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    • Online showcase of creative work

Street Art Dealer

Beam, a sculpture by Haywood Slucutt and Joesph Watts
» www.mediasandbox.co.uk/category/c6-stealfromwork/

Street art is developed in the street for a street audience. But a growing public interest has encouraged re-sale of street art. Street Art Dealer puts control back in the hands of the artists by enabling art to be discovered and bought direct from the street using a mobile phone.

Mar - Jul 2009

For their Sandbox project, urban art programmers Steal From Work (Bristol) and C6 (London) demonstrated an entirely new way to interact with street art. SFW and C6’s project Street Art Dealer is a web service that enables users to easily discover street art and even buy work through scanning Quick Response (QR) codes at the sites.

A QR code is a two-dimensional bar code that can be embedded into anything from street lamps to Pepsi cans: it contains information (like text or links to websites) that can be scanned and triggered by mobile phones.

The Street Art Dealer web site was launched with an exhibition of urban art around Bristol in July 2009. The exhibition centered around an empty shop where people were shown how to use QR readers on their mobiles. Visitors were then set loose on a street-art treasure hunt, with pieces by artists including Turner Prize nominee Tomoko Takahashi and graffiti artist/technologist James Powderly. Codes adjacent to the pieces launched the Street Art Dealer website, which gave information about the work and a clue to where the next piece was located.

Knowledge-sharing – a Sandbox speciality – is a key inspiration for C6. As Calum puts it: “The new wave of community-driven software is fundamental in my eyes. The open-source movement has developed outside the grasp of corporate capitalism, and has managed to forge such a strong path that everyone in the computing world uses it. That, to me, is the first real global social democracy. Innovators who share, who are not precious about their inventions but who rely on the respect of their community to make a living – these people fascinate and inspire me.”

Related Links:
www.c6.org
www.stealfromwork.org