As a web developer who works on a screen and an illustrator that works on paper, I have always admired those who could paint big—often on impossibly large and inconveniently placed walls—only to be erased in a matter of weeks or days. The ephemeral nature of street art is what makes it simultaneously appealing and frustrating as a viewer. However, Google Maps recently rolled out a feature allowing users to go back in time on its Street View. I immediately thought to check out the well-known wall on Bowery & Houston and found that Google captured the painted wall dating back to 2007. Here's a sampling from 2007 to present. I added a few images of the wall that I found while perusing the web to fill in some of the gap years that Google didn't capture.
Next, since the images of the walls were taken from different angles, I built a very basic web tool to align them by defining each of their four corners to be used as control points.
As more and more digital materials become available from the library and beyond, we will need to continue to ask what we should be remembering and what tools we can build to surface topics of interest and encourage conversations around them.
All the code for this tool is publically available here.