ABSTRACT

The theme of documentation and preservation of digital-born artworks emerges here from a concern about their vulnerability and disappearance, due to technological instability and meagre institutional investment in their conservation. Dance research has developed methodologies to preserve corporeal knowledge, and Performance studies have addressed unstable and irreproducible conditions that also affect interactive New Media artworks, thus contributing to an interdisciplinary field where audience experience is constituent to the form and identity of creative practises. Some projects focused on tools for analysis and dissemination of ephemeral practises and others in avoiding technological obsolescence. Such concepts and developments will be reviewed here in order to contextualise the analysis and documentation undertaken with a web-based work from Cie. Mulleras, an I-phone piece by n+n Corsino and a telematic installation from Joseph Hyde, which aim to contribute to the history of digital arts.