Keywords

1 Introduction

New approaches are needed to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of documentation and archiving of hybrid works, especially mixed media artworks. The gap is produced by the discrepancy between a work considered ontologically as an object, and a work considered from an epistemic point of view as a set of knowledge-producing processes and practices. The new approaches should not only focus on the documentation of the artists’ intention, or on the work of researching, producing, designing and curating art, but also on the work of interpreting art carried out by various audiences including the press as well as participants, spectators and bystanders. These new approaches, to be effective, would ideally become part of museum documentation practice.

We know that documentation plays a major role in the conservation of art, yet a key factor in documentation, the role played by the audience in the design, experience and interpretation of art, is generally overlooked. As I argue, the role of the audience is crucial in relation to hybrid mixed media artworks, not only to understand how an artwork is conceived and received, but also in relation to how it changes over time. While researchers and museums have started to look into what kinds of knowledges works produce, it remains to be seen how best to include documentations about the role of the audience and documentations by the audience in museum documentation. Specifically, I discuss four case studies which illustrate the significance of the role of the audience in documenting contemporary art and indicate the responsibilities of researchers and museum professionals in facilitating the conservation of materials produced by and about the audience. I hope to show how a shift in focus from the ontology of a work (what the work is) to its epistemic capacity or potential (what knowledges it produces) may begin to address the widening gap in the field of complex hybrid art documentation.

It has been established that artworks, especially those that entail a hybrid, technological and performative dimension, should no longer be conceived of purely as objects or even solely as time-based events, but rather they should be considered as processes and practices. These start before the artworks exist as material objects or events, and continue after their assumed “completion.” Most artworks, after all, adopting Umberto Eco’s (1979) well-known expression, are opere aperte, open works, whose lives go on evolving over time. Considering artworks as processes and practices within the context of documentation gives an insight into why invaluable information about the aesthetics, creativity and legacy of these works ought to be preserved, not only about the artworks as artistic products, be it objects or events, but also about their conception, design, co-production, exhibition, reception and, as shown by recent research by the Unfold network led by the curator and museum director Gaby Wijers at LiMA, their reinterpretation by other artists or practitioners over the years (Wijers et al. 2017).

In the context of the documentation and conservation of art, a seminal study by the philosopher Renée van de Vall, and conservation professionals Hanna Hölling, Tatja Scholte and Sanneke Stigter suggested that since “the meaning of an object and the effects it has on people and events may change during its existence”, we should construct the ‘lives’ of artworks “as individual trajectories” (2011, p. 3). The study draws from Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe’s use of the term “trajectories” to describe how an artwork does not behave like an “isolated locus” but as a “river’s catchment, complete with its estuaries, its many tributaries, its dramatic rapids, its many meanders and of course with its several hidden sources” (2008, p. 3). Computer scientist Steve Benford and I also used the same term “trajectories” in the context of the design and orchestration of spaces, times, roles and interfaces in complex mixed reality artworks (2011). This study intended to create a distinction between canonical and participant trajectories to express the constant tension between the artists’ design of and the participants’ actual journeys through these works. Here, I suggest that when creating a documentation of hybrid mixed media artworks, it is crucial that both canonical and participant trajectories are documented and preserved if a rich future understanding of what it means to be a participant in such a work, or to experience such a work, is to be arrived at. I also show in this context the importance of understanding not only what a work is, but also what it did and could still do from an epistemic point of view.

When documenting artworks, especially hybrid mixed media works, we should attempt to capture their life histories, by which I mean their conception, design, co-production, exhibition, reception and re-interpretation, not only in the words of the artists but also in those of the producers, performers, designers, curators, and audiences that took part in them. While in theory there is no question that these research strategies are crucial in terms of building an understanding of the behaviour of hybrid mixed media works over time, in practice the draw on resources to carry out such documentations has so far rendered this an impractical proposition. Whereas research into the life histories of works therefore plays a crucial role in telling us about what these works are, and how they may be preserved, it can be impactful within the museum context if the capture and archiving of audience documentations become part of museum documentations. The four case studies discussed below, consisting of three artworks and a project prototype, are meant to illustrate the value of documentation for the field of hybrid mixed media art, but they also reveal the complexity of its applicability within the museum context.

2 Blast Theory, Day of the Figurines (2006)

The first case study is a documentation of Blast Theory’s Day of the Figurines (2006), which was a massively multiplayer board-game for up to a thousand participants who could interact with the game and each other remotely via SMS through their mobile phones from anywhere in the world. The game took place over a period of 24 days in a digital setting based on an imaginary British town where players could visit a number of destinations, be allocated missions and dilemmas, and interact “live” with other players. The piece, developed in collaboration with Nottingham University’s Mixed Reality Lab, was part of a larger research project, IPerG, funded by the European Commission’s IST Programme. The world premiere took place in Berlin at Hebbel am Ufer, where 165 players joined in the game.

To participate in Day of the Figurines, audiences visited Hebbel am Ufer where they found a large-scale white metal model of an imaginary town at table height. On the board there were fifty cut-up destinations based on a typical British town including, for instance, a 24-Hour Garage, a Boarded up Shop, a Hospital, an Internet Café and the Rat Research Institute. Each of the destinations was cut out of the table surface and bent up vertically to form a white silhouette. Two video projectors beneath the surface of the board shone through holes in the table and reflected off mirrors mounted above it, enabling the surface of the table to be augmented with projections of live information from the game.

As part of their game registration, audiences selected a figurine from a display of one hundred figurines arranged on a second, smaller square table. Assisted by an operator, they gave their figurine a name, and answered a few questions about him or her which were designed to facilitate the construction of a minor role play. Before leaving the space, audiences, who had by now become players in Day of the Figurines, were given some basic instructions about the game, which explained how to move, speak, pick up and use objects, find other players, receive help, and leave the game.

The first SMS was received soon after registering. If the player chose a destination, orchestrators would move the figurine within it. Here the figurine was likely to encounter other players with whom they could exchange SMS in real time (or live, as in a live performance). Players might have also encountered objects, and be presented with dilemmas and missions in the form of multiple-choice questions and open questions, some formulated in real time by the game operators. As time went by, with each day corresponding to one hour of game time, the town went through a series of transformations and as events started to occur, players soon learnt that by eating and drinking certain foods, or advising others on how to do so, their health could improve or, if in poor health, be restored. Once players had registered, they could leave and continue to engage in the game wherever they were. Some players remained very active, others behaved more like spectators, and a few quit the game or died, and so were cut off from the game. As in most other works by Blast Theory, the experience of the game was therefore highly subjective.

I documented the work as part of the AHRC-funded Performing Presence project (2006–2009), which aimed to explore the construction of individual and social presence in live, mediated and simulated performance. The aim of the documentation, in this case, was to evidence how a sense of social co-presence featured in this work. I therefore decided to document the work by conducting a 24-day-long auto-ethnography describing what was happening in my life as well as in the game. Crucially, the documentation also traced the initial research and design phase, reflecting also about the project’s initial evaluation by the artists and the computer scientists at the Mixed Reality Lab. Documenting the game for 24 days generated interesting evidence of how Day of the Figurines affected my personal life, about how players interacted with each other, and about the level of orchestration necessary to keep the game live, and so for the audience to feel present within it. While presenting some preliminary findings about this at the Mixed Reality Lab in Nottingham, I realized that despite my sustained engagement I had only partially documented the work because the Lab held in-game data to which the public had no access. When juxtaposed against my documentation, however, this offered a much richer picture of what I and other participants had experienced during the game. As part of this richer picture, design and orchestration decisions became apparent, and these are crucial towards building an understanding of how to orchestrate engagement and facilitate presence and social co-presence within mixed reality artworks. Findings produced by this project led to the development of the trajectories framework, distinguishing between canonic and participant trajectories, to which I referred above. This was subsequently used in a wide range of publications in both humanities and human computer interaction journals (Benford and Giannachi 2011). The framework, capturing the importance of tracking the audience experience, is also useful in the context of the documentation of hybrid mixed media works.

In the UK, Research Councils usually have an obligation to preserve data generated by research for a period of five years. There is no guarantee, then, that after this period any of the data and associated unpublished documentations would be preserved. Moreover, there were a couple of other researchers and some members of the public documenting the work. Because the work was highly subjective it would have been advisable to capture some of these participant trajectories. Finally, while the platform was analysed by the staff in the lab in a number of papers, it was not part of the overall project documentation largely because of the difficulty of documenting human computer interaction in the wild. This means that the overall documentation of Day of the Figurines is scattered between two universities, the artists, and the blogs of a number of participants. Despite the significance of this work in new media history, as well as in human computer interaction, the wider documentation of this work, offering important insight into the role of the audience in documenting art, might therefore be only in part available to future audiences. This suggests that museums should perhaps take a more pro-active approach at archiving documentations of works that may not form part of their collections but may still be of critical significance to specific artistic fields, so that future researchers, artists, curators and audiences could still have access to these documentations in years to come.

3 Blast Theory, Rider Spoke (2007)

Documenting Day of the Figurines inspired me to do a documentation of Blast Theory’s subsequent work, Rider Spoke (2007-), in collaboration with documentation expert and art historian Katja Kwastek, then working at the Ludwig Boltzman Media Art Research in Linz. Rider Spoke, a location-based game for cyclists, was developed by Blast Theory in partnership with the Mixed Reality Lab as part of the European research project IPerG. The work encouraged participants to cycle around a city in order to record personal memories and make statements about their past, present and future that were associated with particular locations in the city and/or find and listen to the responses of preceding players. The recordings built over time as each day’s best recordings were loaded into the system overnight to appear in the performance the following day. The experience of the piece, then, was systematically counter-pointed by its historicity—the present moment being torn between past and future game trajectories.

Participants, who arrived at the hosting venue, usually in the early evening, either on their own bicycle or to borrow one, were registered at the reception, where they were briefed about the work by Blast Theory staff and informed about how to use the interface and cycle safely. Riders then left the venue individually and had about one hour to complete the experience. After the first few minutes, a narrator asked them to find a place they liked, choose a name and describe themselves. While proceeding on their bikes, participants listened to further questions and were prompted to look for hiding places in which to record their answers or listen to the stories of others. The questions asked them to reflect on significant moments of their life while engaging with the city through which they cycled. While these kinds of instructions encouraged them to use details from the physical world around them to start reflecting about themselves, others turned them into voyeurs, required to transform everyday life occurrences into spectacles. Towards the end, riders were given one final task, to make a promise for the future. After the promise, they were asked to return to the hosting venue where the device was dismounted from their bike and their deposit returned. Over time, Blast Theory was able to select the best answers and so the work revealed a map formed by the rich history of engagement from each of the participant trajectories through the work. The life of the work, in this case, consisted of the summation of each participant’s trajectory, an overlay of participants’ recordings into a kind of diachronic map that could be described as a living archive.

The documentation was carried out in September 2009 by staff from the Universities of Exeter and ethnographers from the Mixed Reality Lab, as well as personnel from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research in Linz, as part of Horizon. As the aim was to capture multiple aspects of the work, as well as their juxtaposition, a range of equipment was utilised to make the recordings of the participants’ experience. The riders’ location was recorded using a GPS device. In-game audio was recorded along with the participants’ responses and any environmental sounds. Following advice from Henry Lowood, an expert in the documentation of virtual game worlds at Stanford University, videos were taken of the riders from two key vantage points (a “chase cam” followed the bike, creating a third-person perspective, and an upwardly mounted “face cam” mounted on the handlebars of the participant’s bike, creating a first-person perspective). An original requirement was to allow data to be immediately re-played to participants during a post-trial interview. To this end, all data was recorded to memory cards so that these could be immediately downloaded into a laptop for data review.

Each documentation started at the Rider Spoke registration desk to capture the induction process habitually carried out by Blast Theory—often neglected by documentors—and terminated with a semi-structured interview conducted straight after the experience in a studio space within the Ludwig Boltzman Institute Media.Art.Research to compare the data captured by the ride, the GPS and in-game data, with the riders’ memories of what they experienced. Two riders were fully documented (first- and third-person documentation plus GPS and interview); six riders were partially documented (third-person documentation plus GPS and interview); and one rider was very partially documented (GPS and interview). The documentation revealed that participants had highly subjective experiences and that their memories of these experiences were not always aligned with the in-game records of these experiences.

The use of a documentation platform, CloudPad, which was subsequently devised to annotate these documentations, revealed that documentations can operate as memory prompts not just for the audiences but also for the artists, who were inspired by CloudPad to add personal detail to the documented materials. However, while these findings were invaluable from a research perspective, the data were not subsequently turned into a documentation that could be used by museums or the public at large. As in the case of Day of the Figurines, the documentation remained scattered between two universities, the Ludwig Boltzman Institute Media.Art.Research, which has since closed, and the artists. This means that important insights into a work may have been systematically collected, but that no long-term preservation strategy was put in place to curate this documentation into a public-facing set of documents and no agreement with museums was made to provide access to these documentations in years to come. Still, the documentation underscored the importance of the introduction of ethnomethodological methods into the field of performance documentation, after which I decided to expand on them more systematically in a subsequent project, Performance at Tate.

4 Musée de la Danse, If Tate Modern was Musée de la Danse? (2015)

My third case study was an investigation into the rich history of performance at Tate from the 1960s to the present day. For this project, I decided to adopt some of the findings from my work with Blast Theory and the Mixed Reality Lab and investigate the role of the audience and participants in documenting the work, looking also at the value of documenting salient phases in the curatorial process, by which I mean the conversations between artists and curators at the time when the planning of the work had started in relation to the host venue, Tate Modern. The idea behind this was to look at the work as a set of processes and practices rather than as an event or object. The work selected for documentation was Musée de la Danse’s If Tate Modern was Musée de la Danse? (2015). The choice of this work was made on the basis of the Musée de la Dance’s recurrent inclusion of audiences in processes of transmission, and the documentation challenges caused by the fact that the work involved ninety dancers, lasted twenty hours over a period of two days, was streamed live and was simultaneously staged across several locations at Tate Modern. The aim of this documentation was to understand how Tate’s documentation practices could be augmented by involving the audience in the process and by capturing the work both before and after it took place.

Conceptually, for the choreographer Boris Charmatz, who since 2009 had been leading the Musée de la Danse, a choreographic centre based in Rennes, dance is akin to “wearing ‘glasses’” with a “corrective function” (Wood 2014). This means that one kind of institution (e.g., Tate) could be seen through the lens provided by the other (e.g., Musée de la Danse), an aspect Tate Curator Catherine Wood wanted us to capture. For this reason, we decided to employ the Mixed Reality Lab ethnographer Peter Tolmie to document how the Musée de la Danse’s inhabitation of a number of spaces in the museum challenged “the viewing behaviour of visitors”, turning Tate into a more fluid space, one, in Wood’s words, “filled with potential” (Wood 2015).

The documentation had started well before the piece was staged at Tate Modern, so as to capture the conversations between and decisions made by Charmatz and the Tate curators Wood and Capucine Perrot, especially those pertaining to the significance of the juxtaposition of the permanent collection at Tate and the Musée de la Danse’s history of work. As Tate had created an appetite for the piece in advance of the scheduled event by sharing a question via social media, asking audiences to imagine what a dancing museum would look like and to think about where it might take place, we decided to prompt social media use through a twitter Q&A, which was held with Charmatz in the lead up to the performance. The responses revealed that the audience was keen on the idea of “curating” Tate as a fluid space.

Tate’s standard photography and live broadcast were used to capture the event itself, while photographer Louise Schiefer was employed to capture what visitors looked at, so as to document the work literally from the point of view of the audience. Members of the team, their families and staff at Tate were also encouraged to record their own experience of the piece via social media through the twitter hashtag #dancingmuseum created at the time of the Q&A with Charmatz. Finally, a video documentation was produced, both of the work showcased in the Turbine Hall, and of the work that took place in the Galleries, while smart-phone photography was shared using Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The marketing photographs were shot by photographer Hugo Glendinning, prior to the opening of the piece, and influenced early responses by those members of the public who had engaged through social media.

From the documentation of the exchanges between Wood and Charmatz, it transpired that the former had envisaged for the work to be “an evolving model of the Museum,” in which one place was super-imposed with another, something that is already, at least metaphorically, explicit in Glendinning’s image. Wood indicated, “[i]t could be as much the planting of a conceptual perspective as a demarcated space.” In particular Wood suggested, “[t]o try an astronomical metaphor, if the majority of the museum behaves according to a framework of certain space-time co-ordinates, how would the placement of the ‘musee de la danse’ open up an alteration of those co-ordinates, where such laws do not apply, or are ‘curved’?.” In other words, Wood was interested in drawing attention “to the human activity existing within all the ‘found’ spaces of the museum,” those “‘readymade’ dances that are already happening there […] set this in conversation with the event-dance that is programmed” (Wood 2013). So, in commissioning an ethnomethodological study and the photographers, it was decided to pay particular attention to the way audiences worked at responding to the transformation of spaces that curators had anticipated would occur during If Tate Modern was Musée de la Danse?

The ethnomethodological study, which covered a wide demographic, including individuals as well as families, was carried out over two visits: one set took place the weekend before the performance and the other during the days of the performance. Tolmie found that there was a constant flow throughout the galleries on non-performance days and that, generally speaking, the dwell time was short, a few seconds, maximum two minutes per work, slightly longer for video works. However, this changed significantly on performance days when dwell time in a single place could be ten minutes or more. There were also multiple choke points, that is, points where people stopped, especially at the entrances to galleries. Once performance spaces were created, people, except for children, were reluctant to cross them. Group cohesion also changed in the sense that people would usually tolerate some degree of separation in museums, but during this performance they stayed tightly together.

In response to the transformation, visitors organised themselves as audiences and started looking at the central spaces, where the performances were taking place, rather than the walls, where the Tate collection tends to be located. Visitors commented on how things were being set up and organised themselves in much the same way for both the rehearsals and the actual performances. Moreover, while visitors do not tend to look at each other much during gallery visits, they were notably looking at one another much more during the performances. In particular, the ethnomethodological study found that about 90% of visitors stopped for at least a few moments, 50% stayed for up to five minutes, and around 10% stayed across multiple performances, while less than 1% tried to walk around the gallery as though nothing was happening around them. Interestingly, while some visitors became audiences, or even participants, some amongst them also became “documentalists” by literally documenting the work photographically through social media.Footnote 1 Most visitors switched between these modes during the course of their visit. This suggests that during If Tate Modern was Musée de la Danse? visitors were particularly active in designing their visiting experience, which, in turn, indicates that performance may constitute a powerful mechanism in shaping museum visits as experiences.

This extensive documentation of both the expectations and reactions to the work led to the publication of a report, a thesis and numerous articles and book chapters. However, once the research was completed the documentation was not made available to the public. Nevertheless, the project did lead to a development on what is known as the Tate Live List. In addition to this, alongside Head of Collection Care Research at Tate Pip Laurenson’s and the performance studies and documentation theorist Vivian van Saaze’s ‘Collecting Performance-based Art: New Challenges and Shifting Perspectives’, this list was an outcome of the Collecting the Performative Network funded by the AHRC between 2012–14. The Live List, one of the most comprehensive frameworks about the conservation of live art that is available to the public on the Tate website, intends to produce prompts for those thinking about acquiring or displaying live works. As a consequence of findings by the Performance at Tate project, performance studies researcher Acatia Finbow was able to work with the conservation department at Tate to further develop this list so as to consider documentation and produce what is now known as the Live Art Documentation Template. Crucially the template looks at the life of a work in the museum and prior to its point of entrance in the museum, producing also “iteration reports” based on the model of the Guggenheim iteration reports initiated by Senior Conservator, Time-based Media Joanna Phillips in 2015. Interestingly, the latter both includes feedback on public reception and actual visitor feedback, even though this does not tend to be in the format of documentation unless we may assume that the heading “other” could be used for this purpose. The template actually does include feedback by curators, exhibition designers, media technicians, conservators and external contractors indicating that in tracking these individuals’ reasoning behind their aesthetic, conceptual, practical or economic decisions, iteration reports help generate a deeper understanding of the behaviours of an artwork under different circumstances (Time-Based Media). So, by taking the curators’ point of view into account, this template could be documenting not only the artistic intention, but also, in the words of van Saaze, a work’s interpretation or co-production (2013, p. 115).

These templates begin to address the fact that a work may have different iterations and that it is important to document the audience’s reception of a work. However, they still only partially address the fact that some works are the result of a collaboration or even, as in the case of the two Blast Theory examples, a research collaboration. For example, in the case of the two Blast Theory works the human computer interaction design and orchestration elements are not fully captured in the documentation. This shows that it is important to include a wider range of contributors in the documentation of an artwork; that not only works belonging in museum collections are worth documenting; and that documentation constitutes a fascinating practice that museums might wish to engage with more broadly for works that have been hosted but not necessarily acquired by them. In particular, the documentation of If Tate Modern was Musée de la Danse? also showed the value of utilising ethnomethodological methods in documentation so as to unpack the reasons behind audience’s behaviours more systematically. At the same time, the extensive documentation by and of audiences also raised interesting ethical questions as to the rights of museums to preserve such documentations without prior agreement.

5 The Cartography Project Prototype (2016–17)

The fourth case study is about a prototype platform that I developed with researchers at the University of Nottingham and Tate as part of Horizon, the EPSRC-funded Cartography Project. The platform, developed in 2016, consists of two parts: a web application responsible for enabling participants to input data and generate visualizations, and an associated server that is meant to store all the relevant data and allow for collaboration among users. By utilising an online interface, these may facilitate the entering of data—including text, image, video and audio commentary—pertaining to artworks, artists, participants, spectators, institutions, festivals and installations in the field of participatory art practice in museums and art galleries.

The primary purpose of the platform was to visualize the rich and burgeoning history of the field of participatory art, comprising participatory events developed by artists, practitioners and associates within and beyond the arts sector forming part of Tate Exchange. This is a new civic space in the Tate Modern Switch House, offering a site for collaborative and innovative projects, attempting to realise museum studies expert Richard Sandell’s vision of a museum as an agent for social inclusion and change (2010). Initiatives like Tate Exchange suggest that museums may pursue not only the facilitation of or participation in such participatory practices, as shown by the curator and experience designer Nina Simon in her 2010 The Participatory Museum, but also their documentation or even co-curation.

To ensure that the platform was developed so as to generate a Cartography that would empower artists but also other practitioners and participants to document their work, a set of workshops was conducted at Tate Britain and Tate Liverpool in 2016 and 2017, in which leading practitioners from the field of participatory arts were asked to contribute their ideas to the design of the platform as well as their response to and critique of the original proposition. This iterative way of researching and developing the platform made it possible for us to consider a number of cartographic models and finally select, following the first workshop in 2016, a relational model based on the Graph Commons platform, an existing open source platform created by the artist Burak Arikan, so as to make visible the range of processes and practices that operate in this field.

A few characteristics of the field of participatory art practices played a significant role in our way of thinking about documentation in this context. As art historian Claire Bishop indicated, participatory artists often produce situations rather than objects; works of art tend to be conceived of as projects, rather than performances or artefacts; and the audience is reconceived as co-producer or participant (2012, p. 2). For this reason, we decided that it was important that the platform should support multiple perspectives and contested viewpoints; that the visualization of lineage would show long-term projects by association across countries and organizations; and that practitioners in this field be brought in the research stage already and they should also be enabled to generate entries even when they were not associated with any existing element in the Cartography. The participants in the first workshop considered the latter as particularly significant for those artists whose work may not be in a museum or gallery collection as of yet.

The participants in our first workshop also quickly identified potential difficulties, summed up by the comment: “This project needs ambassadors and community leaders to broker the information gathering.” This comment suggests that the production of documentation should perhaps not happen purely online, which is confirmed by Tate’s work on the five-year HLF-funded Archives and Access project, and that, instead, facilitated participation is essential for many audiences new to the material or the online format when it comes to their actual participation. To document participation, then, one needs to facilitate the conditions for participation in the first place.

Our second engagement workshop took place at Tate Liverpool in 2017. Liverpool has a rich history of this practice, and therefore we asked participants, who were members of three major participatory art projects in Liverpool (OK The Musical, Homebaked and The Welsh Streets), to feed back to us by focussing in particular on the importance of place in their work. In presenting their work to us, a number of factors became apparent. All three groups used social media (Instagram, Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube) to illustrate their practice to us. Worryingly, this suggests that the documentation of these artists’ works is currently located in third party-owned platforms in the hands of commercial providers which tend to have no basic archiving standards—which merely justified our impression that our project in itself was timely. All groups, however, indicated that at that point in time the Cartography looked like a history of art, placing artists at the centre, if in a practice that was not quite artist-centric. Moreover, some groups pointed out that the Cartography, at that stage of its development, did not visualise different versions of a work, was too static, and unable to show a whole range of materials that might be submitted, including, as in the case of The Welsh Streets project, letters from residents, images and photos, a play, a film, amateur responses, interviews, learning materials and even a gardening project. Finally, participants in Homebaked indicated that the visualisation did not communicate any sense of urgency, thus raising the concern as to why people would want to participate in such a project. Additionally, they specifically mentioned that the motivations or issues that drove their initiative—such as gentrification, housing justice—should be an option for organising or searching the platform instead of the artists’ names.

The feedback from the Liverpool workshop significantly impacted on the subsequent iteration of the platform but also revealed a number of factors that in the documentation of our encounters with heritage are often forgotten. First, documentation does have an urgency as people’s memories will not last forever, but we also know that not all artists are actually interested in documentation. Secondly, documentation is ethically charged, which implies that apart from participation one should also take into consideration the ethics, ownership and authority over the documentation of participation. Thirdly, in most forms of art we tend to prioritise individual artists over their collaborators, and this may go at the expense of losing significant information about a work. Finally, art should also be documented through its reception—especially in the case of hybrid, ephemeral, non-object based or subjective art—but the available means for capturing reception, as this study may have shown, tend to be extremely time-consuming and therefore unsustainable within the museum context.

While all forms of documentation are at some level hierarchical, the co-habitation of different hierarchies may be what a digital platform like that created by the Cartography Project can visualise in a range of ways. It is this emergent practiced space, then, this relational form of documentation, that may show us how the “History” of this particular art can be rewritten as an intersection of a whole range of “histories” of collaboration that may inspire generations in years to come. While this research identified an interesting possibility for rendering documentation a more social or even shared practice, the proposition remained at the level of theory as no further funding was made available to develop the prototype. Again, it would be interesting to see museums adopt more participatory models of documentation, so as to capture not only the ontology of a work, and the artist’s intention in relation to it, but also the epistemic qualities or capabilities of a work—that is, knowledge about the contexts in which a work was co-curated, performed or even just engaged with by audiences.

6 Towards an Audience Documentation Framework

The first two case studies, Day of the Figurines and Rider Spoke, revealed the importance of capturing audience-generated documentations to understand the audience’s often subjective experience of a work. In a sector which is increasingly dominated by the production of experiences, it is clearly a desirable outcome that at least some of these experiences are documented by the public as well as by professional documentalists. These two documentations also underlined the importance of capturing interdisciplinary research, design, curation and, accordingly, more general practices and processes. The case studies raised the question, however, as to who will preserve these documentations in the long run and as to whether all documentations are in fact equally valid, suggesting that the intent behind a documentation is a contextual factor that also needs to be documented.

The third case study, If Tate Modern was Musée de la Danse?, made it clear that even when a work is thoroughly documented by both documentalists and the public it is only when these documentations are organised (in other words curated and archived for public use) that they will remain accessible in the long run. This case study also showed that while the public has an appetite to document and to contribute documentations to museums, most museums do not have the financial means or the time to preserve these audience-generated documentations for public use. Moreover, there are various ethical considerations to be taken into account when preserving documentations created outside of the museum.

Audience-generated or audience-facing documentations tell us more about the life or trajectory of a work—to use the terms introduced by van de Vall, Hölling, Scholte and Stigter—than conventional forms of documentation. This raises a complex question in relation to an artwork’s ontology (what the work is) and its epistemic potential (what knowledge it could produce), including the question as to whether the life of a work, and so the knowledge it produces, is actually part of the work. As Laurenson suggested in Histories of Performance Documentation (Giannachi and Westerman 2018, pp. 34–35), the two should in fact be viewed as interrelated, and artworks should be seen in their capacity to “unfold” when re-engaged with (p. 35), a term also chosen by Wijers at LiMA to describe her network which explored reinterpretation as a strategy for preservation (Wijers et al. 2017). This suggests that when documenting we need to make a work’s epistemic potential more explicit, rather than focus, as we tend to do, on its ontology. In other words, we need to see the work as changing over time rather than just capture it at a specific moment in time. This also suggests that documentation is not a closed but rather an open practice, by which I mean that documentations should be periodically revisited and updated not only by curators but also by different audiences to consider new documents and their interrelationship with each other.

Finally, the last case study, the Cartography Project, shows that by focussing only on the artists’ intention, as is traditionally common in documentation, we miss out on findings about the input of other stakeholders in the work, which, especially in the case of participatory art but also of art produced through research processes in collaboration with universities or commercial providers, as in Blast Theory’s work, means that we only have one perspective about a work that is in fact often produced by a team with a wide range of competencies. Museums and other cultural organisations may wish to trace these groups of participants or researchers to build a richer history of documentation of participatory art forms. Museums may also wish to help companies to preserve their histories which are currently often shared with the public on third-party platforms, which from the angle of archival interests involve increasingly unreliable, commercial media.

In some ways it should not surprise us that, despite all this research into documentation, there is still a gap between the theory and the practice of documentation of complex hybrid artworks. In a 2001 interview published in A Brief History of Curating New Media Art (Cook et al. 2010), Barbara London, then curator of Media Art at MoMA, pointed out that in 1995 MoMA did not have a website and that, unlike at other museums, their website had emerged from a curatorial initiative (pp. 59–60). In other words, art museums have acknowledged websites as strategies for curation, documentation, and archiving only in the last two decades or so. This was the case for Artport, for example, launched on the Whitney Museum website in 2001 as a documentation portal dedicated to netart and digital art for which artists created splash pages on a monthly basis with links to their work as a way to document their own art (Paul in Cook et al. 2010, p. 96). The site subsequently started to commission work like Martin Wattenberg’s Apartment (2000–2004), showing that a documentation or archival site could become both a commissioning and an exhibition site. There has not been a strong link between documentation, curation, preservation and replay or re-interpretation yet. What is more, the lack of investments in documentation, which is crucial to the other practices, means that in the future we will have only partial information about complex digital artworks at best.

While Artport only documented work at the Whitney, other websites, like Rhizome, documented across museums, raising the question as to whose responsibility it is to document and what our collective responsibility is to preserve existing documentations and their platforms. It is known that the question of what to document and archive is accelerated by new technologies. It is also known that, in the words of new media theorists Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, “a useful thing about new media is that in some cases the media can document itself ‘as it happens’ because materials placed on the Internet by users are to a certain extent stored there” (2010, p. 200). However, as Katie Lips commented regarding the social media Bold Street Project, which uses a combination of a Website, a blog and Flickr sites to gather materials by many participants, these documentations tend to be “messy” (Lips 2007) and, therefore—as we have also seen in almost all the examples I cited—difficult to preserve and re-use in years to come. Of course, art or documents placed on third party-owned internet platforms are hardly safe, as is true of the web as a medium of preservation. Finally, audience generated documentations are rarely preserved, despite the fact that in some cases these are the only surviving records of these works.

So, we must devise more systematic ways of documenting and archiving a wider range of complex hybrid art works. We should probably now mistrust the web, where many artists and audiences deposit their documentations, for it is unclear how best to preserve and even outsource web-based documentations in the long run. Not only do we need to think of what we document but also about who should document and where we should preserve documentations. Documentations should enter museum collections alongside the artworks they are associated with. Moreover, museums may wish to archive also documentations of works that were hosted, rather than acquired, so that they too would remain accessible to the public. We know now, having traced the history of performance art documentation, that many documentations in this field turned into artworks themselves over time. So, we should learn from performance studies and start thinking about preserving documentations of all complex hybrid art more systematically, for today’s documentations may be tomorrow’s iterations of the work. These documentations should include materials generated by audiences at different points in time and should cross-refer to how the same work is situated in documentations produced by different museums.

In her essay ‘Towards an Oral History of New Media Art,’ written in 2008, new media theorist and documentation expert Lizzie Muller imagines that “it is the year 2032” and the reader is “a 25-year-old artist living in London writing a doctoral thesis on the explosion of interactive installation art at the turn of the century.” The Tate, in her prediction, is hosting a “permanent exhibition devoted to computer-based interactive art from the 1970s to the present day,” and while there are numerous books about the topic, there is very little available, says Muller, about how audiences at the time experienced these works (2008, p. 2). Among the works that Muller suggests do have an audience-generated record you find, she says, Blast Theory’s Day of the Figurines, which may well be in reference to the documentation I mentioned earlier in this study. Next, Muller reminds the reader that both the Variable Media Network and the Capturing Unstable Media initiative had stated that the audience experience is important (2005). For her, a way to capture oral histories was through the video-cued recall interview technique, a proposal adapted from ethnographic methods using semi-structured interviews and exit interviews (2008, p. 4), which we adopted in the documentation of Rider Spoke and which indeed did generate a wealth of useful data but which, nevertheless, remained an academic exercise since the interviews were not finally integrated into a public-facing resource. Moreover, these documentations were all generated by experts, and so, in a way, shared a common objective. However, in neither case were documentations initiated by the public preserved alongside these more formal documentations. This could lead to, in the long run, the loss of the point of view of the non-expert viewer.

In her essay ‘Old Media, New Media?,’ Laurenson identifies “areas of focus for significant properties for software-based art that are distinct in a significant way from traditional time-based media works,” and among a range of parameters she identifies visitor experience, suggesting that museums should look into “how are people intended to interact with the work? How do people interact with the work?” (in Graham 2014, p. 94). This distinction between a canonical understanding of how visitors might interact with a given work produced by artists or curators and how participants may actually interact with it seems to provide an interesting field of study for documentation, illustrating also how the ultimate success of creativity not only resides in the artistic intention but also in its interpretation by the audiences.

Unless we start to document artworks not only in relation to their ontology (what the work is) but also in relation to their epistemic capacity or potential (what knowledges it produces), we will only preserve part of the history of the work. This implies that a researcher in the year 2044, writing their thesis on complex digital art, will not be able to trace the history of this field any better than in 2008, or even at present, in 2019, 11 years after Lizzie Muller wrote her insightful study. Hopefully museums will continue to bring together curators and researchers to shift the field and narrow the gap between theory and practice in the intricate and yet fascinating field of hybrid mixed media art documentation.