OG New York writers.
A full-size train.
One 150-foot wall.

Goldenvoice's first NYC festival, 2016. We handed a 150-foot LED wall to the writers who built this culture — and they did what New York does. They hit the train.

Panorama's inaugural edition ran July 22–24, 2016 on Randall's Island. New York is where graffiti started — on the trains, in the yards, the writers who ran the lines in the '70s and '80s. So we didn't set up a graffiti-flavored photo op. We put a 150-foot Graffiti+ wall in that park and gave the cans to the people who earned them.

Meres One, T-Kid 170, Lady Pink, Jerms, Topaz, See and TooFly — 5Pointz and TATS CRU among the names — put up their pieces in real time. The canvas: a full-size New York subway car. They tagged it end to end, and when the burners were done the whole-car rolled out across the LED — the way the city remembers it.

Panorama was our first real go at 3D tracking — reading the can's position and angle in space, not just its mark on a screen. In the years since, we've rebuilt the whole system chasing one thing: making it feel real. The can behaving like a can, the paint like paint — the drip, the pressure, the way a fat cap opens up — closer every year. But for all of that, the most real thing about Panorama was never the tracking. It was who was holding the can. When writers like these step to a wall, the culture is simply there — earned, not staged. You can't build that. You can only invite it. And it doesn't get more real than the writers who put New York on the map, up on the wall in their own city.

Between their sets, festivalgoers stepped up and painted alongside them — no barrier, no app, just a can in the hand and a wall that answered back. The writers set the tone; the crowd carried it for three days.

We've spent years making the wall feel real. Nothing made it more real than the OG New York writers standing in front of it.