You know what London's like. Turn a familiar corner, and a new bit of street art is covering the side of your local butchers. Round the next bend, someone's installed a plastic mushroom on top of the pub. And the much cherished statue of a local hero just got stolen from your nearest park. Sometimes, whole buildings, previously adorned with street art, disappear overnight.
Point is, the public art and street art of this city comes and goes with dizzying rapidity. Step forward BigArtMob, a project to map the transient art of the streets. It's community driven, and encourages users to upload their own discoveries into the ever growing database.
While not an original idea, the site aims to be bigger and better than other efforts, and seems to be off to a good start. Indeed, the original incarnation arrived six years ago, in support of Channel 4's Big Art Project, so the database includes many long-vanished pieces as well as newcomers. The site has just launched a free mobile app for iPhone and iPad to make things even easier.
Although a worldwide project, BigArtMob was set up by Londoner Alfie Dennen, a stalwart of creative digital projects. His previous works include the Bus Tops project and co-founding Moblog. Techcrunch has more on the project, including possible business models to sustain it.
