Survey and Analysis of Interactive Art Documentation, 1979–2017

Abstract

Today, documentation is becoming a major source of exposure and appreciation for artworks on the Internet, beyond the original purpose of preservation and academic archiving. This study analyzes 982 documentations of interactive digital art projects created between 1979 and 2017. Each documentation was represented as a point in a 17-dimensional vector space through binary encoding. The resulting visualization from the t-SNE algorithm shows that, compared to its phenomenological quality, most documentation of interactive art is a cinematic surrogate that follows film post-production techniques. In conclusion, this study calls for the development of documentary techniques that can provide the viewer with a quasi-authentic experience of the original work in interactive digital art.