The qualities and significance of documentation

Documentation is usually regarded as an art project’s remain or trace that is created and used in different ways. In performance and digital art, documentation has become the focus of conservation and presentation strategies; however, there is a lack of standardized methods on how to make effective use of the different types of documentation. Using case studies from their own collections/practices, LIMA in Amsterdam, in collaboration with Tate and various artists / initiatives, in June 2020 organized a series of workshops to identify a typological framework of documentation. Specific attention was paid to performative installations, performance art in the museum, networked and research-based art projects

Moving Spaces. Enacting Dance, Performance, and the Digital in the Museum

This collection of essays investigates some of the theories and concepts related to the burgeoning presence of dance and performance in the museum. This surge has led to significant revisions of the roles and functions that museums currently play in society. The authors provide key analyses on why and how museums are changing by looking into participatory practices and decolonisation processes, the shifting relationship with the visitor/spectator, the introduction of digital practices in collection making and museum curation, and the creation of increasingly complex documentation practices. The tasks designed by artists who are involved in the European project Dancing Museums. The Democracy of Beings (2018-21) respond to the essays by suggesting a series of body-mind practices that readers could perform between the various chapters to experience how theory may affect their bodies

Who decides who participates? Re-thinking the epistemology of participation

Questo articolo analizza i dibattiti salienti nella storia del pensiero critico relativi alle pratiche partecipative in una serie di discipline e campi, tra cui arte, teatro, sviluppo, architettura, radiodiffusione e scienza. La partecipazione, sostiene l'autore, non è solo una forma di empowerment e generazione di conoscenza, identità e creazione di comunità, è anche un tipo di economia che facilita l'autoproduzione, privilegia la connessione (o le relazioni) sociale sul consumo o, eventualmente, trasforma la connessione sociale in una nuova forma di consumo.This paper analyses salient debates in the history of critical thinking related to participatory practices in a number of disciplines and fields, including art, theatre, development, architecture, broadcasting and science. Participation, the author maintains, is not only a form of empowerment and knowledge generation, identity and community creation, it is also a type of economy which facilitates self- production, privileges social connection (or relationships) over consumption or possibly turns social connection in a new form of consumption

Unfold: Dan Graham’s Audience/Performer/Mirror Reenacted

This chapter explores the use of reenactments, and the role of the audience, as a strategy for preservation. Some of the reenactments discussed are historical, and LIMA especially commissioned others through an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project, “Documenting Digital Art” (2019-22), developed in collaboration with the curators and media studies scholars Annet Dekker, Katrina Sluis and Francesca Franco, in partnership with Gaby Wijers, Director of LIMA, Amsterdam. The a..

ArtMaps: A Technology for Looking at Tate’s Collection

This article presents ArtMaps, a crowdsourcing web-based app for desktop and mobile use that allows users to locate, move and annotate artworks in the Tate collection in relation to one or more sets of locations. Here the authors show that ArtMaps extends the ‘space’ of the museum and facilitates a new, pluriperspectival, way of looking at art

ArtMaps: interpreting the spatial footprints of artworks

Creating and utilizing simple links between items and locations in map-based systems has become a mainstream component of modern computing. In this paper, we explore support for ‘art mapping’, an activity that requires consideration of more complex interpretations of spatial relationships as users engage with identifying locations of relevance to artworks. Through a user study of the ArtMaps platform, and an exploratory study with professional artists, we identify diverse interpretations of spatial meaning in relation to art. We find that art mapping highlights potential for more active engagement with art through technology, but challenges existing systems for spatial representation. Through connecting our findings with work on designing for interpretation, and on space and place in HCI, we contribute new understanding of creating engagement through the spatial interpretation of art, and define potential characteristics and uses of holistic ‘footprints’ for artworks

Blast Theory’s Karen: exploring the ontology of technotexts

The continual and rapid emergence of media technologies predominantly since the digital revolution in the late twentieth century has generated a new social, cultural and cognitive ecology. This new environment has shaped the landscape of contemporary theatre and performance, and has brought about new modes such as virtual theatre, multimedia performance and online theatre. These emerging performative responses to the mediatised ecology have heralded transformations in directing, performing and design, and, relatedly, a paradigm shift in the ontology of theatre and performance. The textual dimension of theatre – a strong aspect of British theatre tradition that is mostly associated with playtexts - has also adapted to the changing performance landscape. As a result of this adaptation process, new modes of texts have emerged. The texts that have emerged from practices, whose design and performance are partially or completely based on new technologies and their aesthetics, can be considered in this group. This article is an experiment in forging a vocabulary to identify such texts, which it presents as technotexts, and explore some of their ontological characteristics. It offers an attempt to start a conversation about the changing ontology of text in mediatised theatre practice. To this end, I investigate Blast Theory’s Karen (2015), a smart phone app-based, interactive performance, which illustrates an inventive textual landscape through multiple layers of writing, and invites questions regarding the changing form and role of text as a process and product in relation to performance, authorship and spectatorship, and textual object/archive

The ethical implications of HCI’s turn to the cultural

We explore the ethical implications of HCI’s turn to the ‘cultural’. This is motivated by an awareness of how cultural applications, in our case interactive performances, raise ethical issues that may challenge established research ethics processes. We review research ethics, HCI’s engagement with ethics and the ethics of theatrical performance. Following an approach grounded in Responsible Research Innovation, we present the findings from a workshop in which artists, curators, commissioners, and researchers explored ethical challenges revealed by four case studies. We identify six ethical challenges for HCI’s engagement with cultural applications: transgression, boundaries, consent, withdrawal, data, and integrity. We discuss two broader implications of these: managing tensions between multiple overlapping ethical frames; and the importance of managing ethical challenges during and after an experience as well as beforehand. Finally, we discuss how our findings extend previous discussions of Value Sensitive Design in HCI

On Reenactment: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools

This book brings together dance and visual arts scholars to investigate the key methodological and theoretical issues concerning reenactment. Along with becoming an effective and widespread contemporary artistic strategy, reenactment is taking shape as a new anti-positivist approach to the history of dance and art, undermining the notion of linear time and suggesting new temporal encounters between past, present, and future. As such, reenactment has contributed to a move towards different forms of historical thinking and understanding that embrace cultural studies – especially intertwining gender, postcolonial, and environmental issues – in the redefinition of knowledge, historical discourses, and memory. This approach also involves questioning canons and genealogies by destabilising authorship and challenging both institutional and direct forms of transmission. The structure of the book playfully recalls that of a theatrical performance, with both an overture and prelude, to provide space for a series of theoretical and practice-based insights – the solos – and conversations – the duets – by artists, critics, curators, and theorists who have dealt with reenactment. The main purpose of this book is to demonstrate how reenactment as a strategy of appropriation, circulation, translation, and transmission can contribute to understanding history both in its perpetual becoming and as a process of reinvention, renarration, and resignification from an interdisciplinary perspective