Documenting the user experience: the cases of Blast Theory's Rider Spoke, Tate's Art Maps, RAMM's Moor Stories and Exeter Time Trails (Keynote address)

Abstract

This paper discusses the challenges of documenting highly subjective mixed reality experiences, from artworks like Blast Theory's Rider Spoke, which consists of an interactive audio-tour users experience whilst cycling in a city, to encounters with digital artworks and artifacts 'in the wild', i.e. outside the museum space, like Tate's Art Maps, RAMM's Moor Stories and Exeter Time Trails, which allow users to encounter and annotate museum collections outside the museum through a variety of media. After introducing a number of methodologies for the documentation of the user experience of such works and environments, this paper analyses what kinds of values these documentations bring to users and museums. Finally, this paper looks at the implications of these findings for the curation and preservation of ‘living’ performative archives.