‘READY 4 RIOTS’

Introduction

Hello… I’m the blog administrator for Ready4Riots.com, and I’ve been loving graffiti since I was in the seventh grade, 1993 more or less. I’ve been writing since the late 90s, but a couple of years ago I decided to create R4R and I’ve been running with it ever since…

What were your intentions when you started the blog?

The blog came about because I wanted to publish a lot of the material I was coming across on a daily basis. It was just as much graffiti as ‘conspiracy theories’.

The name ‘Ready For Riots’ came to me when I lived in London, even though then I didn’t know what to do with it. Not long after, when I was in Madrid for a year, I had a job where I was free for hours each day so that whole time I would be looking at graffiti blogs and documentaries about secret societies, conspiracies, symbology and a whole bunch of other strange stuff. That’s when it occurred to me to create a blog that mixed all these themes.

What do you believe a blog like this one should offer?

At R4R, just like at any blog, our principal objective is to create content. I like to post work and stuff from people I meet and from people who need to get recognized just as much as I enjoy uploading or linking information that I find on the web that I feel is interesting. When I travel, I make the most of it and upload photos little by little… just like last Summer when I must of took more than a thousand photos in London, Marseille, Florence, Istanbul, and Berlin… and I still have to post them!

Has the way you view information and graffiti on the internet changed at all over the last two years?

Truthfully, not that much has changed. I always thought that with the internet you can get stuck all day looking at graffiti from other parts of the world and inform yourself about whatever you feel like. The key is being able to stay clear of everything you aren’t really interested in.

The task of managing a blog and having the responsibility to keep it alive when there are all these photo-logs, blogs, flickrs, twitters, tumblrs, etc, and they’re all swamped with pics… it can make you a bit selective.

I also think that access to all types of uncensored information can influence graffiti writers work just as much as graphic designers or other creative people in general. For example, just look at how many people in the last few years who included diamonds in their murals and designs, and nowadays the triangle with the eye inside is everywhere…in pieces, throw-ups, tags… etc. At R4R we are focusing on the mason square and compass for the 2012-2013 season!

Does your blog have a social critical component that most others don’t?

Right… R4R is 90-95% graffiti and the rest is a bit of everything. That critical element exists within that 5-10% as well as a bit of personal confession. In the time that we live in with all this over-load of information on the internet, even though you are a person with blood in his veins and common sense, you feel indignant.

Being the only one behind all of what R4R is, I have the freedom to upload whatever I wish. In other blogs that have a whole bunch of people in charge, maybe it’s more difficult to agree on content they want to put up or they simply don’t put that type of stuff up. For me there are issues that get me fired up, and I don’t have to give any type of explanation to anyone, and I do what I want.

Future?

The future of the blog is that it will stay alive as long as I enjoy it. Maybe this year I will include an online store with “nice, good looking, and cheap” t-shirts with designs that inspire graffiti 100%. For my personal future, I might go abroad, and if I do, I´ll document whichever scene that I´m around.

Long live graffiti!!

* Images courtesy of Srger.