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This article has been published in: Ocula 18, Street Art: Iconoclasm and Istitutionalization

author: Cristina Greco (LARS – Laboratorio Romano di Semiotica, Università La Sapienza di Roma (IT))

Embryonic Lines. Mapping Urban Art, Documenting the Absence via Web Archives and Locative Media

language: italian

abstract: Spatial and locative media, Internet archives and on-line and interactive maps using positioning and cartographic visualization technologies allow a migration of urban art, from which often nothing remains except in the memory of the web. This migration makes the invisible in all cities visible, by determining a reduction of the boundaries between local/global and central/peripheral. Just think, for example, of the Flickr image galleries, artists’ websites, blogs, collaborative social networks, experiential mapping and Google's platforms for geo-location and geo-annotation. This contribution proposes a reflection on two topics: first, on the transformation of the consumption patterns of art in the urban space, and second, on the role of Internet archives in the selection and organization of the memory (Certeau 1980, Ricoeur 2000) of artistic interventions subject to processes of deletion, deterioration and over-imposition. It does so through the analysis of some exceptional cases: Rome Street Art Map Project, M.U.Ro. (Urban Art Museum of Rome) Map and The Google Street Art Project. It aims to reflect on the practices of communication and on the effects of meaning in the examples where Urban Art acquires greater visibility and where the nature of the work is subject to the transition from a local dimension to a plausible more global dimension selecting the fragments of existing materials, in analogy to the concept of bricolage (Lévi-Strauss 1962).

citation information: Cristina Greco, La traccia in fieri. Mappare l’arte urbana, documentare l’assenza tra archivi web e locative media, "Ocula", vol.18, n.18, pp.102-122, September 2017. DOI: 10.12977/ocula79

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Ocula.it publishes articles and essays in semiotic research, with a particular eye on communication and culture; it is open to dialogue with other research fields and welcomes contributions from all the areas of the social and human sciences.