Documentation as Art

Documentation as Art presents documentation as an expanded practice that is radically changing the ways in which to look at, participate in, and generate art. Bringing together expertise from different disciplines, the book provides an in-depth investigation of the development of documentation as a set of production, circulation, and preservation strategies. Illustrating how these are often led by artists, audiences, and museums, the contributions offer new insights into digital art and its history, curation, and preservation, through documentation. Considering documentation as the main method of preserving these art forms, the book analyses how it can address the inherent challenges of capturing live events, visitor experiences, and evolving artworks. Showing how documentation itself can become (part of) an original artwork, the book discusses ways in which these expanded practices can impact the value and experience of the documented event or artwork, giving consideration to how this might affect the traditional authority of the museum as creator of documentation used for future reference, historical relevance, or cultural memory. Documentation as Art demonstrates how the curation and preservation of documentation and the introduction of audience-generated documentation are radically changing exhibition and visiting practices in which documentation is becoming a significant and emergent cultural form in its own right. The book will appeal to researchers and students engaged in the study of museums and curation, art and art history, performance, new media and digital art, library and information science, and conservation.

Annet Dekker is a curator and researcher. Currently she is an assistant professor of Archival and Information Studies and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and a visiting professor and co-director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University. Her monograph, Collecting and Conserving Net Art (Routledge 2018), is a seminal work in the field of digital art conservation. Gabriella Giannachi is a professor of Performance and New Media at the University of Exeter, UK. She has published a number of books including Virtual Theatres (2004); The Politics of New Media Theatre (2007); Archaeologies of Presence, co-edited with Michael Shanks and Nick Kaye (2012); Histories of Performance Documentation, co-edited with Jonah Westerman (2017); and Technologies of the Self-Portrait (2022).

Introduction; Part I: Production -- 1.The Tension Between Static Documentation and Dynamic Digital Art 2. Documentation in an Age of Photographic Hypercirculation; 3. Fifty-Two Weeks: A Year of El Paquete Semanal, the Cuban Offline Internet, and the Two Artists who Archived It; 4. In-game Photography; 5. Documentation as a Creative Act; Part II: Circulation -- 6. Challenges in the Creation, Perception and Distribution of Documentation; 7. Leaking Lands: Museum Documentation without Digitization; 8. Digital Culture: Heritage, Social Media and Documentation Practices; 9. Step-And-Repeat: The Feed as The Great Flattener; 10. One Terabyte of Documentation. The Circulation of GeoCities; Part 3: Preservation -- 11. The Use of Documentation for Preservation and Exhibition: the Cases of SFMOMA, Tate, Guggenheim, MOMA, and LIMA; 12. Rendering the Moment. Virtual Reality as Documentation Tool for Spatial Kinetic Artwork; 13. Collecting Social Photo. A Nordic Project in the Search of Sustainable Methods for Preserving Social Media as Cultural Heritage; 14. In Between Performance and Documentation; 15. How a Guitar Started to Self-Document its 'Identity'. The Future of Art Documentation.