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try staring at a wall for thirty years

Ever wanted to peel a layer off a textured urban wall and see what’s underneath? Or, better yet, watch a timelapse slideshow of how a wall or structure has changed over the decades?

Back in the day, you’d just have to sit yourself down and stare at a wall for, oh, twenty or thirty years. Nowadays you can just ride up to the internets, where you can watch decades of wall evolution in the time it takes some flash wizardry to load.

GrafArc.org is a fascinating collaborative study of graffiti-covered walls in urban settings. The special ingredient in the sauce? Time. Using the flash-based GrafArc Explorer, you can watch how urban spots change and evolve as time passes.

From the site’s description:

Graffiti Archaeology is a project devoted to the study of graffiti-covered walls as they change over time. The core of the project is a timelapse collage, made of photos of graffiti taken at the same location by many different photographers over a span of several years.