E-Mail This Article to a Friend Writing on the wall (continued)

Collage artist Mouffiko, who creates ornate wheat-pasted pieces based on biology-textbook images, first contributed to the street dialogue right after 9/11. Given that this was a period of unrepentant jingoism, his stickers declaring WAR IS THE ULTIMATE FAILURE enraged people. "One person took those white sticky office labels and wrote evil things about French people and stuck them just beneath my stickers," writes Mouffiko in an e-mail — the only way he agrees to answer a reporter’s questions. He mounted placards with mostly blank space and a military-rifle border. "People wrote some funny and sad and shocking things [in the blank spaces]," he recalls. "One person wrote: ‘If you need to shoot someone, try shooting yourself.’ "

Politically loaded statements and provocative imagery may evoke community responses, but creators of less-confrontational post-graffiti pieces face the difficulty of getting regular folks to notice their work. "One of the hardest things is to get the public to notice," says photographer and cartoonist Alex Lukas, of Cantab Publishing, a Cambridge-based producer of street-art ’zines and books. "Street art has sunk so far into the background of everyday life."

Along with the dark clouds, one set of unsanctioned public-art pieces that has managed to capture public attention is the four-year-old Monster Project, a continuing series of installations conceived in Providence that spread to Boston, New York, and Rome. Inspired by MIT’s tradition of infamous hacks, the minds behind the Monster Project transform urban structures into gigantic beasts by adding made-to-fit body parts. "Our idea is that a city environment is in many ways cannibalistic," writes one member on the street-art Web site Wooster Collective. "It eats itself." Each site is chosen and measured before the installation, and the appendages are designed to fit their often-derelict surroundings: decayed doorways, corroded rooftops, boarded-up windows. In Somerville’s Davis Square, a tan appendage emerged on the roof of Somerville Jewelers sometime last year, made to look as if an unseen beast is clawing its way out of the store. Another installation transformed the meshed entrance of a footbridge into a monster’s gaping maw. The monsters have lasted for anywhere from half an hour to years; the monster in Davis Square still remains.

As with traditional graffiti, documenting the piece is an essential part of the process. Web sites, portfolios, and books bear innumerable photos of stickers, stencils, and signs displayed in their intended environments. And part of bequeathing art to the streets is seeing what happens once it’s photographed. "I put up another piece recently," writes Mouffiko. "And it got taken down within 72 hours. I didn’t get a photo of it while it was up. I did get a photo after it was taken down, smashed into pieces, and put in the trash."

"I like art to have a story, a meaning, an ownership beyond purchase," writes Neelon on his Web site. "Street art provides this. Someone wakes up and finds a [street-art] sign on their street. It’s theirs now, like their local park or basketball court. There’s a game in finding the next one."

For the people putting it up, street art is like a game. "I want to make a game of the street," says one street artist who doesn’t want to be identified. "It’s deceptive, you have to watch out. It’s like an urban video game. Each thing that you see is a power-up. It’s like a little scavenger hunt."

It’s a game for Darkclouds. Whenever he’s bored, the Vermont native rides around the city on his bike, always carrying something to slap up — usually stickers or metal signs. "My eyes are constantly on the streets. The joke is that someday I’m going to get in a car accident for scoping graf and looking for places to put signs." All his work goes up during the day. "I bike around with a backpack full of signs, bolts, and a hammer," he explains. Once he’s screwed in the sign, he uses the hammer to bend the bolts — which is why his works stays up for so long. Some signs have lasted seven months; others, only a few days. "Right when summer hit, 20 of them got taken in like a week or two," he says. "Tons of them were gone. Some of them they painted over with white paint."

Darkclouds gets a five-finger discount on most of his materials. "I don’t steal signs from working signposts," he explains. Rather, he tends to pinch them from construction sites, where they’re frequently lying on the ground. "If you’re really looking for signs, you can find them everywhere." As for stickers, he gets them free whenever a political campaign, radio station, or record label gives them away. "I grab as many as I can until they tell me to take it easy." Then he covers them with spray paint and black sign paint. Once they’re painted, he gets rid of them quickly. "That makes me make more."

For obvious reasons, Darkclouds wants to keep his identity secret. If he ever got caught, he could find himself facing charges of malicious destruction of property, maybe even larceny. So for his online gallery, he’s posed in four photo-booth shots like a bandit, his distinguishing features disguised by a red bandanna and tinted sunglasses. But sitting outside at Thornton’s, a restaurant he suggested near the Christian Science Center, he has wide hazel eyes, a backwards baseball hat, and light facial hair. In front of him is a plateful of bread crusts and a paperback copy of Outland strips. When he talks, he has a slight stutter and manic energy.

At 18, Darkclouds moved to Boston to study photography at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Soon after, he started writing graffiti. He dropped out of the Museum School after two years: "I really didn’t like the attitude." He continued writing graf until about a year ago. One night, when he and a friend were spray-painting in an alley, the cops showed up. Darkclouds wound up on probation for six months — fortunately, he was nicked for drawing a cartoon, not his tag. "If you get caught writing your name that large, you’re fucked," he explains. "If you’re big in the city and the cops have your tag name on file, they can trace everything you’ve done." That’s why, when Darkclouds was still writing graffiti, he had to change his tag name at least 10 times. He finally quit writing graffiti, but he needed another outlet. He had signs lying around his house; he thought about painting them and putting them back out in the world. "My logic was, ‘Oh, this isn’t as illegal as graf.’ But it’s obviously illegal, even though I didn’t think of it [that way]."

The original muse for the dark clouds was a "really pissy" painter friend who moped around like Li’l Abner’s Joe Btfsplk. "My friend was always in this terrible mood, always bugging me. And so I was like, ‘There’s a cloud over your head all the time. You gotta de-cloud.’ " But the project has since become a symbol of anguish for Darkclouds. "For me, it’s turned into the angst that you can’t escape in your life. Everybody’s got some shit that sucks; something over their head all the time." Darkclouds has been in a tough spot lately — he recently lost his job as a barback; his landlord usurped the basement space where he did all his painting; his hip-hop group hasn’t done anything with its demo — and he seems to want other people to feel his pain. "You’re not supposed to be able to go anywhere without being reminded."

"If you put your art on the streets, it’s probably the most genuine critique you can get," he says. Recently, someone glued a glass heart to the bottom of one of his signs. It made him happy. "I’ve gotten more credit and more props for [the dark-cloud series] than anything I’ve done artistically."

And what happens if he ever gets caught? "I have no clue and do not want to find out."

Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com