By Gabriella Giannachi

I research the documentation of performance and new media art, often focussing on artworks which are event-based, ephemeral, interactive, participatory, and hybrid. Over the years, I have collaborated with several artists, including Blast Theory (Partners in the Somabotics Fellowship), as well as art museums, such as the Tate (in the AHRC-funded Performance at Tate project, 2014-17), and the Dutch conservation Centre LI-MA and The Photographers Gallery in London (in the AHRC-funded Documenting Digital Art project, 2019-23). These projects traced the history of the field and identified best practice in several institutions and contexts, leading to two key publications: Histories of Performance Documentation (2017, and, in Chinese translation, 2025), co-edited with Jonah Westerman, featuring interviews to leading museum curators and conservators, and Documentation as Art (2023), edited with Annet Dekker, which highlights how performance documentation evolved from press photo and historic document to work of art.

Documentation is key for artists as it establishes a legacy of works which may otherwise be forgotten about. It is also strategic for museums, who rely on processes of documentation during accession which, usually, are updated every time an artwork is activated. For these reasons, and due to the fact that the same works are often located in different collections, documentation has become very burdensome for museums, hence it is paramount to look into whether and/or how AI can facilitate this process and make documentation more sustainable and accessible.

I have also been researching the role of documentation in my monograph Archive Everything (2016 and 2024, and 2021, in Italian translation) which is featured in a podcast by New Books Network. The volume presents archiving as a key transformative practice that helps mapping the ‘everyday’. In more recent times, I started exploring the use of AI in archives, collaborating with colleagues at the University of Nottingham in the BRAID AHRC-funded Creating a Dynamic Archive project led by the philosopher Lydia Farina, while also looking into how artists have been using AI in their work and how their creative processes can be documented through AI. I have published about this research in several journals and have been consulted by various artists, museum groups, and, most recently in 2025, by UNESCO, who invited me to be part of a webinar on the use of AI in the documentation of intangible cultural heritage.

I have been collaborating with Steve Benford since 2006 when I documented Blast Theory’s Day of the Figurines as part of the AHRC-funded Presence Project (2005-09). We subsequently documented Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke in collaboration with the Ludwig Boltzman Institute and Stanford Libraries. Findings highlighted the benefits of documenting HCI research-in-the-wild for colleagues in computer science as well as for colleagues in the humanities, identifying the parameters of mixed reality experiences, which were subsequently published about in Steve Benford et al’s trajectories framework. Documenting-in-the-wild has shown the benefits of capturing the creative process, as well as the experience of the artwork itself, for artists, researchers, whether in HCI or other, for cultural organisations and also for the general public. Findings inspired the Somabotics Fellowship to generate an ongoing documentation of its artist-generated demonstrators which will be used for research, communication, as part of some of the artworks produced by the project, for learning purposes, and to create datasets for AI training. Key questions to be explored in this context are whether AI can document itself; how AI is best used for documentation and archiving; how a documentation can become an AI training dataset; as well as how a Somabotics approach may change the field of documentation more broadly.