Artivity: Documenting Digital Art Practice

Arguments and interpretations made while researching the arts are based on historical evidence. The technical analysis of artworks and artists' archives supply such evidence with the objective being to provide answers on how and why an artwork was made, i.e. how can artistic practice be described? Identifying such evidence in digital art is difficult due to the lack of the artwork's physical manifestation. Available resources about the artwork often concern long-term digital preservation, e.g., Serexhe (2012), and not the practice. Information on the process and context of the artwork is typically lost. In this paper we present a method for capturing part of this contextual data. We also present an implementation in the form of a software tool called Artivity. We highlight a case study with data by the artist Gino Ballantyne. We discuss the limitations of our approach and the expected use of the tool.