Documentation as Art: Expanded Digital Practices

Documentation as Art explores how documentation is being transformed by artists, audiences, and museums into a powerful tool for creating, sharing, and preserving art. It investigates the development of documentation as a production, circulation, and preservation strategy, and how it can address the challenges of capturing live events, visitor experiences, and evolving artworks. The book discusses how documentation can become an original artwork, impacting the value and experience of the documented event or artwork, and challenging the traditional authority of the museum as the creator of documentation.

Format: Hardback
Length: 200 pages
Publication date: 22 November 2022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Documentation as Art presents documentation as an expanded practice that is radically transforming the ways in which we look at, participate in, and generate art. By bringing together expertise from various disciplines, the book provides an in-depth investigation of the development of documentation as a set of production, circulation, and preservation strategies. It illustrates how these are often led by artists, audiences, and museums, offering new insights into digital art and its history, curation, and preservation through documentation.

Considering documentation as the primary method of preserving these art forms, the book analyzes how it can address the inherent challenges of capturing live events, visitor experiences, and evolving artworks. It demonstrates how documentation itself can become (part of) an original artwork, discussing ways in which these expanded practices can impact the value and experience of the documented event or artwork. This consideration also extends to how this might affect the traditional authority
authority of the museum as the creator of documentation used for future reference, historical relevance, or cultural memory.

Documentation as Art showcases 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.

Weight: 560g
Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367673123