Street Art and New Technology Alessandra Grimm

hi everyone my name is ali grimm i go by the name al grime and today i'm going to talk about street art and new technologies so to get started let's define what street art is street art is any form of artwork or artwork displayed in a public forum on buildings on streets and now we're starting to see it come into web 3 in the metaverse street art historically has been a way for people to make political statements to tell stories of what's happening in history or just to share part of their culture in whatever city they may be in we see this in graffiti with people like risk obey futura we see guerrilla art political art like the gorilla girls and then we see our beautiful muralists like greg mike human and all the amazing artists we have here within our own city we see such an abundance of street art and i think we often get overlooked for what we have we have so many incredible festivals former crush walls we have bay balls we have streetwise boulder that are helping to share the message of what's happening in our culture today and recently lots of our local artists have stepped into web3 making their own nfts chelsea lewinsky we have making one of one nfts selling her work detour is making 3d models of his existing murals and minting them as nfts so that you can actually own a moment that exists in the real world and then you'll also be able to own it in the metaverse and place it into actual spaces and we have pinpusher who's here creating a generative project with 3333 um of his little pin pusher guys and we're seeing tons of street artists being able to fund new ideas and create new opportunities for themselves using um the nft space and crypto and a little bit about me i have been doing augmented reality murals for about two years within the city i have the mural upstairs in the makerspace which has ar if you haven't tried it out yes thank you um and i i am constantly looking for ways to redefine what street means so i'm super into clothing this year at complexcon i release an nftnar clothing line that allows you to authenticate your item on the blockchain i also did an ar mural with sorak last year where we were able to tell her story from one of her songs that empowers women in the music space and this year i'll be launching a metaverse gallery created by yuletech of irl downstairs that will host uh street art street artist streetwear in side of crypto voxels and beyond of course denver we have tons of street artists that are doing amazing things as well i wanted to shout out matt corrado who's from dc where i'm from with his hypeys they're amazing and he's giving back of course with those we have bird cap who partnered with dirty bird to do the dirty bird flight club we love those as well and he continues to expand on that universe linking art and music and and soon to have augmented reality as well of course greg mike with his mad cans that are always evolving always growing greg mike i always see pushing the frontier and using what he's able to fundraise in crypto to be able to put back and push the limit of what we understand as street art streetwear physical art digital art he just is really pioneering a whole different wave and of course the fomo mofos from jasper wong who runs a powwow worldwide so the main reason i wanted to talk today is about the next generation of street art so in the beginning we defined street art as defining a culture and telling a story of the here and now and as we step into this new age technology and this new future who's better to tell that story but street artists themselves and so um in our first picture we have a sartre who's one of the top selling artists on super rare and we see him implementing these sculptures that he makes inside of the oculus into his photography but then he'll also place it onto himself to create augmented reality street wear and so now we're able to re-understand what street art means beyond a wall beyond a street beyond a t-shirt to mean something that really goes beyond the bounds of physics and our understanding in the real world of course artifacts we have to shout them out completely changing the game in digital footwear and digital wearables and like part of the nike family now so hands down pioneering a new wave that none of us can deny is incredible and lastly we have those ray-ban glasses google glasses soon to have apple glasses that not only have ar but they are able to do mixed reality and this is where i really encourage street artists to start learning about augmented reality imagine a world where you wear glasses and every single wall around you is flashing where a lot of us have struggled to really leverage what we do and help people understand we're able to create walking billboards that move with people every single wall in the world will be covered eventually with art and where we can't paint we can place augmented reality this is opening incredible new doors for us for the money that we can make for the opportunities that we can create um and for the way that we can help young people understand what art is we no longer have to be stuck in a box in a gallery you can literally place your art wherever you want make a name for yourself grow and just create a foundation for yourself as an artist so what does this mean for the city of denver yesterday we heard governor polis talk about how he wants to transform denver into the first official digital city meaning that we will be powered by cryptocurrencies we want to become a city powered by tech companies by innovation by creators and those people are already here but i think that more of them could come and see our beautiful city and grow and so i am very excited to announce denver walls an official member of the pow wow family pow wow is an international mural festival hosted in 17 countries hosting thousands of artists around the world with the biggest names in street art that you could imagine we will start this year september 22nd to 26th and we're very excited to announce westfield properties as our first sponsor our main goal my main goal in bringing this is to bring the best street artists in the world and to place even the newest street artists in denver on the exact same platform as them give them that international platform to grow to have the same opportunities as them and to expand their network beyond the walls of denver beyond the united states onto a global platform we will be integrating augmented reality virtual reality and [Music] extended reality experiences we will be projection mapping our walls and lastly we will be minting all of our walls and 20 of all of that money will go into a fund that will serve to fund local projects within the city so for example we will come into a school and teach a whole classroom about augmented reality we'll give them an oculus and we'll teach them how to create their own augmented reality experiences so that we can create the next generation of street artists virtual artists digital artists in denver and continue to expand and my goal is to then be able to integrate those children that learn from us back into the festival and give kids that aren't even 18 yet the opportunity to have this global platform and be able to be hosted on the biggest mural festival in the world my goal here is to make denver the next art mecca of the world i think we already have an incredible amount of street art we have the tech companies we have the creators the innovators and i think we can maybe get cut a little short because our hustle bustle is a little bit more relaxed we we like to sleep and we take care of ourselves but that doesn't mean that we can change the world so um i'm so excited i hope you learned a little something today about street art and i'm ready to change the art space in denver thank you