The project is significant because in the last 20 years, with the development of democratic processes and urban culture, there has been a serious intensification of Street art and Underground culture. Simultaneously, in the European and global context, the creative expressions in question are already recognized as a full part of world culture and civilization – they are exhibited in museums, offered in galleries, and are subject to the protection of immovable cultural heritage. This situation allows for their accumulation in the urban environment and for them to become objects of study. What information can we extract from street/wall art examples? Traditionally, this matter would be recognized as a research field for representatives of the visual arts (artists, art historians, photographers, art critics, and filmmakers). However, it carries an enormous charge and potential for the study of visually mediated communication and for periods of human history for which there is no written evidence (prehistory).
The hypothesis that the motives of the creative act “today” are like the motives of the creative act in a distant “yesterday”, proven by the compilation of a scientific classification of the two manifestations, will provide fundamental scientific information about the main driver of human culture and civilization – the preservation and transmission of information through imagery. The research is innovative both in its methodology of comparative analysis between the two cultural manifestations and in its attempt to accumulate empirically and experimentally proven information about cultural layers that have traditionally been subject to scientific interpretation.
Prehistoric wall art has been relatively well studied worldwide but not nationally. As there is insufficient archaeological excavation of cave paintings in Bulgaria and only one known petroglyph site in the country (The Magura Cave), the databases of the Bradshaw Foundation, a global rock art research organization, will be used for the project and comparative analysis. The classification of the two cultural layers (prehistoric and modern) will be based on the research work of the Bulgarian archaeologist Todor Stoychev [2005]. For the needs of the project, the body of information accumulated about modern wall art culture studied by Oleg Gochev will be processed [2010]. The provision of empirical material for the project will also rely on the information systematized by Sofia Graffiti Tour.”