Artistic experiments of urban acupuncture

Abstract

Urban art has become one of the main subject of a collective demand for improvement concerning the aesthetic quality of today’s city, as an element capable of changing the perception of a place through the filter of culture, creativity and therefore promoting positive impacts on the local community by means of the reconfiguration of space perception, the diffusion of a collective aesthetic awareness and the attribution of a positive value to artistic intervention and creativity.
In the last decade, street artists’ murals have been transformed from spontaneous individual denunciation to committed interventions by private or public institutions, thus becoming rightfully among the most appreciated interventions for the urban redevelopment of suburbs, abandoned areas or degraded building. When local communities participate the design process, urban art aims to revitalize the streets, squares, urban public spaces, so that they return being the privileged places for meeting.
The educational result of citizens’ participation in the artistic installations is the so called “peer-to-peer learning”, that is people who learn, create and therefore teach others how to do it.
In the last decade the new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have assumed an important role in the artistic field, determining a transformation of people’s mental processes and a different way of living and perceiving places, characterized by narration, creativity and the playful aspect of interactivity by means of digital technologies. In this scenario there are some street art experiments, whose murals are animated by digital contents that overlap perfectly with the painting, interacting with the pictorial shapes and completing their meaning. The more traditional open air museum thus turns into an innovative art-infoscape, both for local communities and for the connected tourist circuit.