Spider-Man and Street Art
How many spray cans can a spider hold at once? #streetart #painting #videogame
Welcome back to Artcade—part political rally, part therapy session, depending on the week. Today, no couch-side dream analysis, promise. Instead, everybody squeeze into the living room: it’s vacation-photo time. What’s that? You’d prefer the dream? Skeptics. I swear there’ll be no shots of me posing by the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramid of Khufu. Where are you going? Stay put—these aren’t Uncle Bob’s pics from every pub in Prague, honest. Let’s dive into this (mostly visual) episode before it’s too late, enjoy the view!
If it were up to me, buildings would look like this:
Staircases like this:
And walls like this:
Those are a few urban corners of Rome and—okay, I lied—one photo does have me in it. I’m just in the background, not posing—and that’s not the point. This episode moves in bursts, like when a mural suddenly catches your eye as you’re hurrying by.
Just outside Rome, in the province of Viterbo, there’s a village called Sant’Angelo, now nicknamed the Fairy-Tale Town because it turned street art into a resource:
A mural that pops up mid-walk is an explosion of beauty—and it can happen anywhere in the world. In Oslo, for instance:
In Amman, Jordan:
And guess where else?
It happens in video games—Spider-Man: Miles Morales, to be precise. I had no idea until I stumbled on it, then I couldn’t stop snapping screenshots like a tourist. Hope you enjoy my holiday album from Insomniac Games’ digital New York.
Insomniac Games (2020) Spider-Man: Miles Morales [Video game] [Action-adventure] [7½ Hours] (Playstation 5) [Playstation 4, Windows] Sony Interactive Entertainment
My last two coins
I love that this episode has far less text than usual because it fits one of my obsessions: taking photos while I play. If I call it an obsession, it’s because the symptoms are serious. No photo mode? I get twitchy. I’ll do anything to hide the protagonist, the HUD, every UI element. My shots aren’t documentary—at least not in the “look what the game lets you do” sense—they’re mostly landscapes. And that takes time. Too much time, sometimes. When I check my play hours on HowLongToBeat, I often find my runs last several hours longer than average: finding the right angle, the right light, the perfect moment isn’t easy. If you’ve ever wondered who tweaks every manual-focus slider—that’s me, blissfully happy.
Until the next episode, ciao!