Survey and analysis of interactive art documentation, 1979–2017

Today, documentation is becoming a major source of exposure and appreciation for artworks on the Internet, beyond the original purpose of preservation and academic archiving. This study analyzes 982 doc-umentations of interactive digital art projects created between 1979 and 2017. Each documentation was represented as a point in a 17-di-mensional vector space through binary encoding. The resulting visualization from the t-SNE algorithm shows that, compared to its phenomenological quality, most documentation of interactive art is a cinematic surrogate that follows film post-production techniques. In conclusion, this study calls for the development of documentary techniques that can provide the viewer with a quasi-authentic experience of the original work in interactive digital art.