Reverse graffiti, also known as clean tagging, dust tagging, grime writing, green graffiti or clean advertising, is a method of creating temporary or semi permanent images on walls or other surfaces by removing dirt from a surface. It is often done by removing dirt/dust with the fingertip(s) from windows or other dirty surfaces, such as writing 'wash me' on a dirty vehicle. Others, such as artist Moose

Moose (graffiti artist)

Moose is the pseudonym of Paul Curtis, a British graffiti artist. Instead of the typical methods of graffiti, Moose creates his art by cleaning dirt and grime off surfaces....

, use a cloth or a high power washer to remove dirt on a larger scale.

Origin

English artist Paul Curtis aka Moose

Moose (graffiti artist)

Moose is the pseudonym of Paul Curtis, a British graffiti artist. Instead of the typical methods of graffiti, Moose creates his art by cleaning dirt and grime off surfaces....

 is one of the first street art

Street art

Street art is any art developed in public spaces — that is, "in the streets" — though the term usually refers to unsanctioned art, as opposed to government sponsored initiatives...

ists to make an art piece using the reverse graffiti technique. He discovered the technique at his dishwashing job, as he explains in his documentary.

The first large scale reverse graffiti art piece was made by Alexandre Orion in 2006, the intervention Ossario with over 1000 foot is washed by the municipality of São Paulo in the end of the video.

Street artists such as Banksy

Banksy

Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter.His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine irreverent dark humour with graffiti done in a distinctive stencilling technique...

 or Alexandre Orion

Alexandre Orion

Alexandre Orion is a Brazilian graffiti artist and photographer.He gained attention for his exhibition Metabiotics in 2006, a graffiti/photography project in which he painted graffiti pieces with white and black latex paint and photographed people interacting with them...

 have made works with reverse graffiti as well.

Commercially

As with traditional graffiti

Graffiti

Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....

, nowadays the technique is also explored commercially as an original way of out-of-home advertising

Out-of-home advertising

Out-of-home advertising is made up of more than 100 different formats, totaling $6.99 billion in annual revenues in 2008 in the USA. Outdoor advertising is essentially any type of advertising that reaches the consumer while he or she is outside the home...

 to reach consumers in an unconventional new way. The pilot campaign for Telfort

Telfort

Telfort B.V. is a Dutch mobile telecommunication company, and a subsidiary of KPN.It operates GSM mobile telecommunications service in the Netherlands...

 was highly successful and made it to several blogs and advertising magazines.

Since then, large companies as Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

, the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 and Smirnoff

Smirnoff

Smirnoff is a brand of vodka owned and produced by the British company Diageo. The Smirnoff brand began with a vodka distillery founded in Moscow by Pyotr Arsenievich Smirnov , the son of illiterate Russian peasants. It is now distributed in 130 countries.Smirnoff products include vodka, flavored...

have advertised their products in this way. In this context, marketers call it, "clean advertising" or "clean graffiti".

Environment impact

Because reverse graffiti is temporary, biodegradable, and no hard materials such as ink, paper, or chemicals are used in its production and it does not use electricity to back or front light, reverse graffiti is considered an environmentally friendly way of advertising.

Legality

There have been several instances of authorities attempting to prosecute those performing clean advertising, but prosecution has been difficult due to the temporary and non-destructive nature of the practice. Moreover, while adding something to the sidewalk like paint is illegal, cleaning is not. Thus, companies or artists offering their reverse graffiti services are operating in a legal gray area. In the UK it is not a grey area as the Town & Country Planning Act 1990 section 224 makes it very clear that advertising without consent is a criminal offence. See http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/planningandbuilding/outdooradvertisements

From January 2011, CURB Media worked with Leeds to help the council become the first globally to regulate clean advertising, marking the start of clean media's development into the mainstream. Since this time numerous other councils across the UK have started to regulate the media as means of generating revenue and delivering local and national advertising.