Documentation as Art

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.