(Un)placing Street Art: Augmented Reality and Urban Museums

Abstract

Street Art was born with a strong connection to place. Due to its site-specificity, it is difficult to exhibit it inside a museum. There is an intrinsic risk of completely de-contextualise and un-bound Street Art. Therefore, there is an increasing adoption of online, mobile based solution such as mapping or using Augmented Reality in order to comment and narrate the artworks within their own placeness. However, the online mapping of Street Art and the adoption of AR is far from uncomplicated. Starting from the interviews conducted with stakeholders of the Museum of Augmented Urban Art, the paper considers the various narratives involved in the creation of the museum. It focusses on the selection of the artworks, on how the ephemerality of the street art has been addressed and how the relationship between Street Art and AR have unfolded. It also reflects how the museum acted as Contact zone (Clifford, 1997) and digital and physical memoryscape.