Introduction

As early as 1992, Brenda Laurel noted that the operation of computers is a performative activity (Laurel, 1993). The use of digital technologies to create interactive and immersive art works is continually increasing as hardware and software becomes more available and affordable to artists and the conceptual and aesthetic opportunities offered by digital media continue to inspire. Interaction with technology is the virtual and conceptual equivalent of a man walking across Peter Brook's famous ‘empty space’ (Brook, 1968) and is both performative and ephemeral. In terms of their inherent characteristics, digital arts are very similar to performing arts: artistic experiences that are manifested physically yet do not rely on a static materiality to communicate meaning or emotion, that have a life beyond the moment of their enactment, and that, crucially, require active interpretation and interaction. As such, it is useful to consider interactive art works through a dramaturgical framework and to draw parallels between their similar challenges for documentation and curation and the preservation of these art forms into the future.

Interaction as performance

Like the performing arts, interactive art works are characterized by ephemerality, variability,and an individual and two-way mode of perception that defines their interactivity.

Ephemerality refers to time-based enactment and the audiences’ experiences of it. Any live or interactive work of art is irreproducible; each experience is unique and cannot be replicated in another space or time, even if both the work's author and the audience/user (or ‘spect-actor’, to borrow a term from Augusto Boal's Forum Theatre) wishes it.

Variability refers to the separation of the concept of the artistic work from the physicality of its manifestation. Just as there have been many thousands of performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream with different casts, sets and even texts (not one of which can be considered to be the ‘original’ or definitive performance), the core of software art is typically much more about what it does rather than what it is made out of. Function has primacy over material; performance and behaviours are more important than format. This reinforces the idea of art as being something you do, not something you make.