News

July 2015: dAP Parklet construction is complete! Now the work is in YOUR court! There will be an inaugural event August 2, 2015, Noon-5PM. There will be a sign up sheet on hand for speakers at both podiums. Mission poets, comedians and people with opinions are encouraged to speak.

The Maria del Camino blog site has been used to document the progress.

JANUARY 2015: dAP received a grant for a parklet from the San Francisco Arts Commission.

A MEMORIAL TO FREE SPEECH. Two speaker's podiums will bracket the dAP.

The parklet design began in 2011 with a suggestion from Kelley Coelho and countless hours of work. The protracted process, faced numerous hurdles. The application for a grant could not be pursued until permits were secured. The approval was contingent on many special considerations and exceptions from the Pavement to Parks Program of the Planning Department, The Fire Department, and the Department of Public Works for which we are grateful. Our neighbor, Bruce Helmberger, a fan of the wall, is generously co-sponsoring the project. In contrast to most parklets, one in this location is not tied to any commercial activity such as a cafe. Our goals for this endeavor are to strengthen the community, reinforce the significance and history of the wall, and foster continuing activity (public speaking) that reinforces the spirit of the wall. The parklet is being thought of as temporary, and it will be maintained for at least one year. After that, it will be reassessed annually for continuation depending on its reception from the neighborhood.

June 2011: dAP featured new book "Ten Years that Shook the City" edited by Chris Carlsson

The deAppropriation Project makes an appearance in Dr. Jason M. Ferreira's chapter, "With the Soul of a Human Rainbow: Los Siete, Black Panthers, and Third Worldism in San Francisco," pp. 30- 47. The chapter provides some great background history about the Mission Police Station, and provides details about how the building has continued to bear a stigma in the Mission Comminity due to to the civil rights abuses and racism of cops in the 60s and 70s. The other chapters in the book narrate the histories of other controversial spaces and social movements in San Francisco, and help develop the historical context for the building and the project.

dAP at TAG Conference: May 6-8, 2011

The (de)Appropriation Project Archive will be participating in the Theoretical Archaeology Group Meeting held at the University of California Berkeley from May 6-8, 2011. Resident archaeologist on the project, Phoebe France will present a paper for:

  • Graffiti and the Archaeology of the Contemporary
  • Saturday, May 7, 2011

    • This is an exciting chance for us to present the project in a new context, and to get feedback on the most recent iterations of the web resources and tools.

    You can attend the session without registering for the entire conference. Please join us!

History & Future

deappropriationproject.net is the third archive of the (de)Appropriation Project: the continuing documentation of a wall fronting the jail cells of the former Mission Police Station at 1240 Valencia Street, San Francisco.

Earlier versions of the archive, Archaeographic Collage 1 & 2, explored different ways to interact with the photographic record of the wall beginning with a year of images that included 9-11-2001. For Archaeographic Collage 1, the user's cursor marked interaction with the digital images by scratching temporary lines modulated in width by the speed of movement. Areas of increased detail highlighted as the cursor passed over them, allowing the user to open new windows for a closer look.

Archaeographic Collage 2 employed an archaeological strategy of "portals" for digital excavation. Content was locked "geographically" in its proper place on the wall, while portals to a given day moved and cut though layers of time, allowing for the chronological reorganization and isolation of content of interest. Users could view images in sequence or in collage. These early versions of the archive have been exhibited on several occasions in galleries and lectures, and are included as a part of the web site for reference. While visually interesting, these versions lacked essential search features, making them ill suited to serious research.

The wall as a resource for a range of disciplines has become more evident over time. As a dynamic artifact, time has been a key aspect to understanding its value. The range of imagery and subjects seems to be unlimited, triggering considerable dialog with neighbors and colleagues. As new cultural issues arise, the archive expands to incorporate them, becoming a living record of our culture and concerns.

Reciprocally, the documentation and organizational technologies used have changed the archive over time, allowing it to evolve in a way different from traditional photography. The project began with color print film and slides taken with a 35mm Kodak Retina IIIc. Later images were taken with a Canon PowerShot S110 Digital Elf and a Canon Eos 20D. The Eos has captured the most acute detail, showing the subtle or inflammatory comments handwritten by passersby with pencil and ballpoint pen. Yet while image quality varies wildly between cameras, all photographs are included in the archive.

As there are 1,000s of images in the archive and it continues to grow, the challenges to organization, adding metadata, and keywords are significant. The most recent images are the most completely notated, whereas the oldest images are the least well notated. The dates for the oldest images are in some cases notated as year/month/day, with the day being "00."

The current version of the (de)Appropriation Project Archive lives on Flickr to enable a reassembly of the content based on various searches and community interaction with the project through tagging, commenting, image sharing and reuse, online community building, and beyond. As resources permit, the development of the project on Flickr will continue to expand the design and interactivity of the first two versions.

The (de)Appropriation Project has been developed with the encouragement and support of Courtney Fink and Southern Exposure, and was inspired and catalyzed by multiple elements ranging from discussions with Leigh Illion, her paper on "Wall as Archive,"; exhibitions such as AD 2000 at The Lab; encouragement from Steven Black and the SF Bay Guardian's Best of the Bay; irritated and grateful comments from neighbors; the Tomb Family; Phoebe France, resident archaeologist and archivist on the project; and of course those the wild and wacky San Franciscans whose conviction to democracy and free spiritedness are unmatched.