Capturing recommendations

As a summary of the research on Capturing Unstable Media, the following general recommendations can be formulated. These recommendations are deliberately kept general, in order to make them applicable to the individual situation of a wide range of organizations.
As a general remark, it is important to note that the recommendations for Capturing Unstable Media not only apply to electronic artworks, but to a very broad range of activities in the field of electronic art or unstable media art. Therefore, not only artworks, but also activities as varied as festivals, radio broadcasts or book publications can be captured through these recommendations.

A. Definition of object of research

(1) Context of object
For capturing an activity or object in the field of electronic art, the context and scope of the object of research needs to be determined. Often, it is part of larger events or processes (festivals, research trajectories) so it is important to get an overview of its range. This can be done by distinguishing the activities and products related to the object or activity, and deciding which of those, from the point of view and depending on the involvement of the organization, are inside or outside its scope. These decisions depend on the level of detail the capturer commits herself to and the level of institutional interest with respect to these activities.

(2) Contents of object
Next, it is important to define which inclusive entities of the object of research need to be captured. Here, again, the level of detail will depend, among others, on the commitment and involvement of the capturing institution.
Electronic art practices often include a number of objects, activities, actors, tools and components. Each of these is associated with different phases of a project (research, development, implementation). At this moment, it is important to identify the phases and states of a project and discriminate any aspect or activity that 'happened' or 'was created' within the scope of each state or phase. The concepts defined in the Capturing Unstable Media Conceptual Model (CMCM) can be very helpful here; the institution's own description model (see recommendation C below) may serve as a general framework.

B. Documentation of object

A next step would be the act of collecting documentation that is most appropriate to the entities of the object of research that needs to be captured. A selection needs to be made, depending on the relative importance of the object or activity and to the level of detail in which it will be described; furthermore, documentation can be selected on the basis of its quality, variety and standardized readability (for more information, see Chapter 5 of Deliverable 1.2 (PDF), with recommendations for building a digital media archive).

A few general guidelines, resulting from the research on the case studies for Capturing Unstable Media, can already be formulated (see also the chapter on documentation genres in Deliverable 1.3 (PDF)). Some of these categories of documentation will not be relevant for certain types of institutions; for example, organizations without a media lab or workshop will not have access to, or generate, documentation related to research processes -- which does not mean that this type of documentation is not important.

(1) aRt&D process
Depending on the type of collaboration (multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary), documentation on concept, research objectives, design issues, the flow of technical experimentation and innovation, the technologies used and the results of the research process will be discovered. This category of documentation also includes information on the operation, interrelationships and interdependencies of the components of a system, as well as its software, hardware and network configurations. Most often this documentation will be textual or visual in nature and include genres such as source code of applications, research reports, schemes and diagrams of interdependent (hardware and software) components and conceptual descriptions.
Depending on the perspective and goals of the institution that is involved in this process, the selected documentation will rather emphasize finalized, implemented versions of the documented object, or may, on the contrary, emphasize the evolution of the research process itself.

(2) Implementation
Because of its complex nature, electronic art often needs to be implemented in a physical (installation) or technical (application) environment in order to function properly.
Documentation here will include practical information and instructions on the technical and/or physical environment in which the electronic art manifests itself, as well as user-oriented information on how to get started The type of this kind of documentation is mainly textual or visual, and may include genres of a more directive nature, such as installation instructions, technical riders, schemes plans and documentation on ambient sound or lighting conditions.

(3) User interaction
A formal, restricted metadata model for describing user interaction can be found in Deliverable 1.3 (PDF). However, the specific, subjective characteristics and quality of a user's interaction with an electronic art piece cannot be captured through formal modeling; specific documentation of a user's experience is needed here. Often, such documentation will need to be actively created by the person or institution involved with capturing. Available documentation may be textual or visual use case scenarios; but for a good understanding of user interaction, it is often necessary to create audiovisual reports or registrations of someone interacting with a piece (e.g. a screen movie of the use of a user interface, or a piece of video about a user involved in an interactive installation). Interviews with users may also prove very useful; in general, recordings and registrations of user testing activities are rare, but interesting documentation materials.

(4) Interdisciplinary collaboration, distributed authorship
The individual involvements of contributors to a project can be outlined in a formal model; the Capturing Unstable Media Conceptual Model serves as inspiration for this. However, it is also important to gather additional documentation on contributors and their specific roles or functions in the project as related to the specific aspects of each activity. This includes documentation on copyright and biographical information about artists, main contributors and technical staff, mostly of textual nature.

The documentation that is obtained along these guidelines needs to be appropriately mapped to the relevant entities as defined in recommendation A. Digitalized or digitally-born materials need to be stored according to well-defined procedures, respecting the basic principles of maintenance of a digital media archive as outlined in Chapter 5 of Deliverable 1.2 (PDF).

C. Modeling the object

Apart from gathering documentation about a researched object, describing the object and its documentation in an appropriate formal model is an important step in the process of capturing. A formal model, such as an archival metadata structure, makes large numbers of research objects accessible and makes it possible to compare and study them on an equal level. Each organization will inevitably develop its own modeling system according to its own activities and goals; the Capturing Unstable Media Conceptual Model (CMCM) was designed as a source of inspiration for providing clear concepts and terminologies that can be used in such an individualized model.

In any case, based on the experience of V2_Archive in developing a metadata system for electronic art activities, the choice of a flexible system based on objects and relations is preferable to a rigid record-based approach, because the former is better suited for describing the wide variety of activities in the field of unstable media art with a large emphasis on these activities' contexts.

Furthermore, the Capturing Unstable Media research project has investigated a series of problematic aspects of electronic art projects, for which metadata solutions have been suggested: terminology for describing electronic art (through a thesaurus), genres and types of documentation (see above), describing distributed authorship, hardware and software dependencies and user interaction. These metadata suggestions can be found in Deliverable 1.3 (PDF) and can be applied or adapted to an organization's information system where needed.

D. Archival interoperability

For organizations active in the field of electronic art in the broadest meaning, it is important to be aware that activities in this field are extremely process-based and that each organization's information on a project is only a part of a larger picture or context of what a project, research trajectory or an artist's work has been. We want to emphasize that reducing such activities to stand-alone, fixed and collectable objects doesn't do justice to the correct capturing of such activities, on the contrary; we strongly recommend the design of individual information systems that are open for collaboration and mutual interoperability.

Because of this, the research team of Capturing Unstable Media has designed its conceptual model with the idea of archival interoperability in mind, offering a set of concepts that can be elaborated upon and shared by a group of complementary archives and information resources. More information about this can be found in Deliverable 2.1 (PDF).

E. Maintenance

Finally, it is evident that description models for electronic art, their content and related documentation need active maintenance and updates on a regular basis, in order to keep pace with a quickly evolving field of research.