Beginning on June 10 nearly five thousand Cuban art proposals became part of the visual universe of Google, where most of the works showcased are from Latin America and arrive to the Internet platform as part of the Street Art Project conceived by the Google Cultural Institute.
Launched in Paris and Buenos Aires, the mission of this initiative is the online preservation of an urban art whose expressions often disappear forever once the walls on which it was created is "whitened." Videos and photographs reclaim these ephemeral "jewels" for posterity; testimonies that are now available for the entire world to appreciate online at http://g.co/streetart.
Spearheaded by the Google Cultural Institute, the project has developed tools for allowing access to our cultural heritage through the Web. Among the various initiatives included in such heritage is the Art Project platform. Since 2011 it has made available to Internet users more than 40,000 photographs of art works from about 400 museums and cultural institutions around the world.
To create the Street Art Project, the institute joined 30 partners from fifteen countries that allowed it to incorporate in its homepage nearly five thousand works, with the notable inclusion of urban art from Latin America: a total of 1,175 works from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and México.
Brazil and its urban art proposals were responsible for inspiring this initiative last year, when a partner from this country mounted a street art exhibition utilizing the Art Project platform of Google, an action that generated such interest that it led to the decision of forming a special global collection.
Urban art in Latin America stands out for its creative freedom on the streets and for producing a wide variety of works centered on themes that range from stories from everyday urban life to politically charged proposals. Themes such as integration and freedom are among the most common subjects that inspire Latin American graffiti and urban artists.
With just a click, internet users can access these types of large-scale murals, small "interventions" on walls, graffiti and even trompe l'oeil (a technique that creates an optical illusion) images that rely on details from the available landscape, such as a hole or a portal used to deceive the viewer's gaze.
The high-definition images of the works can be zoomed in or zoomed out and users are allowed to create their own galleries—like the one in Google Art Project—and compare different exhibitions and artistic movements.
It is also possible to do virtual surveys—such as the Paris Tour 13'—of European buildings that were intervened with urban art works, but that were eventually destroyed. Users can also learn how to create a mural from an artist's perspective.
This multimedia platform not only includes the high-resolution photographs but also behind the scene videos and videos of exhibitions organized by the partners of Google in this project.
Largely inspired by Latin American aesthetics, the initiative was launched by the largest search engine in the world through the contributions of the Graffiti Mundo collective in Argentina, with 309 works online. Estilo Libre, with 160 images, and Buenos Aires Street, with 202 proposals, are the two other Argentinean collectives that joined the project.
Brazil is represented with 169 works by São Paulo Street Art, an organization that was already an associate of the Google Cultural Institute.
Chile was incorporated into the project with works from the Open Air Museums in La Pincoya and San Miguel, both muralist street intervention initiatives.
Likewise, Colombia is represented by Bogotá Street Art, a spontaneously formed urban art collective that creates different read...