via COOLPI, a colourimetric tool, to spectral reflectance profiles. Finally, online surveys and exploratory tools embedded in the UrbanChameleon platform will provide insights into the evolution, visibility, and covering of socio-political graffiti.
By uniting Digital Humanities and Technical Sciences, INDIGO 2.0 reshapes graffiti research and offers transferable innovations to Heritage Science through tools and insights applicable to rock art, painting studies, and the digital preservation of cultural heritage. The project also aims to establish much-needed terminological standards and style formalisations for graffiti studies, supporting future cross-project data interoperability. In doing so, INDIGO 2.0 recasts graffiti as a rich, dynamic, and interpretable record of contemporary urban culture, far beyond mere visual noise.
Awards
- INventory and DIsseminate Graffiti along the dOnaukanal
- Austrian Academy of Sciences
- INventory and DIsseminate Graffiti along the dOnaukanal 2.0
- Austrian Academy of Sciences