Co-construction of meaning, creative processes and digital curation

Abstract

Purpose-The preservation and curation of music with real-time or live electronics is challenging. The goal is not to preserve a recording of the performance but to keep the work alive by providing the means to re-perform them. This paper presents the theoretical and practical outcomes of the Documentation, Dissemination and Preservation of Compositions with Real-time Electronics (DiP-CoRE) project. Design/methodology/approach-The methodology combines methods stemming from work psychology and ergonomics with conceptual frameworks constructed according to grounded theory. Data were collected during a six months' creative process. Subsequent interviews were conducted during confrontations with documents, including observational recordings, sketches and technical specifications. Findings-This article demonstrates the relevance of the proposed documentation methodology for the preservation of contemporary music with live electronics, focussing on the notion of intelligibility. It brings into light the multiple perspective of the documentation of the activity in a multi-agent creative process, which encompasses what was done but also what could have been done. Research limitations/implications-The DiP-CoRE project bring to light connections between the notion of intelligibility, the thickness of the activity and boundary objects. The paper proposes further directions of research in order to embed the designed framework within digital repositories. Practical implications-The documentation methodology, designed and tested in this paper, proposes a framework for practitioners, building on video-stimulated recall as well as documents produced during the creative process. This framework requires less expertise (but a more important technical setup) than a traditional interview-based documentation framework. It thus provides opportunities for various size organizations to build methodical documentation processes and to further build on distributed expertise with computer-supported collaborative work. Originality/value-This article proposes a new interdisciplinary documentation methodology relevant in the artistic domain, which brings together transmission with objects and by practice. It specifically defines the relation between this proposal and a high-level model for digital curation, namely, the Mixed Methods Digital Curation (MMDC) model. It further creates a link between documentation best practice and the ongoing research in the tracking of creative processes.

MyHealthMyRecord-annotation: An Investigation of Digital Annotation of Short Duration Videos Created to Document a Patient's Health and Well-being

“…A study investigated music in a live setting as a rational thought process (Boutard, 2016). They found that this form of curation consists of organizing and presenting sounds to create a live performance.…”

Preservation practices of new media artists

“…In addition to technical preservation approaches like migration and emulation, art information professionals have developed methods for documenting the performative and experiential aspects of new media and installation artworks (Jones, 2007). Boutard (2016) has also advocated documentation as a means for preserving a rich and multi-agent record of electronic music performances. Documentation can serve as an ongoing record of an artwork if preservation efforts have failed; but documentation can also inform preservation efforts, providing insight into how an artwork originally functioned.…”

Documenting acousmatic music interpretation

“…Methodologically speaking, it provides us with a significant shift from studies that have focused on the documentation of contemporary instrumental (or mixed) music (e.g. Boutard, 2016). While performance may be conceptualized itself as a document, performance-as-document (see Lee, 2018), we will discuss here performance documents and models that may support both documents by intention and documents by attribution (Meyriat, 1981; Roux, 2016), grounding new interpretations of these works.…”