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I recently developed an iOS application called Public Art, which aims to provide users with a platform to discover more than 100,000 new street art and graffiti images from Instagram every month. The idea behind the project came to me when I realized that there was no effective way to browse the images captured from Instagram that were aggregated based on lat/long data and hashtags.
Public Art solves this problem by passing the device's current location and running a search query for the nearest indexed images. This app lets you see which of the indexed images are the closest to your location and presents the route you can take to explore the art that is nearby. The application functioned for two years until the features used to pull Instagram images could no longer confidently create tags for graffiti and street art due to the high cost of processing every image and the risk of displaying undesired images.
As part of solving the problem of preserving street art, the application includes a feature that allows for anonymous labeling of artists captured in the graffiti images. To encourage participation, I created a simple game that rewards users’ points for correctly identified artists. The game monitors the community to see if a consensus can be reached around artist identification.
The problem of preserving street art may be uniquely solvable given the broad use of social media, which provides a wealth of valuable data such as time, date, and location information for capturing graffiti and street art images. With the application’s basic use of user-generated image submissions and crawlers that monitor certain social media hashtags, there are currently over 100,000 new graffiti images that can be accessed and preserved per month. This number is likely closer to 400,000 new images. Moreover, there are no global foundations that systematically preserve street art, and the current state of machine learning, computer vision technologies, mobile devices, and widely available internet technologies provide a unique opportunity to begin systematically preserving this art form.
Public Art solves this problem by passing the device's current location and running a search query for the nearest indexed images. This app lets you see which of the indexed images are the closest to your location and presents the route you can take to explore the art that is nearby. The application functioned for two years until the features used to pull Instagram images could no longer confidently create tags for graffiti and street art due to the high cost of processing every image and the risk of displaying undesired images.
As part of solving the problem of preserving street art, the application includes a feature that allows for anonymous labeling of artists captured in the graffiti images. To encourage participation, I created a simple game that rewards users’ points for correctly identified artists. The game monitors the community to see if a consensus can be reached around artist identification.
The problem of preserving street art may be uniquely solvable given the broad use of social media, which provides a wealth of valuable data such as time, date, and location information for capturing graffiti and street art images. With the application’s basic use of user-generated image submissions and crawlers that monitor certain social media hashtags, there are currently over 100,000 new graffiti images that can be accessed and preserved per month. This number is likely closer to 400,000 new images. Moreover, there are no global foundations that systematically preserve street art, and the current state of machine learning, computer vision technologies, mobile devices, and widely available internet technologies provide a unique opportunity to begin systematically preserving this art form.
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Version 2.3.0: N/A