Street art is visual art in public spaces — public art — created for public visibility. Street art addresses a huge and highly diverse audience: everyone in a city. In this public symposium, we discussed to what extent science-inspired street art can be considered a means of science communication, what strategies street artists use to communicate their ideas through large-scale murals, and how street art can be understood as a vehicle for creative grassroots environmental creativity. Street art is unique in that it is both a producer of public knowledge and a participant within the environmental discourse, as it represents knowledge of environment but also reflects the public’s perception of this knowledge. Together with exciting guest speakers, we introduced our audience to ANU’s multifaceted and innovative research and learning activities at the intersections of street art and science communication, and also celebrated the launch of the street art episode of our Sci_Burst podcast – a podcast that explores the cultural power of science!

Science and pop culture are two of the most powerful cultural institutions that we have created to understand, shape and envision our world. Pop culture – including (animated) film, comics and street art – is where collective science understandings are created. This is where our desires, fears and anxieties and about science and technology are reflected, experienced and, sometimes, generated. It is well-known that pop cultural stories and visual imaginaries about science influence our perception of science and our attitudes towards science. Therefore, it really matters to study the cultural meanings of science in pop cultural contexts, such as street art, to clarify how pop cultural narratives about science have affected the public discourse and understanding of science, and thus our science-society relationship.