Posted by Corina MacDonald on Vague Terrain: The fifth and final DOCAM Summit took place two weeks ago in Montreal. Over five years the project, spearheaded by the Daniel Langlois Foundation, brought together researchers and practitioners from a variety of disciplines to investigate the issues inherent to the documentation and conservation of media arts heritage. The project produced a great collection of tools and resources that are now freely available on the DOCAM website to artists, curators, conservators, archivists and anyone else concerned by the future of artworks with technological components.

Many themes and discussions emerged during the single day of the Summit that I was able to attend – we were exposed to a wide swath of interrelated issues and topics that are central to the research axes of DOCAM: conservation, documentation, cataloguing, terminology, pedagogy and the history of technology. I thought I would bring to your attention two projects that reflect a new and important area of inquiry in preserving media arts: the documentation of audience experience and its relationship to artistic intent. Two documentary case studies were presented which highlight the importance of recording visitors’ subjective impressions of their interactions with a work. Rolf Wolfensberger of the Museum of Communication of Berne presented a case study of Paul Sermon’s work Telematic Vision (1993-) and Katja Kwastek, formerly of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Media Art Research, presented a case study of Tmema’s (Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman) The Manual Input Workstation (2004-2006). The methodology used for capturing the audience experience of these two works was developed by Lizzie Muller and Caitlin Jones during their earlier work for the Daniel Langlois Foundation on a documentary case study of David Rokeby’s Giver of Names, and includes techniques such as observational videos, video-cued recall interviews and questionnaires. Information about how audiences interact with a work has seldom been included in the official documentary record of a work, yet the identity and authenticity of a work is often closely tied to the nature of the interactions that occur. The information gathered from audience members provides valuable context for conservators who wish to preserve and possibly re-present the work at a future date. To read more about the role of documented audience experience in preserving new media art, see Lizzie Muller’s publication Towards an oral history of new media art. You can also browse through the documentary collections for these and other artworks in the Publications section of the Daniel Langlois Foundation website here.