Artistic research output and documentation

Again has the topic of documentation come up. I have gone from thinking it is an unsolvable problem to not caring so much about it to now land in a deeper awareness of the issues at hand. The fact is that for any live art form (such as music) any documentation of the performance risk at being a reduction of it - a representation with significantly less impact than the live version. To make an effort to make the documentation more accessible may actually distance it from the performance instead constructing a work kind of its own.

However, any trained performer or critic will be able to get his or her around it and recreate the performance much in the same ways as a member of the audience will do though it requires a big effort. I am again thinking about the documentation engine I started developing for the Integra project. It will not solve the bigger problem, but at least it may be possible to deduct the problem and, rather than looking at documentation of performances as the main topic, provides a way in which to pull out excerpts in an efficient way and discuss these.