Augmenting Angri: educational street art in augmented reality
The project, which is strongly focused on educating the younger generation about legality and the rediscovery of local identity values, consists of a series of 8 murals in AR, dedicated to the memory of Carabinieri General Gennaro Niglio, a local hero who lost his life as a result of his fight against the Mafia. Conceived and realized by students of the Federico II University of Naples, the installation is based on the designed interaction of street art and augmented reality.
Local
Italy
Municipality of Angri (SA) and University Federico II of Naples
Mainly urban
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): Department of Architecture (DIARC)_University Federico II of Naples Type of organisation: University or another research institution First name of representative: Alessandra Last name of representative: Pagliano Gender: Female Nationality: Italy Function: Associate professor at the department of Architecture Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Camillo De Nardis 7 Town: Naples Postal code: 80127 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 339 284 7165 E-mail:pagliano@unina.it Website:https://www.docenti.unina.it/#!/professor/414c455353414e4452415041474c49414e4f50474c4c534e36394134324638333942/riferimenti
Name of the organisation(s): Department of Architecture_University Federico II of Naples Type of organisation: University or another research institution First name of representative: Alessandra Last name of representative: Pagliano Gender: Female Nationality: Italy Function: associate professor Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Camillo De Nardis 7 Town: Naples Postal code: 80127 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 339 284 7165 E-mail:pagliano@unina.it Website:https://www.unina.it
With an intuitive and high-impact language that combines the pictorial expressiveness of the street art with the captivating expansion in communication by means of digital contents, that appear overlapped to the murals, Augmented Reality integrates and expands the storytelling of each image. The goal is bringing to life the memory of a little-known local hero, awarded with numerous prizes and honorations by virtue of his constant commitment in the fight against mafias, and in particular ecomafias. The motion, the diachronic development of the story, the emotional factor due to the surprise of the visual epiphany and the possibility to interact with the new digital configurations, generates a playful dimension related to the freedom of individual exploration, in a phygital reality where the physical space is integrated and collaborates with the digital one. Each mural narrates an episode of his life, such as: the murder of Simonetta Lamberti, the awards and honors he received, the fight against "ecomafias", his death and an invitation to a more active involvement of local populations in the fight against mafias of
all kinds. With the aim of involving the local community and especially young people in the rediscoveryof this recent history, the murals send an invitation to awareness and social participation. The opening event was held in April 2022 in the presence of local government, cultural associations and local people, with the participation of the son of General Niglio to whom the murals are dedicated.
Legality
Digital technologies applied to the street art
Local identity values
Transmission of local memory to new generations
Positive exchanges between generations for creation of communities
The cost of the murals, designed by the universitary students, was very low and funded entirely by the Department of Architecture. The cost of the technologies adopted was also zero because the installation was designed for use from each observer's individual smartphone and therefore without hardware costs and without fear of technological device obsolescence. The app adopted is ARTIVIVE, which is free and easy to use even for a non-expert audience and can be easily downloaded to the observers' personal devices.
The key objective is to use the positive impact of the new artistic installations in street art of traditional street art combined with the communicative potential of digital content in AR, in order to create a sustainable urban installation (because of its low cost), which upgrades public the space, but at the same time engages the local community in the rediscovery of stories and values of their region. Street art is communicative, augmented reality is engaging, easy-to-use digital technologies can bring different generations closer together.
The murals are designed for differentiated fruitions: the image painted on the wall has an aesthetic value that comes from its pop language, the expressiveness of shapes and colors, and the appeal to people and contexts. A second level of fruition, on the other hand, is the more narrative one related to digital content, which, while basing its narrative on visual and graphic elements through the use of illustrations and animations, takes on a didactic role for younger generations on issues of social commitment and legality. The third aspect is the desire to allow even older audiences to easily and pleasantly enjoy new digital technologies through user-friendly apps, thanks to which they can feel reconnected to the younger audience.
Telling students about ecomafias related to illegal waste dumpingthe urban istallation intended to raise awareness among the younger population toward toward taking an active role in solving the problem that so plagues the ancient Campania Felix. The purpose of the murals is also to highlight to the local community the great and dangerous work done by the Carabinieri force in combating illegal waste dumping, in a local area that is well known precisely for its local tomato crops.
The project therefore brings together in this simple urban installation the forces of law and order (in particular the Carabinieri force to which General Niglio belonged), the local community of all ages, educational institutions, the University, the municipality of Angri and the neighboring towns in which Niglio's actions took place, as well as local associations of artists who supported the young students of the Department of Architecture in the creation of the murals.
The project aimed to experiment with the communicative potential of new digital technologies such as digital illustration, animation, video editing, and augmented reality, which are new advanced representation techniques that are very present in the education of architecture and design students, but whose use still needs to be controlled in order not to fall into trivialization of the content due to the surprise effect (the so called WOW effect).
Our project is also in line with the recent cleaning actions in some cities of Campania region aimed at removing Camorra’s symbols, illegally painted in form of murals praising small and big bosses, using the strong communicative effect of street art to engage small children who can be inspired by the ideals of violence and abuse represented by these people. There are few painted augmented reality murals in Italy: a few examples can be found in Milan, Turin and Palermo collected in the MAUA museum, a diffuse, open-air museum featuring a city tour through a series of authorial murals augmented with digital content that animates the painted images. However, the purpose of MAUA is to be an open-air museum for artists who wanted to experiment with the new digital technologies of augmented reality. The projects here have also been developed in co-design but the purpose of our murals, not being painted by famous artists, is rather that of the education of the new generations through a language that can better appeal to their increasingly weakened attention to issues of civic engagement and legality.
Street art works are generally site-specific so, since it is an artistic transformation of a place from its signs, features and history, there is no doubt that the subject and the shape of the murals could be different. However, each image painted on the wall can always be linked to a digital content that expands the narrative and thus implements the communication. Such a project can also be easily adapted to other contexts and replicated within a few months. The murals were based on a co-design project with students and local communities, led by academics, and this type of organization can be easily replicated in any urban and social context. The technologies adopted were digital graphics, video editing (with no specific programs to be used exclusively) and the free ARTIVIVE app so they can be used in any other situation and by other co-design groups.
Below are the methodological stages of the project from inception to implementation:
1) site selection through consultations with local government, associations and listening to the local community;
2) Understanding the urban, social, historical and spatial characteristics of the chosen wall;
3) Definition of the educational goals;
4) Definition of the target audience;
Our installation also is addressed primarily at the younger generation of students who, each day on their way out of school, will have the opportunity to interact with the murals and reminisce, but the enjoyment is nevertheless extended to all parents and thus to a cross-section of the local community that will have a chance to transform the current preconception toward a type of street art that is too closely related to graffiti art, and thus too "modern," or "vandalistic," or related to degradation or even detached from the urban space into which it inevitably introduces an impactful transformation. Thus, the challenge was to create a common ground of interaction between the younger generations (attracted by street art and the fascination of digital technologies) and the older generations who are the repositories of even recent memory, which is unfortunately being dispersed. Having transformed into an art installation a phase of the memory of those places allows its preservation, having done so with an appealing tool for new generations allows its future transmission. Moreover, street art in Angri has always been a very active artistic field since the 1980s, when the municipal administration invited (in an absolutely forerunner way of the street art culture in Italy, which spread only a decade later) local artists to decorate the facades of the Angevin village, which was becoming depopulated due to the damage of the 1980 earthquake. Even now, impressive new murals commissioned by the public administration are being created in the town. The language of street art thus finds in the population of Angri an "already fertilized" ground for its positive acceptance. Our murals, however, go beyond the authorship of the artist to show that it is possible to implement this type of communication even outside the reduced artistic circle.
The murals were inaugurated in April 2022 in the presence of the educational institutions, the Municipality, and the assoThe Augmenting Angri project is participated in the "University for Legality 2021" call for proposals of the Falcone Foundation, which was established in Sicily after the massacre in which Judge Giovanni Falcone lost his life, with the aim of spreading the culture of legality and raising awareness among the youngest in the constant fight against the mafias. Our project was selected to represent the Federico II University in the pubblic event. As the scientific head of the project, I have also been invited to present it at the upcoming conference to be held in March at the University of Roma Tre. also on the topics of teaching legality to the younger generation.
