Street Art: Visual scenes and the digital circulation of images

Abstract

Street art is introduced as a global visual scene that is local, trans-local, and digital, as well as a practice that often expresses various tensions of the visibility regimes in which it exists. This study specifically focuses on Arab-occidental expressions of street art in three locations: Paris (France), Djerba (Tunisia), and Montreal (Canada). The visibility regimes of these visual scenes are physical (Arabic and Occidental), but significantly they are also digital (found on social media, web sites, blogs etc.). The concepts of “visual practices,” and more specifically “image practices” (pratiques de l’image), are used to study the spatio-temporal and digital evolution of street art to ascertain the changing nature of these visual scenes, in their specific stagings, as they reflect Arab-Occidental encounters.