Abstract_Street-ARt: communication of Street art works through Augmented Reality

Street art is a growing global phenomenon. The frequent appearance of works, projects, and events in this area reveal its increasing social and cultural role worldwide. Street art is a form of art for everyone, bearer of the feeling of artists who can show their works and their thoughts outside circumscribed spaces and predefined paths. The desire to build new artistic paths is intertwined with the desire to enhance, on the one hand, degraded urban areas and architectural structures, adding new signs of belonging and cultural rebirth. Onthe other hand, it shows a real communicative intent to define a collective memory in art. Unfortunately, Street Art operas are often few visible in the territory, despite their presence. Besides, few national and international databases collect the characteristics of these artworks. For this reason, the chance of digitizing artworks represents a way to gain these cultural paths on the territory, providing an additional tool to understand and interpret it, connecting with other operas in the same area, freezing their memory, and mapping its change during time. Street art is characterized by peculiar aspects that make it unique in the artistic panorama. The democratization of contents and the physical decay of the work are two pillars. Any digitalization and communication project should consider them carefully, proposing a knowledge model respectful of the artwork. Augmented Reality (AR) is a representation tool that leads to achieving that delicate balance between the real and the digital, enhancing the specificities of both. The chance of connecting the artwork with descriptive and multimedia content can significantly improve its visibility, enhancing its presence in the territory. AR can also fill this information gap in the artwork, providing a stimulus for multigenerational reading that brings different audiences to Street Art, integrating with existing platforms and proposing new cultural paths. The authors start from the experimentation with artwork digitalization, connecting image deterioration with image recognition. Besides, they show some possible applications in Rome through a critical analysis of the domain, opening some future multifaced scenarios.