MementoArtem: A Digital Cultural Heritage Approach to Archiving Street Art

Abstract

Street art, and its close relation, graffiti, can possess a dramatic visual, aesthetic and political power. However, artworks are subject to damage and harm by many means such as weather, removal of unsanctioned works by public authorities, defacement, vandalism and even demolition. Artists themselves often regard their work as purely temporary creations. In a word, street art is fragile. The MementoArtem project was established in 2021 to explore a variety of human-centered technologies and emerging standards to document and archive, not only the physical work of street artists, but also the tacit knowledge of a variety of sources that go into their production. In this way, street art, like other cultural heritage artefacts, may be digitally preserved for future generations. It is with this in mind that we propose a metaframework for the documentation, storing and dissemination of a semantically-enabled archive of street art.