A Catalogue of Street Art Techniques

‘A Catalogue of Street Art Techniques’ is a prototype of open source platform for sharing knowledge over street art, developed by The G. Canyon in a Crack (www.thegcanyon.com). The project had its first test during the 3rd edition of Public Design Festival, organized in Milan form the 12th to the 17th of April 2011. Involving the areas of the city with the most intense and/or interesting presence of street art, ‘A Catalogue of Street Art Techniques’ was born with the purpose of presenting the works of artists that act everyday in our public space, in the attempt to turn the city into an interactive, open air exhibition, as well as a receptive database of informations, public discussion, criticism and enquiries. Employing modern technologies, social networks and printed media, ‘A Catalogue of Street Art Techniques’ interferes with the city both in the physical and in the virtual level, providing the user an accessible navigation system for a smart urban drifting experience. ‘A Catalogue of Street Art Techniques’ makes intense use of the city as a catalyst, spreading concrete information beside focal points in the urban pattern, while taking advantage from the open source nature of a web-based platform to collect and analyze the contribution of the users.

An overview of ‘A Catalogue of Street Art Techniques’ in its beta stage may be found at http://streetarttechniques.wordpress.com/ and the project diary can be consulted at http://streetarttechniques.tumblr.com/

‘A Catalogue of Street Art Techniques’ aims to spread the knowledge over certain kinds of urban art with which we face during our everyday experience in our surroundings, as well as to push the citizens to assign the right value to well-crafted works, in order to promote the diffusion of valuable expressions of street art in the daily life of our cities. In the attempt to involve citizens in the experience of an interactive, open air knowledge-sharing platform, spread to the whole urban pattern of the city, A Catalogue of Street Art Techniques does not aim to create anything new, but rather to give value to what is already present. The intent of the project is to act in two levels at the same time: from one side, in the city itself, where a physical platform, in the shape of a record, is placed beside valuable examples of street art. The record describes the technique which was used to perform the work and provides a map locating nearby works of street art, allowing the user to choose which will be the next step of his or her urban art route. On the other side, the digital platform, in the shape of a website, offers the same content of the records (technique descriptions and maps, beside a photo of the referred artwork) but furthermore provides interactivity and possibility of personalization to the user (a QR-code guarantees the connection in between the physical and the virtual level), allowing not only a practical navigation system organized in areas and categories, but also the chance to add new inputs to the database. Taking advantage form a Geo-RSS feed of an open Flickr group, anybody can contribute to make the database wider and include new entries with just a geo-tagged picture that can be shoot from any mobile device with a GPS.  Everybody can be part of the curatorial process of this open air exhibition spread through the city. The project is willing to provide an open platform as a starting point, including a certain quantity of entries in the database and a widespread presence of physical records beside the most notable artworks in the city, in order to act as a catalyst and open the door to the contribution of the public, that should subsequently lead the project in a second stage. Furthermore, in the attempt to involve the flexibility of mobile technologies in the process, ‘A Catalogue of Street Art Techniques’ featured in its first public presentation the collaboration with a group of technological partners, who provided free access to an iPhone based application named ‘All City Street Art’, which allowed the user to access a worldwide database of street art, including a geo-localization system and informations over featured artists. The database is open and fully customizable, and has been available for free download in the days in which the first edition of ‘A Catalogue Of Street Art Techniques took place’.

To attract even more the public to the project, a street art walking tour was organized during the first edition of ‘A Catalogue Of Street Art Techniques’, with the presence of notable local artists and an expert guide.

A Catalogue of Street Art Techniques Flickr group is open to the contribution of everybody. Posting a geo-tagged photo to this group will help us increase the range of our experiment and open the perspective of a future evolution for the project.

In the moment of posting a new photo to the pool, please be sure to include information over the author, as well as the technique (if you have any doubt, please refer to one of the pictures already present in the pool or visit our blog)

More images of the project, as well as a small diary of the experience, are available at http://streetarttechniques.tumblr.com/

Printed and digital press releases (more updates coming):

Il Sole 24 Ore, Sotto La Vernice, Lobo di Lattice, Madness Wall, Coca Colla