Documenting digital art: the role of the audience

This is the author accepted manuscript.Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

Temporal convergence in shared networked narratives: the case of Blast Theory's Day of the Figurines

types: Article© 2009 ISASTDay of the Figurines, developed by Blast Theory in collaboration with the Mixed Reality Laboratory at Nottingham University, is a massively multiplayer board game for up to a thousand participants. Players can interact remotely with other participants via SMS through their mobile phones from anywhere in the world. Following an analysis of this games complex use of time, the authors introduce a framework structured around five layers of time, from authorial to perceived time, that will facilitate the management and investigation of networked narratives shared by mobile communities over prolonged periods of time

Temporal Trajectories in Shared Interactive Narratives

publication-status: Published© ACM, 2008. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in CHI '08 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, {ISBN 9781605580111, 2008} http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357067Temporal trajectories can represent the complex mappings between story time and clock time that are to be found in shared interactive narratives such as computer games and interactive performances. There are three kinds. Canonical trajectories express an author's intended mapping of story time onto clock time as part of the plot and schedule of an experience. Participant trajectories reflect a participant's actual journey through story time and clock time as they interact with the experience. Historic trajectories represent the subsequent selection and reuse of segments of recorded participant trajectories to create histories of past events. We show how temporal trajectories help us analyse the nature of time in existing experiences and can also generate new approaches to dealing with temporal issues such as: disengagement and reengagement, adapting to different paces of interaction, synchronising different participants, and enabling encounters and travel across time

Expanding Documentation, or making the most of the cracks in the wall

Performance in the digital age has undergone a radical shift in which a once ephemeral art form can now be relived, replayed and repeated. Until now, much scholarship has been devoted to the nature of live performance in the digital age; Documenting Performance is the first book to provide a collection of key writings about the process of documenting performance, focused not on questions of liveness or the artistic qualities of documents, but rather on the professional approaches to recovering, preserving and disseminating knowledge of live performance. Through its four-part structure, the volume introduces readers to important writings by international practitioners and scholars on: * the contemporary context for documenting performance * processes of documenting performance * documenting bodies in motion * documenting to create In each, chapters examine the ways performance is documented and the issues arising out of the process of documenting performance. While theorists have argued that performance becomes something else whenever it is documented, the writings reveal how the documents themselves cannot be regarded simply as incomplete remains from live events. The methods for preserving and managing them over time, ensuring easy access of such materials in systematic archives and collections, requires professional attention in its own right. Through the process of documenting performance, artists acquire a different perspective on their own work, audiences can recall specific images and sounds for works they have witnessed in person, and others who did not see the original work can trace the memories of particular events, or use them to gain an understanding of something that would otherwise remain unknown to them and their peers

Art-mapping smart-cities: accessing art collections outside the museum

PublishedArticlePaper presented at the international conference, Museums and the Web Florence (MWF2014) held in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy 19 to 21 February 2014In this paper I will discuss the outreach potential of those mobile museum applications that relate art collections to places on a digital map and in the real world, at first focusing my attention on a specific crowd-sourcing application and on a case study that illustrates its usage, then making more general observations on the related constructivist learning experience and recommendations on how to effectively adapt it to the city of Florence’s historical context. I will start describing the affordances of the Art Maps web-based application, a research project funded by Horizon and led by researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Nottingham in collaboration with the departments of Learning, Digital and Research at Tate, London. Such application allows users to access the Tate collection through a digital map from a desktop or mobile device, and invites them to comment on an artwork and either confirm its proposed location, or suggest a new one according to their prior knowledge and experience of a place or an artwork, in a crowdsourcing exercise that aims at mapping a total of 70,000 works around the world. I will then present the Migrants Resource Centre’s case study, recounting activities run at and around Tate Britain in November 2013 by the Art Maps Research Team and aimed at a group of women recently migrated to London from non-European countries. Through the Art Maps application, participants were encouraged to use artworks from the Tate collection as landmarks, to get familiar with their area of residence and foster their orientation skills both on a digital map and in the real world, but also to tap into their knowledge and experience of the borough to interpret selected Tate artworks and precisely mark them on the map. Using a co-constructivist framework, I will then discuss the participants’ learning experience, focusing in particular on the possible changes in confidence in accessing the collection they experienced, and on the nature of the digital crowd-sourcing collaboration they embarked upon in order to exactly place Tate artworks on the map. My argument is that applications such as Art Maps constitute an effective way to flatten the perceived barrier of the museum as an elite’s stronghold, bringing collections to the more neutral territory of the places where communities dwell in. Along these lines, I will propose the idea of running similar activities in Florence and illustrate some of the many ways Art Maps can effectively intertwine the city’s cultural heritage with artworks from the Tate collection. Attendees will be invited to access the application and contribute to it with their knowledge of the city, or use it to explore its historically rich areas. In conclusion, through this paper I intend to demonstrate how the relationship between art and place, experienced through flexible digital technologies greatly enhances the quality of engagement that community groups may experience, and encourages them to visit the museum in real life

Performing Nature's Footprint

publication-status: Published© 2011 The authors*RCUK funded Horizon projec

Imagining the future of a complex mixed media work: the case of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s The Floating Museum

This is the final version. Available from the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam via the link in this recordArts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)EPSR

The documentation and archiving of mixed media experiences: the case of Rider Spoke

publication-status: PublishedThis paper introduces the early stages of the research conducted by an interdisciplinary team in Horizon, comprising staff from Computer Science and Performance Studies, who, in collaboration with artist company Blast Theory, Stanford Libraries, British Libraries, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Ludwig Boltzman Institute Media.Art.Research, and Sheffield University, have devised a new form of interactive archive, the CloudPad, for the documentation and archiving of mixed media experiences