Bombing, roaming around in search of free canvas - train, building, abandoned truck, whatever - space for throw-ups, a quick piece, tags, and the occasional mural.

They run around in the night. Kids pile into vans with a hip hop boom or roam on foot with backpacks of spray paint boosted from the neighborhood hardware store. They go to work sketching and filling in quick concentrated outlines. When the lights come out of nowhere, cans drop and people explode in different directions. Whether the police or some other group marking its territory, nobody stops running.

Early in 1994, Pat Delilo, working with a Queens community pride group, was cleaning up the remains of a night time graffiti mission when he was struck by the quality of a piece he had started to erase. He realized that some of these "graf writers" were frustrated artists, poor kids in search of an outlet. Delilo acquired private donations of space and materials and created the Phun Phactory. At the Phactory's headquarters in Queens, and now on trains donated by Amtrak in the Bronx, Pat oversees the installation of the works of "aersol artists". The commissions come with city-issued authorizations, but they aren't always honored by the NYPD vandal squad.

Writers Tore, Ovie K.D., and Coda hang out in the Phactory's grassy back lot. Out of highschool with bills to pay and jobs that have them going to bed early, they're working with legal walls now. But they extol bombing in its traditional form; recalling fabled bombing missions of the past. Tore says: "Once you' re a writer you're a writer forever but times have changed." He and his friends worry that the hassle-free environment at the Phactory detracts from the dissident essence of graffiti art.

Graffiti - Vandalism, Aersol Art, Graf. At the Phun Phactory what it's called and what it's all about depends on who is talking.