Introduction

Whereas digital preservation – as a field of knowledge and as a practice – mandates the long-term appraisal, definition and management of the content and context of digital information, it has been repeatedly signalled that context can be elusive and difficult to pin down in meaning (Giaretta, 2011). In the world of software art, this danger is magnified by the temporal, ephemeral nature of art works whose intrinsic value derives from the sociotechnical framework in which they are created, rendered and experienced. Lovejoy, Paul and Bulajic (2011) argue that – although context has been ‘traditionally understood as subordinate and supplemental’ – the use of digital media in artistic output blurs the boundaries between content and context, so much so that interpretation and documentation depends on ‘the thematic lens under which [an art work] is examined’. What are the ramifications of this interconnectedness for preserving digital art? Is our long-term ability to preserve the meaning, value and impact of digital art works impaired by the elusiveness of context documentation and interpretation?

In an effort to investigate platforms for explicitly documenting contextual dimensions of digital art works, this paper presents an approach towards defining a vocabulary for context classification that builds on the theory of social informatics. Software art is perceived here as a sub-genre of digital art, which in turn pertains to the broader domain of new media art. Hence, the analysis transcends the confines of software art and approaches the definition of a context classification vocabulary from the ‘new media art’ perspective. The result is by no means definitive, but rather a vehicle for deliberation and placement of software art in a historical context.

The context of software art as a sociotechnical system

What is context? One definition would be the discourse, facts, circumstances, environment, background or settings that surround a phenomenon and help to determine, specify or clarify its interpretation. From an empirical analysis perspective, this reflection on context is rather too vague to allow us to deploy any classification scheme for contextual characterization of new media art. If the computability – as in digital,computer-based – and interactivity characteristics of software art are considered as dimensions in the context equation, a parallel can be drawn to sociotechnical theories that define a context for computer-based technologies.