Let’s get this out of the way: supposedly, Banksy’s real name is Robin Gunningham, and he’s from Bristol, England. How did this revelation come to be after the prolific street artist and social commentator’s superhero-like attempts to conceal his identity? In a word: science. Steven Le Comber of Queen Mary (part of the University of London) used geographic profiling to narrow down various people and where they were in correlation to Banksy’s artwork going up around the world. It’s really cool, but also scary considering the invasion of privacy implications. Regardless – we probably know Banksy’s name now, and that’s what matters most, I think.
Here’s a snippet of what I call the “Finding Banksy” report, full of jargon and impressive-sounding data that may have finally revealed everyone’s favorite anonymous artist:
“We use a Dirichlet process mixture (DPM) model of geographic profiling, a mathematical technique developed in criminology and finding increasing application within ecology and epidemiology, to analyze the spatial patterns of Banksy artworks in Bristol and London. The model takes as input the locations of these artworks, and calculates the probability of ‘offender’ residence across the study area. Our analysis highlights areas associated with one prominent candidate (e.g., his home), supporting his identification as Banksy.”
The researchers extrapolated their methods to the BBC:
“What I thought I would do is pull out the 10 most likely suspects, evaluate all of them and not name any. But it rapidly became apparent that there is only one serious suspect, and everyone knows who it is.
I’d be surprised if it’s not [Gunningham], even without our analysis, but it’s interesting that the analysis offers additional support for it.”
Keep in mind that Gunningham was “accused” of being Banksy all the way back in 2008, so these researchers are only adding evidence and data supporting those claims by filtering hundreds of “known” Banksy works, then correlating their locations to certain people that reside nearby. In the cases of Banksy, Gunningham was a constant presence.
Now that the artist is out of the bag, hopefully people won’t start to dislike Banksy’s work now that he’s been outed. And if you want to delve deeper into just how these scientists tracked down one of the world’s most mysterious men, you can read their full report here.
(via Economist)