ATLANTA — Wedged between Wylie Street and DeKalb Avenue, the Krog Street Tunnel stands. More than 100 years old, the tunnel is a permanent passage between Inman Park and Cabbagetown.
But as Curt Jackson knows, what's inside the tunnel is ever-changing.
"It's a community bulletin board. It is ephemeral," said Jackson.
That's why the PhD student spends every Saturday at the tunnel, camera in hand, along with a team of Georgia State University students. The group hopes to capture the evolving canvas of graffiti, tributes and political messages inside one of Atlanta's most iconic locales.
"One of the things I tell students is to always keep an eye out because there are always little details you might miss," said Jackson.
Using 360-degree cameras and Matterport 3D mapping technology, Jackson's team is tracking the weekly and monthly changes happening at the tunnel. The group wants to create a digital record of the tunnel's walls and the conversation happening inside.
"We can track when does stuff about Roe Wade come up. When does stuff about Ukraine come up," said Brennan Collins, director of the university's EPIC program (Experiential, Project-based and Interdisciplinary Curriculum.) The Krog Tunnel project is part of the EPIC program, one of the many 'Mapping Atlanta' projects.
When there's a significant event, cultural shift or news story, the team knows that's a cue conversation may start also popping up in the tunnel.
"By us archiving [the tunnel], we can then see how political, social, cultural changes happen across Atlanta through reading the tunnel as text," said Jackson.
Jackson's team has been working on the archive project for three years and is now publishing the work online, with the plan to continue tracking changes for generations to come.
"It is an archive of the tunnel so it should go on indefinitely," said Jackson.