A new mural appeared on the wall of the Rag Factory building in East London at the end of March. The mural that was painted by the street artist Phlegm is just one of five pieces of street art that have appeared or will soon be appearing in Heneage Street, off Brick Lane in Tower Hamlets, where the Rag Factory - a provider of affordable space for people working in the creative industries - is situated.
But the plan for Heneage Street is part of a much bigger story, initiated by Global Street Art and Lee Bofkin, one of the people who run the project. Global Street Art's plan is to set up a real-life street art and graffiti museum, but while it may still be some time before the physical museum can be established, an online street art database will be published on the Global Street Art's website in a couple of months' time.
At the moment, the website acts as a daily photo blog until the whole database can be launched. Lee himself has taken more than 50,000 photos of street art and graffiti in 20 or more countries and the call is out for all street art photographers and artists to submit their own images: some 10,000 photos have already been submitted.
The classification system for the archive is based on Lee's PhD, which was a combination of mathematics and evolutionary taxonomy. Each photograph from the database is classified in a variety of ways, so that images can eventually be searched by artist, location, technique, surface type, content and so forth.
While waiting for the database to be ready to uploaded online, Lee is focusing on arranging new walls for street artists in London, so keep your eyes open.
