Ephemeral -- spreading the word!

Lisa Sedano has launched Ephemeral, a mobil app for crowd sourced data collection on advertising and art in LA. One of the main hurdles to public space reform is a lack of understanding about what types of images are priviledged in public space, our personal stake and ownership in our shared environment, and general lack of political participation. Ephemeral seems to engage all three of these issues in an effort to create a public with a more nuanced understanding of the shared environment around them. It's an exciting project and if you are so inclined, donate a few bucks to help make it a reality. [HERE]

Dear friends,

I am excited to announce Ephemeral, a mobile app will let people share pictures of street art and outdoor advertising, creating a collective map and visual archive of the urban landscape. Ephemeral asks community residents to open their eyes to how much outdoor advertising surrounds us and to notice the art that is fighting for space and bringing unique and unexpected moments of creativity to urban life.

Ephemeral builds off my graduate work in geography, for which I designed a website that let people map billboards in Los Angeles. At the time, the city had an inventory of billboards, but was refusing to release it publicly under political pressure from advertisers. I created a crowdsourced webmap of billboards, believing that the community could create what money and politics had stopped the city from doing (and I sued the city to release the inventory!).

For many people, billboards are just “what a city looks like.” Street artists offer a counter-narrative to the corporatized city, directly engaging with consumer society in their work. Artists such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey have brought attention to street art – to the power of provocative, surprising, creative expression in public space. The aim of Ephemeral is to preserve all types of transitory art in the public realm, from wheatpaste posters, to murals, to hijacked billboards, to hand-knit cozies on objects of infrastructure, as well as the advertising that we take for granted.

Ephemeral will be free to download and use, to truly harness the power of the community, but right now, it needs your help to come to fruition! I would be so grateful if you could visit the Kickstarter page at http://kck.st/2oC6F56, offer any support you can (there’s a slew of neat rewards to collect, starting at donations of $1), and share the project with your friends.

Any support you can offer is incredibly important and sincerely appreciated. And please let me know what you think! I would love to hear from you.

Best,
Lisa
@ephemeral_app