MuralApp

Public art can define the spirit of a city. It connects people with a sense of history and place. A mobile app can give people access to information that helps them better understand the world around them.

MuralApp helps you to not only find art, but to get to know it. Who was the artist? What was their thinking behind the piece? Was there a different mural beneath the one you see today and what did it look like? The mural app is a way for city dwellers and visitors to explore the art in their towns – and discover the history of the art around them.

Built for the City of Philadelphia, the birthplace of street art.

Find art, muralapp.mobi

Our next iteration of this project will be to work on how to open such an application up to more cities, beginning with San Francisco.

We are also experimenting with crowd-sourced data gathering techniques.

We are inspired by the work of Matt Blair who created a public art app for Portland:

 

Public Art PDX from Mayor Sam Adams on Vimeo.

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Our hope for the future is to work with artists, art reporters, art blogs and others to build a grassroots network of art curators, mirroring the spirit of street art as an art form accessible to anyone.


Who’s working on this

John Mertens – Code for America Fellow | Aaron Ogle – Code for America Fellow | Max Ogden – Code for America Fellow | Karla Macedo – Code for America Fellow | Pete Fecteau – Code for America Fellow | Matt Blair – Genius behind Portland’s Public Art PDX | Leigh Cooper – San Francisco Artist, Community Outreach and Street Art Researcher

Anna Bloom Project Lead

Contact Anna to get involved:
Email | @annabloom



Be Social

What We Need Now

This project needs the support and contributions from various skill types:

Front-end & Mobile Developers: The project will rely heavily on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. The plan is to start the build with a mobile JS framework (Sencha Touch, jQuery Mobile, etc.), and then progress to native apps via programs like PhoneGap or Titanium.

Server-side Developers: Moving forward, we want to be able to store & interact with geo-spatial data. This will probably be done with GeoCouch or PostGIS - so people with experience with either of these technologies would be great.

Public art lovers and historians, artists, pedestrian and professional photographers alike: We need you to help create a grassroots community of street art curators for Philadelphia and San Francisco. We want to build context around the art.

Resources